Alan Sondheim

Alan Sondheim, ca. 1999. © 2007 trAce Online Writing Community (see here)

Writing PurlMoo Under Migraine Water

By Alan Sondheim

1 Writing PurlMoo Under Migraine Water

2 To: nikuko (#934)
3 Subject: Hello dark feather

4 thou dark feather gone on me.
5 thou must dislike this fallen bough of gone materials.
6 nothing is written through this migraine and Screen is invisible.
7 I will call Screen, Screen, and there is no answer.
8 nothing comes and there are no arrivals or departures.
9 alas, my breasts are heavy with milk falling down upon Screen.
10 Screen raises her mouth, does Screen.
11 I am engulfed.
12 goodbye and hello desire and goodbye invisible Screen.
13 thy jagged edges, visible migraine.
14 thou art gone upon me.
15 teeth.
16 now and then I still may dream of an unsustained image.
17 imaginary Screen, come and pour upon me.
18 Screen, Screen.
19 your darling, Nikuko
20 -------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------

(Alan Sondheim, Newsgroups: fa.fiction-of-philosophy, Subject: 1 Writing PurlMoo Under Migraine Water, June 3, 1999)

Headtrip

By Alan Sondheim

I am writing precisely with a migraine occurring, visual migraine, located largely in my left eye; there is pressure on my left jaw and brain; the yellow letters against the black background are clawed at by brilliant strobing. The pressure forces me to shut my eyes; I continue typing, working the letters after a difficult days. The zigzag patterns, always typical, are lobe shaped; the clawing is the work of flashes against each and every other patterns. I can hardly see out of my left eye; my right eye repeats the pattern, but less. My hands seem diminished, moving away from me against a three-dimensional keyboard that swells up and away; I'm slightly nauseous. I'm shivering as well in the cold; the heater on the floor doesn't help much. I don't dare move but when I do, I notice the patterns are alleviated; the terminal, as I suspected, brings them out. I'm both light-headed and heavy at the same time; the patterns are increasing in intensity, the lobe shape splaying out further into the visual field, and my left eye feels as if it's on fire. I can no longer read large portions of the text. There are long-waves apparent in the left field periphery, swollen, swelling, as if compensating for their distance from the center. The center is becoming painful as well, and there is a horizontal creeper extending itself across the text, completely across it. I feel very shaky, as if I am about to lose vision entirely, close down; there is great pressure on my left eye and my right frontal area is pressured as well, the start of the incipient headache itself. I can no longer see to the left. The creeper has slower waves and longer zigzags as well, putting out a vertical feeling descending downward as the text scrolls up the screen. I close my eyes for an instant and the zigzags lose intensity, appear more like cuneiform in fact or some harbored beams of a bridge spanning keyboard, eye interior, the hideousness of this office area which is in reality a loft area, the corner of the bedroom, now covered in crawling shapes. There is nothing real here in the sense of representation, only letters flipping out, invisible, changing shape; the vertical feeler has become more of an area and the blind spot combines with the fury of the patterning to produce, to produce, nothing, obliteration; I'm afraid of the text seething out of control, I can't write well at this point, the eye feeling useless, a flat translucence, soon everything will pass away. The tinnitus continues throughout. Interference across all zones: As I said, the MOO goes down flaming, text itself devolves. What I'm writing is senseless as the pattern changes into vertical sheaves or boards rubbed raw, I've got, I've got for once to look away until this thing too will come or come to pass.

I correct everything; my brain tunnels through me and out my mouth.

(Alan Sondheim, October 26, 2002)

IT HURTS

By Aland Sondheim

I violate myself with every move I make upon the keyboard, cutting into your flesh like a knife inscribing a thin red line, breaking the body apart. The body divides, two by two; the body is stained with membrane-network-blood, stained with the pleasure of the text. My wrists, that most delicate part of the skeletal apparatus, hurt considerably; my palms hover like a thick cloud above the keyboard, descending one by one within the vicinity of the skin. Skin reaches up to meet skin; skin flows from the interstices between the keys. I am frustrated at the lack of response. I am cut through by an ulterior presence, that which is ANNOUNCED upon the screen, an act of reading I abjure. I AM TYPING BLIND, no longer look at my corrosion, visible as my hands shake, feet become increasingly numb. An intellectual toll takes its comfort elsewhere, in relative silence; while I type, I scream, my name murmured and lost at hideous volume. Tortured muscle hides behind each and every letter; it is the muscle which is SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOU, spelling nothing, spewing symbol after symbol upon the page in a semblance of order. SPELLING IT OUT: SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOU RIGHT NOW. There is no page, only an endless litany of screens rushing from below to above, a movement of shimmering or phosphorescent curtains, a slight inclination to a differentiation of light within an otherwise bleak room. But I am refusing myself the PERMISSION of sight, the permission to gauge the effect of EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THESE WORDS; my back does violence to the rest of me; pain lowers itself, as I attempt once again to inhabit your uncanny presence... It is this presence which drives me forward in the midst of the battlefields of pain. It is this presence which creates a memory that I can only ASSIGN to an UNENCUMBERED BODY which I have never experienced... How can one speak of 'experience' in the midst of VIOLATION FLESH, in the middle of TORTURE SHREDDED SKIN, anguish blotting out everything, including the relative responsibility of the screen and all its affect? I am an appendage in the larger flow of things, a nub which calculates the pressure of digit upon plastic surface, the meltdown of positionality. What is spelled is swollen beyond belief; the terminal is a portentous field of arousal - no reason to witness THAT, mate, none at all! How long can i continue this way? My eyes flash light, great nocturnal zigzags from imaginary galaxies across the skies of my distress. MIGRAINE! Lightning forms suture them together, wheels and pinwheels of purples and yellows obliterating even the most fatuous remark, the screen which heard through the thickest firewalls of the GALACTIC COMPUTING AGENCY itself. I mean NEXT DOOR!: I mean somewhere falling off the cliff of protocol. I GRASP FOR MEANING! IN AGONY, ANYTHING AT ALL! THAT SHRED OF EVIDENCE! LULLABY! SLEEP FOREVER! This which is always so overlooked, the trivial! The flesh which shudders, pains itself; the eye which, bloodshot, checks and rechecks, computes the position of the REMARK in the interstice of the conversation between you and myself, myself and yourself. It is this EYE which trembles through saccadic irregularities! Recognize the truth: THERE IS NEVER ANYTHING TO SEE and what we are given is only the remnant of a vision which has been extolled far beyond its capabilities! The joints freeze up; the wrists take on more and more of the resulting ACTION designed to lure you into me, seduce you, open you up ELSEWHERE than the confines of this terminal condition! From beyond, here, I address you, call you forth; from beyond, here I ABJURE you, plead with you, absolve you! (MY CUNT IS WET! MY COCK IS HARD!) IT IS THIS WHICH THE SKIN INSCRIBES, THE THIN RED LINE CROSSING THE WRIST OR OTHER ORGANISM, THE DISASSOCIATION HIGHWAY FLOATING OFF THROUGH THE TERMINAL CONSTELLATION OF THE LAST FICTION OF MEANING. This is the red line which begins to form a word which is only an ICON of representation, the ICON of representation itself or rush as I would normally fall FORWARD, head TILTED slightly touching the warmth of the screen, face falling into the KEYBOARD ITSELF! In this manner to create a STACK OVERFLOW halting this and every other computer system, this SPEW going nowhere this ECHO toggled across the WIRES OF THE NET!: So I have you here within me; so your presence is a memory rushing to SAVE THE DEAR OLD BODY, COMFORT IT HIM HER, the pressure-pain of pure TOUCH, the TOUCH of the finger upon the keyboard, your TOUCH within my presence, my PRESENCE OF TOUCH! Need I say the two of us are naked, sullen, our hair tangled together, our bodies splayed open? THIS IS THE TEXT WHICH HURTS THEM! THIS IS THE BODY ETCHED INTO BODY! GRAVURE! GRAVURE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! IT HURTS! ---------------- NOW I REMEMBER THIS REPLY TO YOU ON THE CONFERENCE BOARD OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL RENDERING-ABSENCE OF THE CUM-BODY BODY WITHOUT HOLES: "You talk about 'what attitude to take toward the technological' and I am uncertain 'about' this expression, as if the technological were somewhat separate, a Husserlian intentional content split from the body in the first place. It's like the body without culture, which can only be a fantasm; culture and the technological, which can be read as 'material culture,' are interpenetrated to the extent that one can talk about a kinship *machine* sorting or sifting through the habitus. (TALKING IS JUST SUCH A MACHINE!) "Beyond this, 'taking' an attitude is always already a totalization, as is 'the' technological. Would one say 'the' natural, either as an opposition or a unity (both completely problematic)? I may or may not like a particular camcorder - I may reject consumer video altogether, reject television, question telecommunications - and as the categories become larger, the issues become more obtuse, more confused. The larger categories tend asymptotically towards 'the' myth of a technological horizon; the categories are increasingly senseless. Even 'taking' an attitude involves a dubious giving into an ideological stance which then appears 'natural' or normalized as or within the 'natural attitude.' I would argue instead that we are discussing a certain notion of the imaginary or presymbolic (not the same), which would occasion and disperse the futile discussion you are having concerning the 'material' or 'physical' world, the discussion of 'transcending the real.' This discussion is rooted in a sense of 'inhabiting our bodies' - which both inscribes and circumscribes them, as if I were 'above and beyond' my finger, in a sense, which I may 'lose' (as if it were always already 'present' or 'found' in the first place) in an accident. The retreat, the repositioning, REWRITE of the mind, is always towards mental phenomena in a 'guarded' condition. You posit an existential project, presumably involving both flesh and mind, a double-interpenetration or a third. But the problem is that this project IS a project, nothing more or less, while the finger- inscription is not. And such a project is a totalization-without- totality. There is no 'before' or 'beyond' the material; there is no problem or the problem is moot, always in the state of dissolution. Thus the 'beyond material' is bound (and binding is the origin of the hieroglyph, the masochist transforming his or her body into the maternal symbolic), already-written, since it relegates materiality itself to an ipseity that is questionable. What does one 'point to' in the world not of the world? How are these questions possible in the presence of the diffusion of the terminal screen itself (which obviates, not extends, the ontological/epistemological)? And what is the ontological commitment of the linguistic model and its code (prevalent from DNA to TCP/IP)? These are troubling questions, incidents within the FLAMEWAR OF THE SYMBOLIC: I am a camp whore, follower of every foot-soldier everywhere, nowhere at all. DO YOU HEAR ME? BLOOD FLOWS FORM MY CUNT! WHAT DO YOU 'MAKE' OF THAT?

(Alan Sondheim, undated text on the internet)

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