P a s s a g e s
a technopoetics journal
"Mind comes into this language as if into an Abyss"
-R.D.
V o l u m e 2
= = = = = =
3 - 1 9 - 9 5
Features:
IMAGOLOGY AND POETRY IN THE WASH OF MEDIA-- II
Doctor P. Semiconductor
[ line 34 ]
The Myrmidons Of Oblivion
Will Alexander
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AN INTERCEPTED MESSAGE IN CYPERSPACE
P.D.Q. Bacharach
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*
IMAGOLOGY AND POETRY IN THE WASH OF MEDIA-- II
Doctor P. Semiconductor
Department of Media Transition, DIU
5) THE PRACTICE OF POETRY
Poetry is conservative. It grudgingly adapted to print. As signs,
the poetic line and the conventional typography used in printing
poetry mean that the words are to be read in a voice of
exaggerated gravity and with attentions to such regularities as
the reader can manage to create the appearance of timelessness.
The quantitative lines of the classical poets marked time to be
filled; modern accentual-syllabic verse creates a sense of
timelessness. Poetry was required to deny its own nature. Even
the typographcial conventions of Robert Duncan's "Passages"--
perhaps the most successful attempt to 'score' poetry-- do not
adequately register the information that one needs to perform
the poems.
With the widespread availability of electronic recording, the poet
can now compose directly in time--the medium of consciousness
itself. Consciousness catches itself and gives way, catches itself
and gives way: one, two, three, four, five, six.... The time,
generously allowed, to be filled.
Composing directly to tape is not a new possibility. Henri Chopin
did brilliant work with a tape recorder in 1950's. But with the
appearance of affordable digital recording and random access
editing, the medium has matured. The potential content is the
entire range of recorded voices and sounds, processed sounds,
and synthesized sounds. Now there is again a possibility of an
oral poetry, a poetry drafted, edited, processed, and distributed by
electronic means--poetry for the Walkman, the car tape player,
the cd player.
6) WORKING IN TIME: RECURSION
Time is a concrete medium. Its horizons are forgetfulness and
expectation. How much is remembered, how many possibilities
can be actively entertained? Electronic media are more time than
space. The Imaginary University has a campus only in time; it
is wherever someone remembers it and expects it.
The muses confer the "power to sing the story of things of the
future, and things past," but these stories are like other temporal
things contingent. They address Hesiod and his colleagues
rather roughly:
You shepherds of the wilderness, poor fools,
nothing but bellies,
we know how to say many false things
that seem like true sayings,
but we know also how to speak the truth
when we wish to.
There are considerations that sometimes take precedence
over merely telling the truth. One is also responsible to just
measure and to the production of useful forms. A fiction might
not only please the human mind more than the mere truth but
also the divine mind. The generations of gods and humans are
driven not only by crass prior conditions, which bespeak some
ultimate prior condition, but also by judgment and creative
production.
In _Laws of Form_ , George Spencer-Brown provides an
account of the origin of forms in the flow, a theogony.
He does not promise the transcendence of our present confusion
by return to an orginal order that clears our troubled minds:
"What is encompassed, in mathematics, is a transcendence from
a given state of vision to a new, and hitherto unapparent, vision
beyond it." The interest and excitement of knowing has to do
with moving from where one is (confused) where the form is
evident. There is not certainty of propositions.
To mark a now against a not-now, it is not enough merely to be in
the present, it is necessary to reenter the space of the distinction
as a whole. This might be known as the recursive shuffle. It is
blatantly circular, but it is as near fundamental ground as one
gets. Whatever still unturning point does not belong to logic.
Working in logic, however, may put a person in a position to
comprehend.
With reentry, with taking responsibility for the distinction as
such, life is indicated. Operator and operand collapse into one
another, time and the assymetry of action are revealed. This is
not the space of the true and the false, but the self-referential
space that in called "imaginary," in the sense of the square root
of a negative one: multiplied by itself it produces not itself but its
opposite. Like the statement of the liar in the famous paradox, if
it is false it is true, and if it is true it is false. There is a minimal
wash of time, the base-line of consciousness catching and giving
way; the memory of that, the expectation of this. The time that is
marked is not the time that is reentered.
*
The Myrmidons of Oblivion
by Will Alexander
alienation - a withdrawing or estrangement
WEBSTER'S
New Twentieth Century
DICTIONARY
Unabridged
The "Internet", its realia beclouded by loss of imaginal plasma.
It is discourse by debris, by a random wave of artificial sullage, from
which, at unsuspected moments icily smouldering gold is obtained.
Perhaps an obscure society of "Sun Ra" watchers, or, an anomalous
scholarly appraisal of Cela. One might also find a fragment concerning
colours in the landscapes of Vlaminck, or observations concerning
damaged vocal fields in the world of deafened songbirds. The latter
figments and their cast represent a level of high rapture for the
medium, but its overwhelming concern seems to dwell within the
data of the strictly quotidian. Generic refuse, invasive cortical poison.
The general user is infused with a passive fascination for codes of the
inert, so deeper levels of insight remain virgin, or go fallow, or
subconsciously stagnate under the gregarious tutelage of electrical
ruination.
There exists a hollow prestige which accompanies "on line"
immersion. Then there begins a rational casting of dice for this or
that figment, so that one piles up a cornucopia of zeal flameless with
non-sequiturs. True, there exists an absolute foliage of technical
preciseness, generally going no higher than accessing a statesman's
schedule on some inadvertent afternoon, or breaking the security of
an "Air Defense" computer by necessity of pointless compulsion. So
one sits in a grove of flattened cerebrums combining in one's mental
frame the endangered movements of some exotic wading bird, with
some heinous debate pertaining to Mississippi caning procedures.
Nothing but drift from waking levels of boredom and death. Static
replies, hollow scattering urns. One sits, not like the author of
Quixote, conjuring battles and rescues, splendiferously stated, far
removed from the "commonsensical" of the "multitude", but waiting
for a reply from the already created, from a deadening glossary of
chatter. The extreme result of this reality is in Japan called the
"Otaku", enslaved within barren ink, void to the realm of intrinsic
social relation. They embody the pinnacle of mesmeric data devoted
to the dark engulfing inches of "modems" and "faxes." For instance,
an "Otaku may collect the names of various actors who were
costumed to portray 'Ultraman'", or discover "the blood type of the
comic book artist Osamu Tezuka", or "the age of the pop star Miho
Nakayama."
The "Otaku", "on line" addicts committed to deadening
replication. First of all, there is a loss of resonance in the speech,
which is followed by the existential truth of negative social dioramas,
the clefts which loom in their weakened sexual ambits. In a word,
sterility, not like the "Yanguesan carriers"*, or "Maritornes", the
Quixotean "Asturian maid" burning with "bodily allurements." One is
concerned in the present with those who lack the power of leaking
blood into a soil of intensive needle makers.
Cervantes, with his molten integers of ruin, his figments spun
around a frenetic concentration, as if he were burning a vat of eels
in his slumber, or obstructing the slaughter of doves at the
motionless apex of star rise. And all the while behind this in-dubious
epic, we feel in Quixote's missions, the life which abounds beyond the
purity of the morgue. In contrast, we see the "Otaku" Snix "obsessed
with Chisato Moritaka", a benumbed singing "idol." He wants to know
her "likes", her "dislikes", "her bra size", her "medical history." But
Maritornes invades us, her redolent breath, capable or stinging for
millennia, yet Chisato, whatever be the size of her anatomy, cannot
draw us, cannot make us dwell over time, as we sometimes glimpse
the voluptuous filth of Fortunata.
The concern here addressed, is paralysis upon the kingdom,
enshrouded by a treacherous jaundice. True power is effaced.
Signorelli, or the Bantu carver, no longer covers a trace within these
efforts of retraction. For the "Otaku" and their planetary equivalents
there is no more than the frozen salt of a dire re-construction.
But the argument abounds, what about quantity, what about the
assortment of people the "Internet" connects. Ah, but only a
superficial contact, the artificial soul which communally darts about a
musical android grave, untranslatable, to any avalanche, or any
snow, or the periodic mind of insatiable volcanoes. The "Internet"
and its ilk implants a fundamental lassitude, but a lassitude akin to
an infernal tenseness. One probes for keys, for fragments, for lone
groups of literati, their secrecy condoned by a suffocating anonymity.
The retinal sun is thus scarred, ritual abolished, motion is spurred by
treeless anti-hymnals. Modes of life become infused by emaciation,
its subtraction expressed by feckless strontium foundries.
Those who constantly feed on this incessant larval wattage,
have lost the reality of a book, expressed by its dimension and
weight. I take at random Cesaire's Collected Poetry, Segalen's Rene
Leys, and Great Russian Short Stories in which Turgenev's Bezhin
Meadows appears. Cesaire enunciates in his intensive Debris, that
"the sea" is "without" "an allemorph opening its fans and rustling its
nuts it is the sea laying downs its entire chromosian hand it is the
sea imprinting a river of herds and tongues way under the palm of
lethal lands and the wind its pocket full of shipwrecks with its mouth
a source as fresh as your thought which I lose and which I hunt
down between sleeping and waking..." The Segalen tells us that the
"narrator" is handed by Rene Leys "a slip of paper covered with
characters of such cursive abbreviation that they simply lay there in
my hand, powerless to clarify in any way what he had just been
saying... In the last light of my flickering lamp I stared
at them, but they were much of a mystery to me as a piece of
Egyptian stenography swathed in Hittite arabesques, studded with
cuneiforms and scraped for a living by twenty archaeologists." Then
Turgenev follows with his "picture" about a fire, as its "red ring of
light quivered and seemed to swoon away in the embrace of a
background of darkness; the flame flaring up from time to time cast
swift flashes of light beyond the boundary of this circle; a fine tongue
of light licked the dry twigs and died away at once; long thin
shadows, in their turn breaking in for an instant, danced right up to
the very fires; darkness was struggling with light." Bodies of verbal
beauty extracted from books of varying physical measurement.
Cesaire's "Collection" measures 7" by 10 1/8th", Segalen's "Leys"
measures 5 1/4" by 8 1/4", and the Russian volume measures 4" by
6 1/4". Saying such, I am not abstracting, or presenting the size of
each book as nostalgic vocation. What I am seeking is the palpable
difference which expresses itself in the different weight and
colouring of a book. The Cesaire being hardbound with a somewhat
ochre colouration. The Segalen cover being white inset surrounded
by red, black and gray solids. The Russian volume being compact and
the colour or canary. As for the print I notice the Cesaire text set in
lO pt Electra, the Segalen I surmise as being closer to a larger l2 pt,
whereas, the formatters would perceive the Russian volume falling
somewhere in between the two. All such detail carries resonance like
a homeopathic field to which a reader's psycho-physical adaptability
is adjusted. This being the ritual of the book, the feel of the book,
even the particular smell of the book.
When I peruse the length of a book shelf electricity crosses my
fingers, as if I were set to engage in the manual carving of totems.
Knowing the particular angle of my electricity I am drawn to this
or that volume. Certain books are honed by the sensation of quality,
drawing about themselves a subtle monsoon, recondite with aura.
Certain books seem lured by the alchemical, by uncontestable purity.
Not perusal assigned as a group of deadened bottle fish, but living
organisms thriving as would a river of immutable swans. Of course I
can say without second thinking, that the "Internet" is void of such
equivalence. It optically mesmerizes the willfully stunted with brute
production of raw data. An addicted "on-line" user becomes self-
classified by the pseudo mathematic of inverse surges. A strange
bottomless clockwork by which forgettable encounters are decided,
by which the daily repetition of a monarch can be deciphered.
I go back to the "Otaku", with their life of maniacal erasure,
with their gales of bloodless subsets, beholden to "circuit boards,
battered decks" and "burned out hard drives." Concentration
reduced to mockery, to ironical folly. So the human curve is
thwarted, is slanted towards an oblivious simulation, void of any
alchemical dossier. Not even the whimsical can be attended to such
action, only necrotic metaphor seems sustainable. As if micro-film
smouldered inside their teeth, and they like minimal brush fire
lizards swarming, across acres and acres of x-rays. The "Otaku", then
lace up their boots and evaporate like ghosts in cathedrals of
oblivious spying. As if their limbs were brewed in a neutered anti-
rain, their eyes deprived of ozone, staring through a funnel of
vultures, their birth gaze poisoned by a famished reticularity. I am
speaking of beings who have thrown away their life threat on a raft
of clinical integers and neurons.
These are beings who will never know the burning spillage of
Campana, of the mimed oasis of Beckett, of the engorged soliloquies
of Schwitters. Such pervasive stultification seems to be the present
posture of the current living norms as nations now endure the risks
of a struggling post-industrial death ship. It is now in the interest of
captains to keep their reign on the meter of global suicide. These
bank lenders, these monstrous Wall Street merchants attempting to
sculpt a whole populace of pariahs. Beings who have lost their
touch with kindling, who have lost the fire of the natural sexual
inferno. Beings who equate with a kind of colloquial refuse. So if the
general populace falls into such gregarious benumbing, it is all the
better for that bleak percent of humanity who kills by unnatural
demand, and controls the living by numbing arbitrary law.
Therefore, if whole areas of the global population are concentrated
within a controlled rectangular wizardry, larger vision is annulled,
and destiny wizens, and no longer invades the aura as thirst.
Could Aeschylus be properly portrayed upon such a screen?
Absolutely not, because he is too much of the living. The same could
be applied to Artaud, with his dizzying drills of marrow through the
soul. In contradistinction, the Americans, with their technocratic
crosses, deny the living of the soul, insidiously whispering that the
natural world is despicable, and that they have the keys to settling
one's personal unrest, and that main key is data. The sheer mass of it
capable of staggering legions of the gullable, and bestows upon the
maimed a simulation of self-importance. The cleansed machine, the
plentiful abstract contacts, as particles, as cold forces, as tenacious
codes of inter-action. Wrath no longer singes, the nerves never blind
with eruption. The "Otaku" and their Euro-American counterparts
represent to the ruthless, a horde of controllable beasts, sedated with
a powder of willfull nightmare pollens. So therefore there must exist
generic lateral obstruction, the peripheral focus excluded in lieu of an
insistent insular centralization. This means that the "Otaku" remain
braced at amorphic anatomical pitch, being the "IDEAL
INFORMATION WORK FORCE." Take, the Gainix Corporation in the
suburbs of Tokyo, a computer foundry which has all "50" of its
"employees" as core "Otaku." Its offices "are a mass of empty pizza
boxes" of "piles of floppy disks", as the workers intently bathe "in the
glow of their terminals." Saying this I am not singularly obsessed
with the "Otaku" on their one small combative isle, but concerned
with their data condoned ideal as universal praxis, as unquestioned
bondage. According to the Times of Los Angeles "the global network
is being traveled by electronic impersonators, sophisticated hackers
and pornographers, almost all of whom operate anonymously, or
under the cover of code names." This being said in the wake of the
Kevin Mitnick capture. The latter being a person more in tune with
"objects and data" "than people." Which translates to a mentally
subverted suburbia, in which the newly withdrawn are tainted by
the lure of a well wrought techno-agoraphobia. Its constant intensity
being the very mockery of acceleration, its wariness, like a scale of
mechanical eyes dividing the invisible smoke of a moth path.
Because of the still existent surplus dollar there increasingly
proliferates a catalogue of items. In one "dimly lit study" there
exists a "a Macintosh IIvx with a built-in CD-ROM (a souped-up
drive that holds staggering amounts of information, like an
unabridged Oxford English Dictionary); a high-resolution color
monitor, two laser printers, a scanner, a modem, plus more than 100
softwares programs." According to the above quoted witness this
equipment was capable of "balancing checkbook", playing a "riff on a
snare drum", barking, turning "an image into a fresco", making "an
interactive journey through the Australian Outback." Such novelty is
carried further when "Morphing" occurs, "a special-effects program to
turn a man into a woman and back" to his original form "without
surgery." It is "cleaner, safer...more efficient than reality..." Up to
"40,000" messages are sent across the bulletins of the "Internet" on a
daily basis by up to "15 million" bureaucrats, combined with global
academia. In a phrase, the combined forgery of the shut in.
This is so unlike Nietzsche, or Borges "in situ", with their
implosive imaginal grains on fire. Is the cyberspace capable of the
instinctive bravura and insight extolled in "Ecce Homo" or the
insomnious vertigo of Borges' "Funes, the Memorious." Such writing
exists in vivid contrast to the generic cyberspace adherent, tainted
by brutality and boredom. When an empire inwardly falters there is
rife amongst the populace a rabid juggling for services, such as
"Prodigy, GEnie, and CompuServe. One becomes existentially
benumbed by the ease in "checking stockquotes", in "ordering office
supplies." Even if serious fragments of literature or politics appear,
they are authored by beings with "handles", with code names,
dastardly in comparison to those anonymous authors of compound
graffiti. In the latter endeavor the body is enlivened by the powerful
jubilation of risk, by the multiple concentration of warfare. In
contrast, the anger of the "Internet" is expressed by the use of capital
letters, which conveys the equivalent of shouting. And the neutering
has gone so far that a San Francisco based firm has created
computerized material for sexual simulation. But when I read Cora
Pearl's "Grand Horizontal", or delve into Lawner's "Lives Of The
Courtesans", I am exposed to a full range of beings who loved and
were erotic, and have now crossed into legend.
What I am scorning via the "Internet" is its lack of palpable risk,
its absence of blood, its negation of pure chance. Give me, the
singular autograph of Lamantia, the malefic squanderings of a thirst
crazed Nero, or teeming graphite from the blazing lagoons of Lorca.
And if it is one thing we can say for the millennial charisma of
Breton, is that his writings continue to writhe like a spark from an
eternal monsoon tree, exploding and re-igniting across the living
currency of the future. Unlike the wretched "Macintosh" wizard, his
writings contain the precipitous health of one who had risen above
the drone of an extinct, but popular Drachma. In the wake of his
protean coloratura there remains the ferocious value of
transgression, of vehement fervour against this pervasive ruse of
mechanical hygienics.
*- "Yanguesan carriers" beat up Don Quixote on one of his adventures.
*
AN INTERCEPTED MESSAGE IN CYPERSPACE
presented with an introductory note by P.D.Q. Bacharach
The following document would appear to confirm the conjecture (put forward
by Hecuba Whimsy at last year's Passages Conference) that the info-collapse
of '95 was a trans-historical counter-revolution. Comment on this
discovery is most welcome.
> You were right.
>
> Ping! -- Intercept!
>
> --J.S.
>
> > From: DIU VAX: BCASEY 21-MAR-1999 01:52
> > To: KPHILBEE
> > Subj: Mole
> >
> > Kimberly -- we caught the bitch in the time terminal, playing mind games
> > again, & after a warning too -- the whole "real names" thing was a dodge
> > to try to draw the other cells out of the shadows. What should we do with
> > this? -- I don't think anyone else knows that "Chris" is a girl, but
> > she should definitely be more careful. Or be shut up for good. Bill
> >
> > > $ finger ahpfunk
> > >
> > > DIU VAX, 21-Mar-1999 01:00
> > >
> > > Username Personal name Program Login Location
> > > AHPFUNK Christine Funkhouser MndFck 23:20 Amerikka Online
> > >
> > >
> > > Default directory: LISP$USERLISP7:[U$A.AHPFUNK]
> > > Logged in since: 20-Mar-1999 23:00
> > > Mail is forwarded to: IN%"CF2785@csc.albany.edu.1995"
> > > Plan:
> > > LISTEN JERKY... Fingering me huh?? Quite UNHYGENIC....Don't you think???
> > > well...everyone has their own little quotage and favorite things going on
> > > in these things...so here it goes...
> > > If you love something...set it free...
> > > If it returns to you...it is yours FOREVER...
> > > If it doesn't...hunt it down with a sawed-off shotgun...
> > > MEN...can't live with them... Can't shoot them...
> > > How many MEN does it take to screw in a lightbulb?? Just one, men will
> > > screw ANYTHING!!!
> > > Of all the things ive lost...i miss my mind the most...
> > > Just a few tidbits For your sick and inquisitive minds...
> > > 51% of the population of the United States is in the majority...
> > > 98% of all constipated people Really don't give a shit...
> > > Well...if you ARE fingering me, i am assuming (NEVER assume, it makes an
> > > ass out of
> > > you...) that i am not here, or you are wondering if i AM here, or if
> > >
> > > i WAS here...so here it goes...i am either...
> > > A...Bungee Jumping off Goodyear... B...Skinny Dipping in Lake Lasalle
> > > C...Sunbathing in Founder's Plaza... D...In class...(what IS class?)
> > > E...Volunteering... F...SLEEPING!!!...G...logic of snowflakes!!!...
> > > H...JUST PLAIN IGNORING YOU!!!
> > > Take your pick...and make it snappy...i don't have ALL day you know...
> > > I'm getting high tonight, and it isnt on illegal drugs, im getting high
> > > on NYQUIL and SUDAFED!!! ... It shouldnt say may cause drowsiness...it
> > > should say
> > > DONT MAKE ANY FUCKING PLANS...Capital N...Little Y...BIG FUCKING Q...Life
> > > is
> > > hard..get a FUCKING helmet...life's little pleasures - a cookie, a
> > > cigarette,
> > > a 5 second orgasm... -Dennis Leary
> > > Have a DAY...not a GOOD day...not a BAD day... who the HELL am i to tell
> > > you that ANYWAY???
> > > I DID IT... I MEANT IT... AND I LIKED IT!!!...C.
> > > Thank you...thank you...and FUCK YOU... - Dennis Leary
> > > Love, hugs, and kisses...
> > > The cuddly elf... (ps...a note to belle and ben...DONT MESS WITH SANTA
> > > CRUZ)
> > > I feel like a million tonight....just one at a time... - Mae West
> > >
> > >
= =
Passages invites writings on mergings & mixings between poetry and technology
Editorial Advisors Belle Gironda (Happy Birthday!)
Benjamin Friedlander
Donald J. Byrd
ConceptEditor Chris Funkhouser
correspond / subscribe -> cf2785@cnsvax.albany.edu