PASS AGES a technopoetics journal 3 28 May, 1995 Troubled surfer seeking the about-to-break line of the wave in it to ride toward revelation, the tide that would have carried you draws back from the litterd margin, and the depth of the sea you would have borne forward is the depth of an impending failure among us who if we fall from the board, as we must, fall into the facts of the polluted stream. F E A T U R E S + Laynie Browne, in falling water [line 50] + Greg Keith, The discovery of philoric [line 204] + Edgar Allen Poe, JOANNE KYGER [line 255] + AutoScrive d'Ficus, from Smileimile Limitude [line 291] + David Dowker, The Counter-Valence [line 370] + a computer generated version of Albany's Presentations symposia, digitally uncovered by C. Funkhouser, 5/95 [line 413] in falling water by Laynie Browne for Chris Eric India visualize gravity intuits the history of a river (in) describable icons as if what finally besieged /\ || a conduit the opposite of torment a heavy spinning velocity weightless or ethereal where the eye marks steps or bridges in falling water mistaken for clouds crinoline A cold night rushes weight of hollow retinal impression || \/ subtle cartographer Lots of people know about phlogiston. I've discovered that fewer folk know its cousin "caloric" (the noun, not the adjective). This seems a little odd since caloric lasted much longer than phlogiston, in part because the math worked better -- heat does look like a flow. I made up "philoric" to sound like that, old and heavily reified. I'd guess the umbrella of "technopoetics" might cover the deliberately spurious thingification of love. If so, I submit the following: The discovery of philoric When we thought heat a fluid we would say steel soaked up a lot of it. Air clearly sopped up less. Cold things, standing emptier than hot things, shrank slightly. Now heat's a song and dance every little thing already knows. We think ice just croons more quietly than steam. The world goes on opening up, always more structure and surprises inside. We see how it happens more than is. Once mood arose from mixtures of four humours, blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy. Now we find brief, scant squalls of serotonin blown onshore particular neurons -- we think emotions are the outside of that weather. Now we see two matters and one energy, eternal delight equal mass times lightspeed squared. No things but in process of becoming. Even a virus, thinglike as it seems, looks mighty procedural compared to miasma -- a true spell, one long nucleotidal word hexing our cells to repeat it. Given this trend, it comes as some surprise to find love is a fluid after all, a subtle dew gathering in quantum twilight. The numeric measure of this flux requires, beyond the familiar real and imaginary parts of the merely complex, a certain exponent, a power to which the whole is raised, called, for convenience, a divine number. Thus we understand how, when philoric backs up and love collects in the body, we feel so ready to burst open. --Greg Keith JOANNE KYGER by Edgar Allen Poe _The Wonderful Focus of You_. By the author of _All This Every Day_, _Places to Go_, _The Tapestry and the Web_. Calais, VT: Z Press, 1980. We feel it is almost an act of supererogation to speak of this book, which is long since in the hands of every American who has leisure for reading at all. The manner itself is deeply interesting, but, as usual, its chief beauty is beauty of style. The Creation of the World as told by Native Americans, an event momentous in the extreme, is yet enveloped, as regards the motives and actions of the principal _dramatis personae_ in triple doubt and confusion. To snatch from this uncertainty a few striking and picturesque legends, possessing, at the same time, some absolute portion of verity, and to adorn them in her own magical language is all that Miss Kyger has done in the present instance. But that she has done this little well it is needless to say. She does not claim for the Legends the authenticity of history properly so called--yet all are partially _facts_, and however extravagant some may appear, they all, to use the words of the author herself, at one time helped make "a place to live / in the greened out 70's / trying to talk in the tremulous / morality of the present." Were we to instance any one of the narratives as more beautiful than the rest, it would be "Marian Lopez Calixto's Story," which we have also heard Miss Kyger recite on a phonograph record. from Smilimile Limitude ***** The flow itself becomes more than just but less clinging and certainly there is more risk now. I feel that the animals have come to drink and this may be a good omen. For days of maybe even weeks I have not felt normal. I hear but I do not believe. There is light where none should be. Dreams leap upon me and take over my mind as if it were the pad used to record an awful automatic writing contest entered by a cruelly nonchalant beast with no more care for my health or even my existence than I for the veriest gnat. One can only hope it grows bored with such as I and does not intend permanence. As waves lap on shores of ant-free, glacial sparl, I can see that we may soon come to an end of this viscid slough. An end. ***** It feels as if recording on a jerky cassette would appear more certain than this life of endless travel and the stayings in murk or steamy jungle could become a permanent end for the trend I can feel over to the left and as the log nears dim lights, only the remaining footgear or is he eating that so it must be cured hide strips. I won't become alarmed in his or her presence. Stiff control is my hiding of the odor that gives me away and leashes me to his big wagon. The end can only be good or as simple as he can show me. I can find things but I can't keep attending to their re-creation. They fade or a luminous aura that precedes their change become the whole thing itself. This can continue perhaps another period or at most two. Prepare. ***** A worldly person would have sent his ego falling for a chance at half of this. I can see from here, several distinct haloes around a single maiden. It is sure that she every day washes a small rock the size and shape of a large animal's inner ear. Can this be a warning of some earlier being's pent-up forgetting? Do I need it? As well as being deepened, the grotto needs several replacement silos. The total need for animal supplies outstrips even my imagination of what can be eaten, worn and sexed. From tomorrow depends a great list of the few or zero financial centers from which I may be called in a state of crystal clarity. This could have been predicted and would have saved a great deal of energy now sent along to the rail department. If this stops, be sure to send a message. ***** Have there been shoes for long? Is a sentence at the work farm equal or similar to those found in a freer slideway? I can only be sure of one thing. At a time that is. And that is not at all certain. It is sure but is that not much more to be wished than severally or alone we can be sure we want? From here, and god's nose where this IS, I can see exactly NOTHING. It is either dark or so bright and featureless that I cannot even see my own physical body. If this is death, then, kiddies, you better eat your broccoli and put it off for now. I can believe anything I WANT to so I can be, eat, sex, feature and paint or lasso any thing, person, place if they be either foul or fair or I can get a virtually true representation of the other side of it. As a matter of incontrovertabilly, we are just about fed over with the stench of truth that hangs like smoke here. ***** Kinda got into this life or pre, after, nexial, sophorist, whatever passes here wherever this is. I'd be more certain if it paid better but it's all more or less the same. Seems more like a carpal tunnel contest than any kind of product of consciousness. A sign, the only artifact here, says no cameras allowed but it's spelt wrong. I can only hope the water gets here in time to put out whatever that red-sounding stuff is over there if that is really over. Severally or as monad, my feet are as tall as the shoes I wish I still could have as the sand heats up periodically to an uncomfortable but surely not dangerous degree. The cramped hole I'm forced to dig can be used later if we are heaved to the last place in line. If this whole land is built only from the front sides of several sheets, can I pass to understand the sides left? ***** -AutoScrive d'Ficus THE COUNTER-VALENCE which corresponds to that "coefficient of weirdness" . trans-linguistic planetary carrier wave, shaggy spirit of the brainforest *THE AUTO-GNOMES ARE EVERYWHERE!* ["I know now that paranoia is the vision of what's happening and psychosis is the hallucinated vision of what's happening, that paranoia is reality, that paranoia is the content of things, that paranoia's never satisfied." (Jack Kerouac)] Control-break-escape. Shift assemblage point / symbolic address change. Interpolate, iterate. This archaic instrumentality in _spectacular_ disarray. Terminal protocols. (We skulk in the line noise...dwell and dither over the bard rate...await continuous echo.) Let us arise and bit-map the universe. --David Dowker Times New Roman encrustation's ASCIIJesusI willdoesn'tembarrassthatcertainXeroxdominated vathatimportantwhatthatthatthataboutpedagogythatdirectlythatthatt ogetherthatthatJohnnycreateexcitementsphysicistsapocalypseonethat' sthere'saccompaniesWeepoetryquitethat'sinvokedincumbent didn'tweirdkindfluoridewantI'mnecessityspecificthere'sthat'svoicedo n'tdoesn'tdoesn'tdropoutcommunityI'mThat'svoicelewdcouldn'ttcorpo rationdon'tmontagesthey'recutoutavant- gardedon'tdon'tpoetrycorporationcorporateavoidcorporationswasn'tv oicedon'tdon'tThat'sdidn'twasn'twasn'tdon'tweren'thachangedthat'spo liticalthat'sTVisn'tI'mflagellateweirdI'mmesmerizedthemediumgerma nemanifestlyresonatingI'mI'mprivilegeconspicuousmaleisn'tI'mherm eticaestheticismpeculiarlydon'tseparationsstooped'corporatecorporate corporatetreferralcorporationsMr.HI'mI'mstrugglingI'mI'mpluralI'mh e'sforaysforaysdoesn'tdiscursivedistributiondidn'tapocalypticdon'tI -a computer generated version of Albany's Present(ations) symposia digitally uncovered by C. Funkhouser, 5/95 * passages invites writings on mergings between poetry & technology Editorial Advisors Belle Gironda Benjamin Friedlander Donald J. Byrd Editor Chris Funkhouser cf2785@cnsvax.albany.edu