<nettime> from the annals

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

0


from the annals


doctor, i am impure. i cannot fight. i cannot find my enemy. i look inside
myself and nothing is there. there are stains there, blemishes. my skin is
scarred, mottled. impure, i cannot believe. everything in the world is
lost to me. i don't know the gift of names.

i don't know the gift of names because to name is to foreclose. love, you
are my friend; hate, you are my enemy. i am impure and i do not know when
one becomes the other. i shall hide out in the caves. i shall be killed
in them.

i came to you to discover, if not purity, then belief. i want to know the
books and theories, the explanations. i want to deconstruct impurity. i
want to know impurity as a symptom, not an essence. i cannot abide
essence. i want to know the shelving and layering of all things. of which
impurity is not one or the other, like an imaginary number, fabricated,
weak in its ontology.

every other is not an other, has an imaginary. this is a real problem for
me, the "me" itself is cancerous, perhaps carcinogenic. divisions force
impurity; i am symptom of the world's collapse. perhaps that is how you
can help me, to transform the word into a symptom or collocation, an
accumulation of mutilated signs.

nothing you do, doctor, bothers me; you are the filter through which i see
myself. yesterday there were flags everywhere; i did not fly one or carry
one. i cannot understand the cloth. it soaks up signs and disturbances,
collapses fields and membranes to nodes, freezes out plasma in the name of
the crystal. it is as if i have read that somewhere, "the crystal." it is
not enough i can read, parse the text, pass "crystal" into insufficiency.

you are trying, doctor, to pin this down. patriotism, ideology, religion,
bring it out in me, the pinning, from which, on the other side of the
flesh, there is only emission, spewing, abjection. the hole or cave - i'll
hide there, impure. or rather the hard external world perhaps, with its
clean and proper body, its white room, its facticity and language gaming -
perhaps you might find the tiniest spot there, the spread of cancer. in
the cave it's all fucking; if we die, we'll die with our cunts open, cocks
erect, the only use of triggering, catalyst, protein holding together
until the last violent explosion and collapse.

when the last collapse comes, the impure becomes pure; the pure becomes
impure. we welcome that; without guns, we fuck the language, fuck our
bright ideas. the only idea left in the world is already dissolving, the
idea of cancer, the tumor of northsoutheastwest, the tumor of
firstsecondthirdworld, the tumor of animalplant, of becomingwomanman.

if the last collapse comes, there will be unbearable pain, spreading
across sheets of flesh, tissue, torn tissue, rendered flesh, articulated
animations, pixels crawling across the screen.

if i wanted to save myself i would, yes, have consulted a medical doctor;
it's the psychiatrist i want, to place me in the light of the patriot,
save me from impurity, from a life suffocated in impurity. i can't forget
that death alone has a finality while life is nothing more than
meandering, useless crawling, skittering, nothing at all.

when life is nothing more than that, aphanisis sets in, everything goes
away, i'm no longer there, nothing is responsible for action. wouldn't you
prefer that doctor, wouldn't you like to see my cunt, my cock, my disease,
my lovely lure?

what would happen would be in your hands, your cunt, your cock, you'd take
me in your arms, you'd swallow my sores, my blemished skin, you'd make me
a patriot, o love flag of white and red and blue.

are you afraid of the truth, doctor, of your categories, are you afraid of
your anatomy?

i am only afraid of this, the tiniest little mark on my lovely flesh,
whole nations fall on this mark.

i am terrified of nations collapsing, life dissolving - only as they keep
me alive, dying in this place, dying indefinitely, look, another mark, i
shall give them names.

i was first frightened by nations, look, a third just there, you can see
them spreading, when they became part of me, when i could no longer
imagine events, when i collapsed into the page, there's a fourth and a
fifth now, they're everywhere.

yes, they are growing across me, through me, spewing in and out of my
cock, my cunt, they are tearing my body into pieces, blinding me, my eyes
are gouged, tongue torn out, they have left my fingers alone.

i am not afraid of sex, my fingers crawl across my body, they find my
cock, my cunt, they penetrate and distend me, they turn me inside out, my
fingers are broken, they are joining multitudes, there are so many of
them.

there are too many of them, they are fucking me everywhere.

history is dead, i am impure, i shall rise up, i shall rise up

i shall rise up with nations, i shall seethe with nations, i shall wear
their flags, sing their songs, march with them

i will go to war, i will go to war

i will go to war i will go to war

                                is fighting

               fighting*


*the other would like to have an imaginary.


_

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