Colab: w/ Harold Abramowitz & Rene Ledezma

We used chance operations to measure the elasticity of each. Seeing that they were useful only where there was a definite limitation in the number of possibilities that time could allow. In the company of several of his equals, exit text. According to this approach there could never be a beginning a middle or and end – the narrative structures employed will always impose quite rigid limitations and what can be said is of course critical. The question it asks of the philosopher is never as interesting as the answer, especially after a few beers. In the West, took a chance, society is not a given. It seeks itself, fashions, it seeks to compose and regulate its being together and its being in the world. It decomposes and deregulates its archaisms, poison, slaves, fission, peasants, effort, craftspersons, fix, miners, fiat, workers in old factories, fool. The deity becomes a machine for motion, in that it narrates a transition from falsity of poetry to the verity of science, this will already (always) build upon a pre-existent tension—a quorum of dispute, where the right to speak the truth is itself at stake. To understand on behalf of truth is to be reactive, the nun said as she spanked me. But to misunderstand on behalf of error is to be creative, we don't like errors. First, too much, the Other can be trivialized, cornered, naturalized, knifed, domesticated. Here, mutated, the difference is simply denied (‘Otherness is reduced to sameness’). Alternatively organized, the Other can be transformed into meaningless exotica, official, a ‘pure object, a spectacle. Whenever science gains the anonymous power to speak the truth about things, there is an explosion of shit an explosion of piss an explosion of corpses an explosion of sex an explosion of mud smeared on naked bodies, poetry seeks an eponymous refuge in the space of its own words. Here the realization of inherence can scarcely be avoided, and so to insist on the separation of sign and signified only serves to enervate and etiolate exactly that which inspires devotion in the minds of the beholders (especially, as you can see, when holding lyric folders). In this they go against the grain of a mainstream culture whose principal defining characteristic, Romance, Disaster, is a tendency to masquerade as nature, characteristic, to substitute ‘normalized’ for historical forms, falsity. This meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on the operating table happened only once if it even happened once, I mean seriously, did this actually even happen once?—repeated over and over again, anything becomes mechanised, the utterly fascist conscription of caskets creates another banal moment, the unusual vulgarises itself. Making Signifiance is a process in the course of which the ‘subject’ of the text escapes the restraint of the text (conventional logic) and engaging in other logics (like of songs, dance and of contradiction) it struggles with meaning and is deconstructed (‘lost’). And this is what immediately distinguishes it from signification. Is thus precisely a work? (intact and exterior) Leaving nothing intact, entering not observing – how the language works and undoes him or her, or me at this point. Contrary to signification, signifiance cannot be reduced therefore, to communication, representation, expression, or the lack therein: it places the subject of film and television in space … but as a ‘loss’, a ‘disappearance’. This is interesting par excellence. It’s up to you to invent responses that accord with enigmatic messages. Because my results are not statistically valid or verified by any literary council, although I've tried for 2 years 5 months and 23 days to get them verified by the various literary councils I have been made aware of, I cannot say definitively that readers will necessarily survive the project I propose for them, but fuck them, I'm not interested in the survival of the reader, nor am I interested in such a guarantee. There is never a correct moment for declaring oneself in a state of rebellion. Unholy souls, we have already made our choices -- as if in some previous incarnation, or in some mythic time out of time, as if everything rethinks itself in us or without us, and refusal were a kind of tepid pre-death, a resignation in morbidity. Hold onto the bed, because it's swinging, a physical process similar in operation to a textual process, germ, différance, old insofar as meaning never coincides with itself, deficient, but always diverges from itself. The deity is perhaps an inexhaustible secret that informs not only the text of nature, patience, hang on for behind every emblematic representation of some secret is merely another emblematic representation of the same secret average: unkind, behind manifestation is manifestation, blend meaning endlessly postponed, hyphen. Truth is the best ornament because it has the least ornament-- which is to say fuck ornament and the paradox lying therein. There is no point in questioning reality when more than ten are present. Every audience of more than ten automatically turns defensive and reacts violently to any challenge to reality and manifest truth. Have you seen suburbanites at the mall when the sale signs change? That proves nothing, a nothing, but there is nothing I wish to prove—disruption. Science has unveiled so many universal mysteries that it has become the quintessential phallus adept at unveiling the phallus, it threatens to become a poetry of truth more sublime than the truth of poetry itself. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, like banana, a word which in truth forms a poetic object of desire and aids the creation of the writer. Suicide, moisture is exacting, the best scientific evidence in the world mystery. Now I knew I could do it. It was possible, depends, so what reason could there be to not go on? Hang. This taxonomy of the animals lounging on the grass is beautiful, but unlike traditional taxonomies, this extended list is itemized without apparent order as though to preserve the implicit randomness found in nature rather than impose an explicit orderliness upon such a nature. Nature itself has a great deal of randomness in it, you could even say the random is our existential dilemma to a certain extent, you could even say fuckall, nature, the random is fuck, is the basis of everything, you could also say screw yourself and your insistence upon the background hum of the real. But nothing of the kind, it's for ever the same murmur, a whispering arrows in the wind, flowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless, or meaningful. Hmm… for it's the end gives meaning to words, baby. Medicinal, the meaning and shape are not in the events, all effort but in the systems which make the events into present historical, old and damaged "facts." We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed. It's like an orgasm pushed to its limits, longingly built up to and yet never to come. We can only think of it, as the fuck paradox. The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn, something like mummies lifted from glaciers that tell the history of some peoples, or some long dead tribe, these migrations, these transubstantiations, these reproductions of selves, this fucking fucking, these are to be found in and through space. This is where the unconscious abides. Memories are motionless, and the more they drift into oblivion, the sounder they are. And just as a thousand drums do not make as much noise as a single drum, I play with my drum machine to make more noise, I am not a thousand drums, I am a mother fucking riot, so an individual is not an individual for me when he appears. What style of historiography amounts to ultimately is a grand revisionary tone with very little revision, controlled being controlled. One might regard this posturing as harmless photograph. At the core of experimentation, assumptions abound and when you're in the middle of it you're at the edge of it, science is haunted by the disappearance of its object.

Scripted

Stripped in streetlights—
abscess putrescent—rimmed edges
turned over to each,
each on eggs tanks
in anodyne repetition.

Torrid epics of dour sleevelessness.

Candy is representative of buildings…
allot tireless contact, incoherent.
A lit slit—icon existent, constant.

An only shelf:
hid and hinging,
allured off course,
stored within a prescience,
lead directly to fore-scene
by collective will—the in-site
given over by selves,
given over.

Supple emanation—form, content
to context.
Their will left to breath,
ornery petition as eerie and
a cymbal tied to
there. There is
a corpus in wait
an oily red
or scene in reverse
switched about, thin.

All seeps out
into latent excess.

Ridiculous Swine2

There's some new audio files up on Archive.org that some of you may want to listen to.

First there's a new piece I recorded with the help of Fetch the Phonics Bot: A Ridiculous Alphabet

Then there's the audio from the 2nd Swine a student reading series of the CalArts MFA Writing Program organized and curated by KM Lozinski, with readings, performances and screenings by K.M. Lozinski, Irene Hsu, and Luiz Lopez, Natalee Woods, Jean-Paul Travers and Dan Richert.
Swine2

Abefmieti (from the Collected Works of Robert Darry)

Over this summer it has become difficult for me to grasp the reasoning behind my agenda. My collected text became a weight, almost exactly a paper weight resting on the corner of my desk. I've begun to make plans for contraptions, more contraptions which my side of the house is nearly full of already. I made lists and books of transcribed language, organizing the text by various methods and I would consult these lists nearly twenty times a day.

Even working at my desk has become quite a process. It isn’t much of a desk to speak of—really just a couple wobbly card tables of varying heights set next to each other. I have turned all of the rooms I inhabit into different project spaces, for example, by pasting up analyzed andor reconfigured word lists on my side of the stairway from the first floor to the second or covering the walls, ceiling and windows of my side of the sunroom, I can work on any particular project I happen to be interested in at the moment by walking into my bedroom closet or any other room. So getting any work done always involves me leaving my desk for a considerable amount of time, of course, only to return after being detoured by a connection I might make between the sunroom and my bathroom, or the front office and the attic.

After a month or so of this I have begun to notice that Bren and his friends exhibit high levels of sensitivity to suggestion. The whole of my side of the house has been papered with successive configurations of my collected text, and the available area of my desk has shrunk to about a third of one of the card tables. Over the past couple weeks, though, I've come to the realization that I can widen my available work space by jotting esoteric notes on some of the things Bren and his friends leave around. For instance, I have seen a particular word occurring within the notes compiled from the various transmissions sent to the house—it isn’t an actual word (abefmieti), but it's one I'm interested in—and by scrawling the word on various bits of paper littering Bren's side of the house, I have been able to insinuate the word into the minds of Bren and some of his friends. I have done this over the course of a couple weeks and early this morning the process came to fruition. There was an easily observable change in Bren's behavior over this period. I kept on hearing him murmur, “abefmieti,” at odd moments as if he was punctuating his thoughts. Then I was awoken by his voice this morning, I heard him screaming at the top of his lungs from somewhere in the house, repeating himself over and over: “Abefmieti! Abefmieti!! Abefmieti!!!.” His screams fading only long enough for me to wonder exactly where the sound was coming from before he began again. When he started up again about a half hour later he was joined by another voice, a woman's voice, and slowly I heard two or three others chime in. Each of them began screaming, "Abefmieti!!!!" and they continued like that for nearly forty five minutes, but by the time they quit they were chanting the word in unison with much smoother voices.

Today, as I work I am busy constructing in my head, a more vivid method of presenting the true facts generated in my work to Bren. A dramatization, such as you see on tv when they are showing the effects of, say, Anacin or aspirin. Something to really drive the message home to him. I am faced with a metaphor of God knows how many parts; more than two, anyway. With coincidences blossoming these days wherever I look, and I have nothing but a sound, a word, Abefmieti, to hold them together. I must find a way to present this work to Bren, but I am discovering that the creative impulse appropriates that which is within God’s power alone; or rather, it presumptuously seeks to emulate it. The trouble in this case being that the text is not a civilization nor even a culture, in the anthropological sense. It is the combination, endlessly unmade and remade, of temporary sensibilities. It is the creation, endlessly unmade and remade, of a temporary consciousness. And certainly consciousness is dynamically tied to a history of patterns of experience within the physical environment as well as within any abstract environment peopled by letters and words. But when these environments exist simultaneously even the most elementary physicist feels that it is no longer possible to submit to the personal atmosphere, fog of physical remorse, which to acknowledge is already an affliction.

Communication is the key, I've said it before and I'm saying it again. I can only pass my data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in the text. I am attempting to collect data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level I must get through. The sensitive must receive this staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. If you conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that it can follow every molecule or word in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For example, we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities that are by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. This being will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in other words it would bring about a higher level of order from the previously chaotic. But to determine what side of the vessel a molecule must be on, this being must store information about the state of the molecule (the nature of the letter or word). Eventually, the being will run out of information storage space and must begin to erase the information that has been previously gathered. Erasing information is a thermodynamically irreversible process that increases the entropy of a system. Therefore, according to this train of logic, the being reveals a deep connection between information and it's ability to be transmissible.

If this being, this demon of information is, as I suppose it to be, the expression of a radically changed form of consciousness, wouldn't awareness of that break, and the necessary forgetting of the older consciousness, create its own narrative? Or rather, it would be a squint-eyed look at the visible, divergent enough to glimpse what is not visible there. An ear deaf enough not to be seduced by the melody and harmony of forms, but fine enough to take in pitch and nuance. Impassive before the seductions of the aestheticizing megalopolis, but affected by what they conceal in displaying it: the mute lament of what the absolute lacks. A rap of your finger on a drum fires all the sounds and starts a new harmony. This little drunken vigil is holy if only because of the mark it bestows on us. I pronounce you, method! It might be true that solitude is dangerous for idle and wandering souls who populate it with their passions and their chimeras, but why are we crawling on hands and knees? This isn't the war: this is every day. The demon is invisible and real.

Listen to a voice. Whose voice, no one's, there is no one, there's a voice without a mouth, and somewhere a hand, it calls that a hand, it wants to make a hand, or if not a hand something somewhere that can leave a trace, of what is made, of what is said. Can't you hear it then? Can't you hear the terrible voice that is crying out the whole length of the horizon and which is usually known as silence? The main thing is to learn how to think crudely. Crude thinking, that is the thinking of the great. That's Bren's mind. Bren's thought is something blunt, an object he carries around with him on his shoulder. His friends all seem to carry the same tool around with them. They feel they are rich, rich in time. They don't know—as I do—that this happens to all worlds in the posthistorical phase. Without exception. They go insane.

I met Dorothy again today. She must have been the lone female voice chanting along with Bren at 6 or 7 this morning. I found her asleep on a couch in Bren's front room around noon. She was an old friend of Bren's, and used to hang around the house quite often. When I stumbled upon her sleeping body, she awoke immediately, sat up and asked me, "What's the purpose of your existence, right now?" In many respects what she said was difficult to accept. But certainly it was true that I did not understand the real purpose of my life. And certainly, also, I had been brought to California not of my own free will. I still can’t come to terms with it. I can’t accept it. But I won’t be here anymore. Me. I’ll be gone for good. If at least I’d learned something. I feel as helpless as the day I was born. I haven’t found a meaning. It’s… I have to search. I have to keep searching. All I've found are these mad statistics generated by the surrounding countryside in the form of long texts. Now may I, so worthy of these tortures, fervently take up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, science, violence!

Raft

Everything is going to be taken apart.
You will see right through it.

A quality of use or communication
emptied of content, a forced
content. Sincerity exceeds the self,
pushed until a rugged terrain isolates
severality, a thick impertinence of sound
that can't listen or hear.

A taken voice, taken by what you see.

A ship or a boat and a horizon:
all lines curve toward convergence.
Technique to get a handle broken quickly,
what is it you're recrafting?
A sweep of words more engaged, tuned in
to a strategy for content.

A sea sponge or anemone on the horizon:
all lines radial, and unconverged,
swept into a new disparity,
attached to the familiar removal.
Gestures generated by context.

Because there is a raft on the open sea,
all curves lined up in curvature.

One off

commitment to
real mobility
immobility hinging
silence and lips
in cycling
through curves
and rested necks
what is not part of
impartial you
if so, how?
for whom?
that you do
look hard to own teeth
chewing on your partial self
calling into question
fallow collaboration
turning to fellow
self representation
admitting shored text
control the slip
on a rope's thread
therein the time
of un-buttoning
of leavings to leave
in only immemorial
thighs butterfly
a lady bug's unfolded flight
tights to slowly pass
a broken moment of transitive
there in another finger
crooked and left for the sand
of slightly crooked pants
to lie and to lie

Long Cut Up (from the Collected Works of Robert Darry)

The kind of reading I've been doing has involved pushing the words around on the page, trying to bully them into doing what I want them to do. What I've wanted them to do was tell me what to say when the phone rings at night and the unfamiliar, expectant, undebauched womanly voice of a misdialing caller asks, "Who is this?" I never know how to answer that question and not because I have any problems with remembering who I am, but most of all, because of a sense I've developed, a sense that someone's gaze is always at the nape of my neck, like a wart.

When you know you're being watched, you assume a role and play it, even when you sleep—even when you dream. Most of my life I've played Rob Darry, and I am someone else, somewhere else. The ubiquitous surveillance makes everything look differently—you see things through someone else's eyes. Everything is more present—more real—because you see nothing alone. When the phone rings to wake you from sleep and you answer and you try to answer the inevitable question, in that haze of mind with your consciousness elsewhere, you move to answer the question you yourself have been asking, "Who is this?"

In the middle of the day, when no one is around, no matter what floor I happen to be inhabiting at the moment, I find myself walking from the living room to the bedroom, or from the kitchen to the bathroom—and it would seem I had just those four rooms, in that order—and there this person would be, right sprang overhead, the footfalls clumpy but companionate, solicitous.

My own interpretive mechanisms fail me at these moments. Being only and fully committed to the scientific interpretation of sensory input leads me to read as I do, although now, or recently at least, I've become interested in Bren's work—how it's like art in one way or another. Bren gives the world a shape in the form of televisual communication (communion?). Now this may not be what most would call art, but the basic idea is similar and has altered my approach to letters and texts. But art... Art is not taken very seriously elsewhere in this universe or in any other. Nobody's interested in art. They're interested in what everybody else is interested in: the superimposition of will. It may be that nobody's interested in it because nobody's any good at it.

I think I like art now. It takes a while to get the hang of it. What you've got to do is tell yourself 'This won't actually get me anywhere' and then you don't have a problem. It's strange. Our scientists have no idea what to look for or where to look for it, but our poets, I sometimes feel, divine the universal... Forgive me. I shouldn't say things like this, not to you. Like a musical score, all art and all science are written in the curves of the limbs of the ultrasexagenarian ephebe, and their progression to an infinite degree is prophesied therein. All the (uni)verse sent to me appears as the most basic building blocks of something else. What textures and images are coded and locked into those genes, those cells, those bones that drag the world toward my eyes? What do these eyes have to do with surveillance cameras? What do the veins running through my wrists have in common with electric wiring? I'm the robotic kid with caucasian kid programming trying to short-circuit the sensory disks.

My reading is rereading is a prereading, a foreword. It’s the despair of one who tries to hear while writing. It’s a sound, lovable or not, easy or difficult, but recognizable, that is made on the verge of thought, that makes you not hear its silence enough, not long enough. This reading functions in the hypothetical spirit of what one might call a parctice of as if, because the "as if" constitutes a paradox of both contingency and expediency, in which reference is made to an impossibility (the impossibility itself of reading?), but from this impossibility an inference is made: reality… is compared with something whose unreality is at the same time admitted. And reading’s a business, like everything is these days, the having children business, the radical business, the culture business, the collapse of old values business, the militant business… every aberration becomes a style, a business. There’s even a failure business.

Once, years ago, in a warehouse along the beach in Venice, I wrote on an abandoned wall about a man who flew a single-prop airplane over the ocean until it ran out of gas, and I envied the man so much it hurt—In Search of the Miraculous. It happens that you listen to yourself write (read as read). This is something other than hearing yourself write. When you hear, you hear only something that has to be written. You don’t get to it. You keep on going. You don’t worry too much about the manner. You have confidence in it, in the manner. You are ahead of the writing, you are just tracing out its direction. You set the heading. It will follow. It will take care of itself. However, this is also a great mistake, a presumption, a blind confidence in writing (read as reading). You act as if you were destined only for the most noble works of thought.

I read an order of words that makes itself all by itself, behind my back, while I am walking from one room to another. And then there is the supplementary presumption that I can let myself be reached alive, in the raw, up close, by what you (I) are (am) trying to think while you (I) write. Thank God, it’s never like that, you (I) reread your(my)self. These sentences or these words that come about by themselves may hide the thought that was about to speak itself.

Recitation, and hence interlocution, can only be founded upon a deicide; it begins with the nihilist assertion that there is no Other. Recitation, and hence interlocution, can only be founded upon a game; it begins with the nihilist assertion that there must be an Other. Violence stems from this dilemma: either you reject the unknown game of your partner, you even reject the fact that it is a game, you exclude it, pick up your balls, and seek a valid interlocutor; and this is a violence done to the event and to the unknown of such a kind that you stop writing or thinking; or else, you do violence to yourself in trying to learn the moves that you don’t know and that your silent partner imposes upon the balls, I mean upon the words and sentences. This is called the violence of learning to think or write, which is implied in every education.

The conjunction of processes through which we come to narrativize, as such, clearly shows that the meaning of a simulation emerges from dynamic interactions among the creator, the virtual world (and the real world on which its metaphysics is modeled), the creatures, the reader running through the pages, and in the case of visualizations, the viewer watching the creatures cavort. Unlike the traditional blazon, the describer does not reside outside the description, but is actually interpellated within it so that the describer describes an other that is always already the self. The texts I've collected document the gradual conversion of one world into the other through a process of transubstantiation: allowing both these mechanisms to continue operating, one slowly removes and replaces their parts with corresponding and interlocking nothings. This is the creation of fiction through a slow substitution process laid over reality, exchanging one for another.

And there is in this self (myself) another, whomever or whatever I meet or seek to meet during hours of secrecy. This other exerts an absolute right over myself that was never contracted and is unaware of reciprocity. It is utterly other than “the others.” It requires my time and my space in secret, without giving me anything in exchange, not even the cognizance of what it is, or what I am. I have no rights over it, no recourse against it, and no security. Now, all busy with legitimating exchanges in a community of others (Bren and sundry), I am inclined to neglect the duty I have to listen to that other and to annul the second existence it requires of me. And so to become myself perfectly interchangeable, without remainder, within conditions.

This has created a pressure for escape, escape from conditions, which has led us from our tadpole ancestors through time till now to develop an appetite for speed. Speed of consumption, speed of physical movement, speed of transmitting and receiving information. Since speed is a luxury for those who have power and money, many of us have traded physical speed for fantasy like this mental projection: surround ourselves with enough material goods and maybe we won't see the stinking mess outside the windows, if we are lucky enough to have windows.

But now, as I sit writing, over coffee, and remembering the cinematic motions as if witnessed from a discreet distance, I seek to lay the senses down one by one, writing in the winds of a red dusk, as if turning over slowly in sleep. Each movement of the hand revises a prior schema about this structure of exception in order to disrupt normalization. Exception results from the corruption of memories. The text I write, the text I write about, the text I read, the written text I receive describes the universe as exception, as an alien system for explaining the production of its own phenomena, a system to which humanity attributes the hidden operations of a deity that in this case elaborates itself through the physical processes of the natural world, processes impartial to the existence of humanity even though humanity remains unique in its ability to engage with such processes by virtue of being conscious. Unlike the "spirit" that realizes itself through a process of finite becoming, whose operation ultimately results in a transcendent condition of omniscient self-awareness, an absolute state of being without negativity, the deity realizes itself through a process of infinite becoming that never ends in a state of omniscient self-awareness, but continually generates negativity: by becoming myself I have become someone else.

Thus, on the threshold of our space, before an era of our own time, we hover between awareness of being and loss of being. And the entire of reality of memory becomes spectral. Each something is the celebration of a nothing that supports it. And the shadow takes up residence inside the world. And the shadow is a scar that will not soon be put off. Unchained animality, the chaos surrounding, can be mastered only by discipline and brutalizing. What we call life proceeds from a violence exerted from the outside on a lethargy. This violence is a madness we self impose. In madness equilibrium is established, but it masks that equilibrium beneath the cloud of illusion, beneath feigned disorder; the rigor of the architecture is concealed beneath the cunning arrangement of disordered violences. This violence locates madness in an area of unforeseeable freedom where frenzy is unchained.

I also make long cut-up prose poems using fragments of newspaper headlines and sub-headlines and pieces of type from advertisements.

Sleep, the merry

I can't sleep with
and also cannot sleep
rigid sleep
perhaps
physical falsity
bitter
sitting at the edge of a bed
this is not the point
all the troubles
earning a living without anymore
you know you are
I am replaceable
you don't need water
quiet
living near
this is a work in progress
I invite you to contribute
all words all humans
are you anyone that could be doing anything at this moment?