<nettime> azure: 'death is a symptom not a disease.'

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

azure: 'death is a symptom not a disease.'

tonight i think: romanticism is a disease of death, not its symptom. my
thoughts crawl like maggots cleansing the brain of life. i release them,
they release themselves, don't go there. what descends is the violence and
fury of decay, the curtain that ceases on details, enlarges them until
memory collapses under the weight of futility. at the bottom of the social
lies the ash-heap, festering for a limited time at best. every statement
at heart desires life, protocol, exactitude, as if something were
accomplished, the world hammered back into shape. the secret of writing,
every statement mauls itself. i am a sensitive. i cannot forbear this as
human condition's nuance. but forbearance is swept away as well. this is
both the same old story and the only one. social networks collapse, it's
not one's life that fleshes before one's eyes, but the diminution, hacking
away, of the social. nothing is left but the flash which exits with a
thud. it's the failure of philosophy not to undermine itself this way, no
matter how weak, weak theory appears, no matter how many subjunctives,
it's gone before it arrives, nothing can revive it. already deconstruction
deconstructs nothing, becomes a distraught capsule of its own unraveling.
the existentialist project is its own formal reversal, phenomenology
talking the red patch or the computer screen's dull eye. every example is
a confounded, entangled, others. ours is a species listing to one side,
close to the breaking-point, intent on closure with insufficient time,
what crawls on my brain, what fleshes, crawls on yours as well, worlds
enough, unkempt detail, peripheral coagulations resisting the logical
light of day. the world goes away before it arrives, the world has gone
away before it arrived. it announces nothing and our anthropomorphic vault
has already crashed. death is a symptom of the omen of death, every set is
open, already foreclosed. what crawls in my mind will kill my sanity, the
presumption is that the rest of us have more than enough to spare. the
sane are masquerades, the insane cannot lift a stone verb. in between,
mobsters appear, what's left is the spoils. nothing moves as feynmann
diagrams shudder indefinitely, spoils seethe. unwatched, we're gone,
carelessly it moves.





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