[-empyre-] Before the Law / control and cutting, stripped naked

[Alan Sondheim]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, Johannes Birringer wrote:

> is this not amazing.
>
> having lived through numerous hurricanes in Texas and the Gulf bay area, 
> I can sympathize with your excitement, the thrill, the rush, the relief? 
> i also, when in Houston during these events, felt the impending disaster 
> as intoxicating, dangerous, fatal, and yet (yet Katrina happened nearby, 
> very nearby, and it was awful) and yet, what is it. this "becoming equal 
> to the wound" we have been talking about?
>

- For me it's also one of the sources of art, an incredible and 
astonishing sense of _wonder_ - that the real surplus of the world is what 
it gives back to us, I almost wrote, and do write, _naturally._ I remember 
a conversation for WBAI between David Finkelstein and his interviewer, a 
pure mathematician - at one point David said, Do you know the difference 
between you and me? I'm fucking reality, you're masturbating. (David was 
one of the pioneers of quantum logic.) The idea is that cosmology, quantum 
mechanics, etc. is give and take with the real; it's seeing what's there 
in a fundamentally different way than pure mathematics. Of course this 
isn't really true - they come together implicitly entangled in so many 
ways - but the idea has stuck with me - What a wonder nature gives us! Not 
dangerous or fatal but intoxicating, because it just _is._

- Alan (yes, so many arguments against this, but it feels like this, 
coheres like this)