[-empyre-] Introduction--Deena

[Alan Sondheim]

On Tue, 16 Oct 2012, Deena Larsen wrote:

> 
> Thus the work is a complex and subtle exploration of pain--and uses links,
> navigation, etc. to explore the unsaid and unsayable. In MS 3.0, I also used
> tags to show how pain and suffering can be connected.  But I tried to
> balance pain with light--as despair has as many entries as love--for life is
> not always pain and suffering, but encompasses a wide range of emotions. 
>

Do you think the links themselves might be representative of cutting or 
incision - that the meaning they carry would have a hint of pain itself? I 
remember writing about links as a kind of breaking down of the diegesis of 
a narrative, for two reasons - you suddenly have a cut where you have to 
do something to proceed, something like moving a mouse, which can be very 
external to the immersive experience of narrative and the "world of the 
work" (Mikel Dufrenne), and that cut is often a jump-cut as in film, where 
the viewer ends up doing extra psychological work suturing the before- and 
after-scenes. There's also the idea that you're no longer in the world of 
the author, but you're in a world (partly) of your own making, which is a 
type of separation you don't get in real life, where you're always 
inhabiting your body.

That said, I find the idea of links as content fascinating - the artist/ 
choreographer Ursula Endlicher uses them as choroegraphic markers for 
example, to good and amazing effect/affect.

Finally, I wonder how one lives through this attention to suffering; I 
have difficulty doing so and want to try and move on eventually. And I 
remember Iris Chang, and think it's important in the context of empyre 
this month, perhaps, to look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Chang

Thanks, Alan