[-empyre-] setting fire to avatars, collapsing realities

[Alan Sondheim]

Should this go first to the body-Johannes-Birringer and then to the 
listserv (if such be the software), a form of indirect addressing? Is the 
body of Johannes Birringer receiving these words smoothly? I ask only 
because the element of the body as weight or pull has entered the dialog, 
only _as_ since the words here are weightless, although their carriers and 
data-bases are not. I keep going back to Clement Rosset, who I read only 
in part years ago to the effect that the real is 'idiotic,' which I quote 
far too often, but which means for me that it is just there, as mute
haecceity perhaps at best. The ground is the ground, ground up, as 
featureless as death and in the sense of materiality, the body is already 
dead, and in the sense of transformation, always alive. The states grind 
into each other; bump and grind have no other meaning than sweat and 
something felt; what goes bump in the night speaks nothing, and its sound 
is muted. So all dancers fall, fail, at the end, and their memorized 
movement is or is not captured from particular viewpoints, but not from 
the interior, what feels within and looks without. These can be dialed-in, 
in virtual worlds, objects turned physical, but they carry no weight. I've 
worked with such, watch them reach the edge of the game-space as the 
tumble across the sim, then disappear. Sometimes they're returned to 
inventory, sometimes not. This is playing out the game with its rules, the 
kind of virtuality everyone talks about today, talks about of course until 
they're dead. I'd say the ground isn't virtual because it doesn't speak; 
in this forum months ago I wrote about the unspeakability of untoward and 
numbing pain, often close to the curtain of death. The body sinks, and 
what then? Nothing, old tech software, and the interior/internal, spoken 
and thought world sinks as well as the body dies. The virtual, we might 
say, is among and for the living; the body, dead, is out of the gamespace 
entirely.

On the other hand, what we're not talking about, virtual particles and 
multiverses, holographic universes and black hole interiors, who knows? 
One can only hope to live on, in a perhaps drastically-altered cosmos, and 
perhaps we already are.

I would have liked to have heard the Finnish tunes -

(Btw I knew you would catch me up on 'infinity' - I should have said 
'inaccessibly high' instead.)