[-empyre-] Introducing Erik Ehn (from Erik Ehn))

[Alan Sondheim]

[picking up from yesterday... "Forcing a chaos to force a telos-precipitate
-]

This power survives as long as light remains in anticipation, and the public
is controlled by anticipation.

This is advertising as an end in itself ? all trailers, no movie.

*

Terror can be an outcome of spiritual experience? mad to have the experience
again, betrayed by the personal and the practical.

Building the dark. Stitching death. Making a Frankenstein society not for
the sake of the society, but for the sake of the wonderful mistake of it ? the
disaster we will pursue by means of our technologies, blessed (in our minds)
by prior experiences of grace. Building the dark, building in the dark,
engaging in the economies of frustration ? these our tides. Crusting our eyes
shut with cravings, and suffocating us with an induced fear of breathing.

*

But grace is not experience, finally.

To know, we are known.

We happen in the world as an electricity through its systems: the brains of
trees, the insulin of temperature. And the world happens through us as
electricity in our bodies; building patterns in us that habituate us to
readiness. ?Habits of readiness? is grammar; we have grammar first, and then
find language to fit it out with; experience finds synthesis in words. In
reciprocity: we throw our words out to the source of words (this is a way of
defining ?praise?); our language when perfect goes away- first to pure
experience and then to pure readiness. Similarly the world speaks persons in
the grammar of societies, not for the sake of persons or societies, but so
that the world may break apart to praise.

In alternative to this scary prospect (where fear = a sense of punctured
control without repair) we stop at our words; we don?t move them, we tether
them, hold our creations close, our temporary mnemonics, our shorthand (all
language is shorthand); adore our words, and make them portable in the form
of slogans. Porting slogans becomes our mission ? the definition of our
citizenship; our hands are always occupied with them, we have no other
function than to carry advertising.

In terms of scripts: we are writing into the ads for our writing. Our
ironies and glibness suggest what kind of art we would make if we felt like
it, but we don?t feel like it, because something hates me or has left me and
my fear produces a serum of anger that serves a biological need to defend
against feeling.