Now this Season of the Poverty of Storms

Friends, this is a season of poor storms, quiet waters, quiescence in general! A look at Gray's Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Forecast will suffice, 5 storms named against the mean of 9.3, 13.5 named storm days against the mean of 46.1, and one hurricane against the mean of 5.7. Oil fills the waters, the wires are running smoothly, repeaters con- stantly meeting their obligations as packets scurry like rabbits about the Net. Friends, these are the latter days, when there has been no major hurricane of category 3 or above, compared to the mean of 2.2, and in spite of the 16 storms corralling all of us, now but a year ago, into believing Armageddon was at hand. Oil on the waters, nothing is at hand, and this is the delusion we create ourselves, as it is recor- ded in the Bardo Thodol, for there have been no major hurricane days, even though the mean is 4.5 overall, and all of this tallied since 1944. Need more be said? Our discomfort sleeps all the while, as desire roams the length and breadth of the Net, creating a sense of security, hardly false, but hardly able to ward off the Nether Days to come. Friends, here is the most telling statistic of all, the measurement of Hurricane Destruction Potential, with a mean of 68.1, and an observation of 1.7, just 1.7, which tells you in fact that Souls are at work, as it is written. And what is more true than this meagre passage I produce for your edification, that "You are now before Yama, King of the Dead." And here we have Yama straddling the Net, as I have foretold: "But again you have to deal with dream images, which you yourself have made, and which you project outside, without recognizing them as your own work. The mirror in which Yama seems to read your past is your own memory, and also his judgement is your own." You fill out the Bardo-plane with your own thinking and your own violations, your desires for murder, for pleasure-organs swelling your body until all thought ceases, for intercourse with every man, woman, and child, in this reality bound to illusion and sensation. You fill out the Bardo-plane, which is the Net, and the Net comes back to haunt you, catching the ghost which is your own, and this is yourself cast upon the quiet waters. As I have told you, without your presence, there is no Net, no cyberspace in which to dwell; your writing is the space and the dwelling of it. Friends, it is not the hurricane or the eagle which is the harbinger of truth, but the humming-bird and soft wind, for the telling of it is the reading of it, and who can but seek shelter in a storm? The days, the quiet days, to come, fear them the most, speak within them, and remember with Pogo, now traveller on the Bardo-plane, that we have met the enemy, and he is us. Let us pray for the storms to come.

On My Future

I want to think about my future and someday I will have children. But when I look at photographs that my grandparents have I don't recognize anyone and I don't expect other people coming after me to recognize me and they will spit on my grave. But people will not walk around so much because they can look into their computer at home and that will give them all they will ever need and they will die I am sure very young and dreaming in their head. I will not be one of them. Later the machines will be smaller but they will not be that small be- cause people will have fingers and also will speak to them.

I will not say to you that there will come a time when there will be no people but just machines but Claire says so and says the machines will rule everything but there will be no need to bring things and stuff to the machines so it will be just as if the machines weren't there. They would let us alone and we probably wouldn't see them.

But I think that even those machines will rust away like cars and then even the rust will go and a few people will be out shooting around the stars, but then not so many as people think now, because how much room can there be. And I think that after a while the air will change and people will get sicker. And then there will be atoms and things that crawl through you and fix you up, but what purpose, say I, without that which God has given you, which is the beautiful world around you. But then there will be new animals and always something to look at.

But I wonder even after the animals and the dust and the atoms, what will the future bring? And I think that it will bring a vast landscape filled with skittering rocks beneath harsh winds and solar flares and< yes, there will still be life and mindfulness, freed from the violent prison of the hard hard world throughout most of its becoming, now, now elsewhere, chanting elsewhere, nor hidden in the grievous pores of sand nor captured against the darkling shadows of nocturnal bliss canopying the unfettered orb of once the planet earth

     No, aye but for the thing of it, whisper of lads and lasses, the
green green of it all, the green that once had been
   disputations
dark foraging
        the shunt of mind hovered
                broken from the red moor ravaged
        against the dream of a sun
memory of yellow
 aeons, the tossed mast, laughter
        the which
grain turned against its shadowing
  covert, lesser degree
   before the splintered thought
         thin-shaft
in this forgotten language

Notebook Entry

On September 23, 1998, several small atomic devices were discharged in the following cities: Dublin, New York, Oran, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Beirut, Jerusalem, Los Angeles. A radiation belt was visible for several nights thereafter, and ground levels rose world-wide by 212%. The death toll has never been determined; including the resulting cancers, it can be assumed in the neighborhood of 75-78 million. The pattern of explo- sives has never been accounted for. The world was going through a long- term crisis of denationalizing, which began with the breakup of the former USSR; it is speculated that the material necessary for the bombs came from Siberian sources.

The Internet was heavily disrupted for several weeks; due to the redun dency of its backbones (some of which had just been implemented), it functioned as an alternative communications system during the aftermath. An odd consequence of the disruptions was the immediate increased number of "hacks," or computer breakins/breakdowns, which died down only after several months.

No demands accompanied the detonations, and no groups took responsibil- ity. Clearly, there was high-level organization behind the slaughter; the devices all went off within twenty minutes of each other, universal time. The coordination may have utilized the Net, but there were no functioning sites, for example, in Oran (a town described by Camus). Like a plague of flying saucers in a grade B film, the impact of the ex plosions went far beyond loss of life. In fact, it was dearly hoped that the world would finally come together in a siblinghood of humanity, working as one for the pure and perfect peace that was so surely at hand. But it was also recalled that the breakup of the former Cold War environ ment had also appeared to signify the increasing production of peace, and nothing of the sort occurred.

Some of the post-generation-xers speculated that young men always need to set their goals high, and what could be higher than slaughter, in which a division is clearly made within the fabric of civilization: you are or are not dead, for example. They argued that life is defined by death of course, and more, that war and terrorism always create horizons of death, an exciting place to live in half-life, which is all we have been grant ed. They saw terrorism as an edge which defined them, because it was an edge of action and activity, an edge even of artificial intelligent agents which could roam the interstices and courses of the Net itself, on the prowl for one another. They believed that the world was ruled by chaos in the form of size queens, young bucks measuring their penises in a contest which began at least four million years ago when upright men were visible shaken by the appearance of upright men and women.

They philosophized that the pacific or peaceable kingdom or queendom had no boundaries whatsoever, nothing to test themselves against. Pounding their spears into the ground, they required the construction of writing to parade what they had learned, and durable materials for the leaving of records to their posterity. They demanded further implementation of the Net for the disemenation of their wildest dreams and desires, insis ting that this specific form of aggression, which included chest displays and increased pounding, was gender-inherited, part and parcel of each and every male, no matter how peaceful they seemed, clothed in the benign forces of post-USSR civilization.

Some women argued in return that nothing was gender-inherited, and that this particular gauntlet transcended considerations of sexuality. Thus in turn they argued that size queens belong to all, that it was not a matter of any sort of demographic preference, but that just to speak was already to do true warrior violence to one another; even silent signalling would determine the course of a battle in ancient times.

Of course the majority of men and women were silent on these and other issues, concerned as they were with getting on with life or tending the walking wounded. Among themselves they said they simply did not feel safe any longer and would no longer feel safe as long as they lived. Later there were rumors that a new series of detonations would occur somewhat closer to the beginning of the third millennium, but there were also rumors that there would be no causal linking between the slaughter and the approach of the occidental new year's day. We continue to hear these rumors now, and are writing them to you, so that you may be aware that something new and awful may be about to occur.

One Million Years in the Future

Noise.[1] Huddled air.[2] Molecules.[3] Tan(tan(tan(tan(tan_x)))).[4] The sound of weaving.[5] Each atom has exploded.[6] Information billowing.[7] Carapace.[8] The shift of serrated edges. --------------the cliff

[1].Ejaculations of sound. Vortices, edges turbulent, roll against the presence of obdurate material. Sub-vortices, borne upon the shear, resonate in shrill wavering tones. Nothing is sine. Broken and polished in ellipsoidal shapes or fractured. Most of the same. [2].Oxygenated, singed or burned dust. Leverage towards the ground. Laminar erasures of firestorms. Scuttling. [3].Wave-organelles, floatations. Compressive immobilities, tailored above and below. Stars not on your life. [4].Enfolding resonance. And what would be the intensity of all reason? Splayed upon the interior of the recursive tangent, everything. So that a fast-forward or backward feed. What would be the presence of space and time? _Not on your life._ [5].Occasionally a serrated shaft or wheel. Now that reason is a black hole, the thing threads a knot, knot threads a thing. The memory of material might have been.

[6].From weight. Tangential imaginary. Burned through pharoah catalyst, tethered wave. If a whisper: _everything is a natural kind._ The ending: _everything is a natural kind._ Tangential imaginary recursion. [7].Noise. Supra-vortices across stream and front alike. Here would be every syllable. Foam-flecked scudding sloped debris gathering. Memory of the pebble. Memory of the indentation of the pebble. Grain. [8].Scuttling of identity, insect transgression. Sexual unraveling in the surplus niche. For the most part carriers of molecules, exploding atoms, tethered waves. [8].From the far corners they come, names beyond them, finding the desolate continents of shattered planets, moons' eerie face-offs with solar heats, scraggled metamorphoses. Infestations, tailed. Stars? Not on your life, folded against matter. [8]._gTer-ston_ "dByings-phyug Ye-s'es-mtsho-rgyal, the mistress of all mysteries, had been gathering the Pronouncements (_bka'-ma_) by seizing them through the ability of not forgetting anything. [9].Grinds to a halt. Huddled air, the enormous entity. Disappearance of _the._ _Dissappearance of_ the: _everything is a natural kind._ The ending: disapperance of _the._ Slips, shudders, falls, skimmers, stops. Doesn't know it.

CMC DISEASE, 2008

Abstract: CMC (Computer-Mediated-Communication) is a classified disease in which the prosthesis of ego/libidinal relationships becomes trans formed through the interpenetration of terminal scroll and internalized projection/introjection psychoanalytical processes.

Symptoms: Reality scroll and echo; a certain numbness of the arms and legs; the usual carpal-tunnel syndromes; static hyperactivity; talking- past [indeterminate eye-focusing off-screen]; nervousness and insomnia; quasi-psychotic displacement of real-life responsibility; often general ill-health and pallor. Initial Findings: Through recent work of Donald (_Origins_) and others, including a generalized aetiology stemming from theories of incorpora tion and transitional objects vis-a-vis Piaget's manipulative childhood strategies and Winnicott's work, it is now acceptable to consider the conscious and preconscious processings of the neural apparatus as both internal and external. Any seeming necessity for external stasis (food, drink, heroin) may be considered positively or negatively addictive; anorexia, for example, is a postive addiction for food, since nourishment is a necessary and therefore negative addiction. The _external_ process ing associated with the neural apparatus consists of three things: stor age, or external memory which is the primary focus of the processing; manipulation, which is the organization and reorganization of storage, including new inputting and outputting (modelled in general by matrix algebras); and interfacing between internal and external. Our analytical target has been the last; the interfacing presents instances of a double addiction, first, to the flicker-rate and obseqious nature of the screen itself, and second, to the temporal reality constituted by CMC.

Ia The flicker-rate. The screen refreshes at a rate of approximately 30 frames/second; with an interlaced field, this occurs at 60 fields/second. At low intensities, this is acceptable for one or two hours' duration; at high intensities (such as might be found in an office situation), the result is flicker which may be responsible for both pre-migraine light displays and addictions. Note the frequency is four times that of the standard accepted for epilepsy.

Ib The obseqious nature. The screen is _internally illuminated,_ and in a Windows or other all-over environment, presents a diffuse wide-area light source. This is clearly reminiscent of the hearth; indeed, the home computer environment has already moved _away_ from traditional desk organization towards a hearth-like framework. The user sits at a range >from 30 to 80 centimeters away from the screen, and the usual clutter of the desk is often reduced by up to 75%. In other words, like the hearth, the computer environment is isolated from the rest of the room, and yet it provides a focus and articulation-point for the user. Like the hearth, as well, the user faces the wide-area light source during communication. Finally, the hearth has often been considered the source of _house-hold gods_ and the terminal, by virtue of its simultaneous impersonalization (hidden operations, neutrality) and personalization (instant response to the input/output of user demands as well as: a. personalizing of the software screen environment, and b. personalizing of CMC inputs and outputs); the double connotation of "magic and mystery" contribute to its overall addictive power.

II But the _temporal power_ constituted by CMC is of _critical import._ In most CMC communications, an inordinate and unprecedented number of posts may arrive on a daily basis. This basis even follows a circadian rhythmic pattern, increasing (as does private telephony) during the mid- evening hours. CMC, however, is always accompanied by _delay_ within which certain elements of masochism and power are brought into play. These are the same elements which are operational in traditional non- chemical addictions. For example, the other may or may not reply; there is always an _intensive personalization_ at work on this level (see Ib). Again, one may always sign-off, kill, or delete the other's messagings _before_ their presence on the screen - and there are all sorts of flaming "hit and run tactics" that can be deployed. The anonymity of the screen, in addition, creates quasi-psychotic sites of power and "occupa tion," within which the real is always already rewritten, and the used or "virtual subject" rewrites, continually, himself or herself. And as we know from other evidence, this sort of compulsive repetition is at the heart of both addiction and obsessive neurosis, and their intertwin ing. So to sum up here: The temporal power aspect has s/m components; it creates simultaneous conditions of power (i.e. kill, flame, sign-off) and revelation (i.e. love, sex, secrecy-revelations behind the veil of apparent anonymity).

III A third aspect of CMC must be mentioned in passing a reconsidera- tion of the _intensive personalization_ of IIb. There is throughout CMC the potential for "customizing" the computer environment, including of course the nature and contents of the external data bases. So CMC con- structs a preminent site for the development of a narcissistic symptom ology _in the guise of communicative strategies._ The presence of the hearth; the ability to reveal/communicate secrecies; the ability to talk intensively on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis _with the same screen application and appearance_: all serve to deepen the addictive potential and addiction itself, once it has been established at the site.

Treatment: It is too early to speculate on treatment, but standard with drawal strategies, including b-mod, may be employed. There are, as of yet, no twelve-step programs.

Epidemiology: CMC is spreading widely; one reason, at least at this juncture, to avoid treatment is to assume that the disease is a _condi tion_ or natural evolution of (sociobiological) human behavior. From this viewpoint, CMC is not a disease to be treated, but a dis-ease to be accommodated. Certainly, barring unforeseen war and other disasters, by the year 2050, CMC in one form or another, including virtual reality (VR) will be commonplace. By then, this and other addictions will be the social norm, leading us to speculate: _Addiction is the standard model of human subjectivity._

Final note on addiction: By this we mean that thinking and repetitive be havioral patterns (including those generated by the autonomic nervous system) are components of addiction; and that just as external storage media are becoming part and parcel of human cognition, so heroin and other addictive chemical substances are becoming increasingly necessary to human survival. It is become harder to draw the lines _between_ ad dictions, all of which possess often-ineffectual twelve-step and other withdrawal programs. To assume addiction as a natural-evolutionary con sequence of the species seems the best approach at this juncture in time.

Alan Sondheim for the staff at Telcom Disease Control Center (TDCC). 4/18/2008

FOR RENT IN THE FABRIC OF TIME

Jagged lightning cut across the enormous cosmos. Novas winked on and off, collapsed into black holes, star systems dissolved in their wake. Could you speak of star-debris, detritus, spanning the galaxy? No one spoke in the cold; no one ever would.

If she could, she would have spoken of economy, of the economy of planets and quasars, the economy of bright and dark nebulae, organic molecules shuttling back and forth in space in cyberspace. She would have spoken of bondings so large you could hardly span them with the aid of a wide-field telescope, and there were no telescopes in those days. And she would have you follow the string of dark matter, leading nowhere and everywhere at once, impervious to gravity, its master.

She would have rented you a star, and it was hard to tell what the cur rency would be, hard or soft.

She would have asked you to soften, in fact, what it was hard to tell, soften cyberspace, the great floppy. She would have told you that the great floppy could get along fine without you, thanks a lot, that it didn't need so much thought, that thought was only getting in the way. She would have told you about the void of cyberspace and about the great void out there in the midst of the dark matter strings, collapsing stars, hysterias of black holes spewing radiations, rings, rings, jets everywhere in the dying universe. She would have gone quiet, as they say, gone quiet, and you would hear the cosmos and your own heart beat ing and you might confuse them if you were lucky. She'd beg you to stop just for an instance, stop the writing, the addiction, flames burning nuclear nothings, quantities of thoughtless matter so huge they defy description. The sublime is inert, dumb, exhausted; the sublime works only through the construct of the face of death, the burial of the organic in an unknown or anonymous stratum. The sublime, she said, is when the great floppy isn't the great floppy, but is a burial ground or the lack of a memorial, it was all one and the same. And she added that the great floppy isn't one and the same, at all, but is always different/indifferent. She added that anything more would add nothing, that the void was inside and outside -

That we're blown bubbles on the face of the void; penetrated by empti ness, our thoughts skim surfaces of surfaces, nonexistent, penetrated themselves. We are ghosts, skimming the edge of the abyss, don't you know, nothing more or less, ghosts who have rented the void in the fabric of time, and our lives are inconsequential payment. She would have comets and stars in her hair, in the guise of a poem.

Blown bubbles, rent through and through, emptied sacks temporarily deploying molecular flows, identifications, rejections, great hollowed o's of language, thinned leaps like wires dissolving before unknown destinations ...