Alan Sondheim – Birthday Poem + Philosophy, Simple, Pretention
Monday
In the year 5000, my birthday falls on a Monday, I won’t be around.
Somehow, this makes me unutterably sad, weeping.Our span is so short, we all know that, but this, this concrete
instance, tears through me. And I won’t make it, to be sure, past
2020…
February 5000
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Happy birthday Alan Sondheim.
Coming event..
ALAN SONDHEIM PRESENTATION AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
February 6th, at 7, at the Granoff Center (see below)
Broken World, Steerage
thinking through blankness, terror, and broken worlds
There is material from distorted motion capture employed in
virtual worlds; considerations of terror and genocide in terms
of anguish and the unutterable; phenomenology of blizzards and
whiteout; revrev ? live reverse reverberation or anticipatory
music; and practical-theoretical issues of gamespace/edgespace.Join Alan Sondheim for a talk and presentation at 7pm on Friday,
February 6 in Englander Studio, Granoff Center at Brown
University. This event is free and open to the public.
One more poem..
Philosophy, Simple, Pretention
Phenomenology doesn’t rhyme, all the time.
Philosophy in this form isn’t serious.
Aphorisms are always suspect, unpacking
revealing the dirty laundry of language.
You have to develop an argument and
neologisms help with their wayward vacuity.
Pictures are more suspect, and Wittgenstein’s
formulas appear to be the bones of an
irrelevant animal.
On the other hand, the formulas of physics
and cosmology contain an absolutely
untranslatable grain of truth, do you hear
that, Badiou?
Our place in the world is indeterminate but
that doesn’t interfere with description and
the latitude or epigenetic landscape of the
resulting deep sketching.
Violence threatens everything but not the
world, nor mathesis.
Violence is not violence until you are
physically touched by it, and philosophy
in this form, that of the witness, is always
serious and always correct.
Do unto others is senseless unless one
believes in the imperative.
There is nothing that can be _said_ about
cosmology.
A picture is the decay of the word; neither
mathematics nor mathesis are languages.
Mathesis and the world is closest to the
film which binds, not sutures, the viewer.
Meaning washes out of the aphorism; meaning
washes out the aphorism.
There is no point to decay.
On the phenomenological level, decay is
everywhere and inconceivable.
One can never explain oneself; and the
attempt to explain one’s writings just
increases the bulk of them.
Hence the mark is always and already the
same, every mark the same mark, except the
number; it is the number which may
function as the sign of violence, and the
word which becomes the diacritical mark.
Narrative never understands that thinking
is thoughtless.
The philosophical example is already lost
in thought.
Philosophy is what I am; writing is what I
do.