DIU 1 4 July 94 I have the same birthday as John Milton. Did you know that? So I don't have to write long poems about heaven & hell--everything's been lost in my lifetime --Eileen Myles Everything lost. We have the advantage of worldlessness & more. Even nothing is lost. DIU celebrates the emptiness. We don't have an idea. We don't have time or space. I or I cannot say it, but we don't have a noun. And I or I say it any way. We cannot make a _thing_. Everything could be lost because there never was any thing (you can lose only illusions). The man said, "No ideas but in things," and we laughed our heads off. There are no ideas, there are no things. We disprove Zeno's paradox that demonstrates the impossibility of motion by moving. We may be able to move so fast, like the bird in the cartoon, that we appear to appear along a length of dusty road that is time and space. The man said, "Go in fear of abstraction," and we are nothing but abstraction. Thus, we have destroyed everything. The lost everything was made of self-loathing. What a relief to be rid of it. The unconscious is empty. It was a boil Wordsworth and Coleridge lanced in 1798 and that kept spewing pus for nearly two centuries. The hidden topologies of the soul are revealed. Now the task is consciousness. Time is that which is always not itself. Time is nothing. We are time. We make events--not things--measuring by rhythms. This is how events happen, though there is nothing. We do not know the first thing. We do not know how to live without destroying the earth. You don't get to be somewhere just by showing up. The place must be constructed, and its compositions and concepts and correlations and technologies must be made up, not out of need (we do not need any thing we do not already have) but out of love of life. Our ignorance is of epic proportion, and it can be overcome only with an epic. The epic of the single body, however, will not suffice--the epic of Joyce, Pound, Olson, the epic of Whitehead, Lacan, Althusser, epics of single bodies. Homer was many (we can now know this for certain). No matter how I or I manage these events of knowing you are always another actor of my act. Exercise for today: rewrite the above paragraphs, substituting verbs for nouns. --Thus, Albert or Hubert THE SYLLABUS Proposals toward a syllabus for the required course at the Imaginary University, First Knowledges 100: Constructing the Earth. This course will undertake an in depth examination of John Ruskin's dictum, "There is no wealth but life." (Propose other readings and other dictums by email.) George Spencer-Brown, LAWS OF FORM. Heinz von Foerster, OBSERVING SYSTEMS. Gregory Bateson, STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF THE MIND. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION: THE REALIZATION OF THE LIVING. Robert Rosen, LIFE ITSELF: A COMPREHENSIVE INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE, ORIGIN, AND FABRICATION OF LIFE. Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, VALUING THE EARTH: ECONOMICS, ECOLOGY, ETHICS. Donna Haraway, SIMIANS, CYBORGS, AND WOMEN: THE REINVENTION OF NATURE. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? Gene Youngblood, EXPANDED CINEMA. Bruno Latour, WE HAVE NEVER BEEN MODERN. Robert Smithson, THE WRITINGS OF ROBERT SMITHSON. Arakawa and Madelaine Gins, TO NOT TO DIE. Charles Stein, ed., BEING = SPACE X ACTION: SEARCHES FOR FREEDOM OF MIND THROUGH MATHEMATICS, ART, AND MYSTICISM. Nathaniel Mackey, DJBOT BAGHOSTUS'S RUN. Jed Rasula, THE AMERICAN POETRY WAX MUSEUM: REALITY EFFECTS, 1940-1990 (forthcoming). Alice Notley, "Introduction," THE SCARLET CABINET. John Clarke, FROM FEATHERS TO IRON. FOUND POEM 4/26/94 TIMES UNION Top quark discovery a physics milestone It is the key to understanding time, matter and the universe The finding isn't likely to make a difference to everyday life --PJ Cecil Taylor, Reggie Workman, Rashid Bakr At the Village Vanguard 6/24 "This is not a question, then, of 'freedom' as opposed to 'nonfreedom' but rather a question of recognizing different ideas and expressions of order." --CT WATCHing Cecil Taylor's hands flutter over the 96 key runway of his Bosendorfer is like witnesSING the exorcism of a crab on speed. Stonewall withSTANDing, it seemed the elastic on New York's panties might snap before it could expand to take in one more umlaut of energy, then Taylor et al transformed the Vanguard into a microcosmic rewrite of the script of systems: Controlled convulsion might be the phrase to describe the epileptic precision with which Taylor lead the chase round Escher staircases of SOUND, with Workman sliding down banisters and Bakr grabbing an elevator to catch PACE. For an hour and a half without pause on the spider web line at the edge of an orgasm where numerical clarity and tumbling ecstasy tug at each other in antinomy & equilibrium. Its music as /secret physics of the blood/more so/ waterfall running backwards fish spawn streaks of traffic light, this, you understand, is ORDER/auto-da-fe. --BG air.txt radiostation wrpi 91.5 fm troy ny 30 June 94 1110-1200 Curtis Mayfield--"Move On Up|(Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below, We're All Going To Go"/Anthology Max Roach/Cecil Taylor--"Duets I"/Historic Concerts Study, study the mind of man-- to break a leg or stake a heart is not enough; you must flint the net & spark a lake of flame to BRIGHTEN THE CORNERS: O for the web to glow its own--a tome of objectivity! Yet we row, row, row the only boat we know-- sense of real, joy of blowing out the hatches. --RL : :: :: :: : Descriptions of an Imaginary University weekly (c)irculated by the Logic of Snowflakes, hypersidiary of We Press Please forward initialized or pseudonymed passages of lucid hallucinatory visions cultural recipes reading lists memos or to cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet