from the viper waters of Phthongos (editions Woods Hole) D I U 28 late july, 1995 Throes of _The Thousand-Sided Dice_ "...the PREMONITION IN LANGUAGE of the unknown, vaster world - that world of which the physical is but a surface or skin, and yet which we ARE IN, and BELONG TO." (Benjamin Lee Whorf - "Language, Mind and Reality") *the k-dice* "Desiring to expand the already impractically large English language, Allegra Sloman and Jeff Rivett were moved to research/write a program which uses a thousand prefixes and a thousand suffixes from a variety of English feeder languages (with thumbnail definitions) and tosses them together to create 1,000,000 new words. Of these words, approximately 10,000 are useful or amusing. Most of the rest merely need the human circumstance to render them fit for use." (aers) This is the domain of the patanormal. The metanymph, momentarily apprehended, out of breath and hair in disarray, with a kind of divine nonchalance peculiar to semi-autonomous mythic entities, flings the phonemes into the voluble air. a thorny wisdom [acanthosophic] self, same, self-induced formation [autoplasm] time seed [chronospore] world dissolving [cosmolytic] contrary course [enantiodrome] within moving [endomatic] to tell stories about a twining (of tellings) [fabuplex] ring visible, evident [gyrodelic] over, beyond writing [hypergraphic] between, within, connected with (or pertaining to what is expressed in the root word) [interary] voice, sound, speech, a turning [phonotropic] stream, an accented syllable [rheotonic] art, skill, to know (name) [techgnomic] the sea turning, twist(s) [thalassostrophic] *metaculous as glass (which see)* These dice are diaphonic, memantic and mysterious. An extension of the cut-up method of Burroughs/Gysin to the words them-selves...to create imaginary or possible realities...the subtle perturbations caused in this reality (dare I say?) already. It is difficult to estimate the rate of diffusion. The effect moving backward in time, in particular, poses a nearly insurmountable problem. ("Duration is the transformation of a succession into a reversion. In other words: THE BECOMING OF A MEMORY." - Alfred Jarry, "How to Construct a Time Machine") A recent example will suffice. A toss of the thousand- sided dice just last week produced the word _cyberpunk_. I hypothesize that _this_ was the origin of the word. How, then, to calculate the relative rapidity with which _cyberpunk_ moved through time to saturate the logosphere. Similarly, the words _internet_ and _postmodern_, which popped up beside each other in one unlikely run of the dice a few months ago...and what of _'pataphysics_, which has yet to appear in my stochastics - who is, or will be, responsible? Perhaps the encrypted origin of language _itself_ resides in this true future of total understanding. The sudden emergence of the word from mumbles and moans, mirrored in the bubble-sort. As the datastream bends into a waterfall and the k-dice play in the wake, frolic in the foam of the phenomenal. I glance over the netscape...vague memory of a machine of some sort or mosaic of connections...a device of polybolic attraction and doubtful significance. I return to light-pen and scanner and attach myself to the work at hand. Definition lurks. This is the remains to be done. Allusive, elusive, archaic labyrinth of possibility. The naming of the imaginary. Contradictory and arbitrary, litany of _maybe_s, making paraphrase. --djd THESES FOR A *NEO-LUDDITE MILITIA FIRST INSTALLMENT (if possible, try to listen to Nirvana's _Nevermind_ while reading text) Ok, it's 1995 and this is the deal people: if we love the earth we will realize that it is diseased and that this is draining us, psychologically. We are becoming more and more psychotic, we want to recite the dictionaries and memorize the T-cell counts in our arterial streams, we have a neurotic (and at times, contradictory) compulsion to eat certain foods: meat and its by-products, salt and sugar. We crave things that we think will enable us to view/feel reality. _Reality_, here, seen as a notion of _help_/self-help and that what we need is macrobiotic, molecular bouncing (and language-smashing) in a huge way. We are/were partially destroyed by religious wars and emotional earthquakes. We are/were completely devastated by witch-hunt inquisition/conversions. We were/are affected by torture and attempted genocidal hatred, fear and more hatred. We continue to live in negative molecular movement, felt, still, from centuries ago. We could agree with the Creation Spiritualists--hiding out in their little huts nationwide--in that, hate has become our worst enemy and biggest roadblock towards (please do not gasp) _peace_ and _love_. Why is it that the sixties-to-early- seventies era is usually touted as some crazed love/drug/orgy-fest that served no purpose? Why is it that this particular era is given a sense of degradation because people actually said words, _peace_ and _love_? Often, these words are considered juvenile or un- intellectual. Hatred begins with the language and what we decide to include as the sacred and the profane within language. Music seems (only seems/a chimera) to perpetuate the illusion of embracing the feelings of un- intellectuality, i.e. peace, love, women, _poetry_ (in many forms), challenging communities, or many manifestations of these. It (the hate-language) attempts to aid in music's perpetuation of illusory _positive- language_, however, only through controlled sound/visual image bites. It lies within controlled hearing/seeing/frequency space, i.e. the car, on the radio at work, on stereos at home, headphones on personal stereos, computers, and more. Sure, there is _live_ or _presence-music_, i.e. concerts, gatherings, instrument circles--these could be examples of the _positive-language_ and could very well be angelic instances of _reality_ (or understanding necessary psychosis), and yet these too fall under (or are forced under) the mantle of hate-control. Perhaps we rely on this control to help us forget _peace_ and _love_. We/I?/It? believe that if we dismantle parts of language, such as omitting all vowels, nouns, pronouns, parts of grammar, that we have in some way affected/effected a meaning or a result. Perhaps on the surface this has happened, for in classroom grammar, we are given a set of surfacia rulings or language legislation from which to determine experience. *(This diatribe however dictatorial it may appear is not a manifesto, as such, nor a militant militia statement, nor an ideological contruct to rear one's children by, nor a bomb threat, by any stretch of the grammatical, theorectical, or physiological imagination). But let us get back to psychosis--via language, and hence, the diseased planet/mind/body/housepets. A psychosis, according to our American dictionary, is "a severe mental _dis-order_, characterized by (the) deterioration of normal intellectual functioning and by partial withdrawal from reality" (American Heritage second college ed.). Now, the problems or enlightening aspects, of this definition: notice that psychosis can only be _characterized_. Psychosis is also prefigured as a _dis-order_, seeming to elicit an "a priori" Cartesian sense of innate _order_ in one's brain--which has been disrupted (apparently, disruption is not innate?). Another problem: how have we (science/psychological testing/technology/statistics) determined a basis for _normal intellectual functioning_? What is quite surprising, and all contained within a juicy defintion, is that we have somehow accepted the facialized (fascile-ized) implications of a basis and a _meaning_--inherent, albeit, within this world. How did this happen? Or how does this continue? It certainly makes the idea of hate within language seem all too accessible and understandable in its perpetuation--cheaply followed. In reading about Hitler in the May 1, 1995 issue of _The New Yorker_, we realize that we must work hard at understanding the seemingly un-explainable hatred and evil of the Fuhrer and all of his horrific deeds. Many theories abound, as to the hows, the whys; the politics of baby-killing, attempts at genocide, and more. Is this hate-phenomenon really difficult to explain or occluded when we read the definition of _psychosis_? We have set up a language that in turn has made it significantly easier for the dictatorial spirit to float around the minds of the populace. When we realize the _poetics_ (_poetics_ should be taken with a grain of reductio ad absurdum salt, here) within language we can begin to rend the dichotomous position of _a priori normalcy_. Hitler certainly was a product of the very hate- language of his own mind via schools, culture, the world and perhaps even Charlie Chaplin. The populace continues to live within Hitler's same chimeraic language-existence but we should realize the implications and the _importance_ we have (only) _placed_ upon language. There is nothing behind, above or beyond the term _normal_; nothing lies beneath the grammatical grave of _characterized_; for _characterized_ is dead, it is the ghost of language-hate or non-presence. We cannot continue to enjoy watching this specter's performances upon the necrotized stages of our Sega Genesis constructions. These stages may be destroyed, as in the case of the machine some time ago, and yet, it will be much easier to eliminate these curtains of chimera versus a ton of steel. --Capt. Swing THE LITERATI OF SAN FRANCISCO by Edgar Allen Poe NATHANIEL MACKEY I am not sure that _Mackey_ is not the greatest of poets. The uncertainty attending the public conception of the term "poet" alone prevents me from demonstrating that he is. Other bards produce effects which are, now and then, otherwise produced than by what we call poems; but Mackey an effect which only a poem does. His alone are idiosyncratic poems. By the enjoyment or non- enjoyment of his "Song of the Andoumboulou," or of the various parts of "Mu," I would test anyone's ideal sense. There are passages in his works which rivet a conviction I had long entertained, that the _indefinite_ is an element in the true _poiesis_. Why do some persons fatigue themselves in attempts to unravel such phantasy- pieces as "Ohnedaruth's Day Begun"? As well unweave the "_ventum textilem_." If the author did not deliberately propose to himself a suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning, with the view of bringing about a definitiveness of vague and therefore of spiritual _effect_--this, at least, arose from the silent analytical promptings of that poetic genius which, in its supreme development, embodies all orders of intellectual capacity. I _know_ that indefinitiveness is an element of the true music--I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision--imbue it with any very real determinate tone--and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exaust it of its breath of faery. It now becomes a tangible and easy appreciable idea--a thing of the earth, earthy. It has not, indeed, lost its power to please, but all which I consider the distinctiveness of that power. And to the uncultivated talent, or to the unimaginative apprehension, this deprivation of its most delicate grace will be, not unfrequently, a recommendation. A determinateness of music is sought--and often by writers who should know better--is sought as a means to wisdom rather than rejected as foolishness. Thus we have even from a high authoriy like Prof. Mackey, attempts at a _stipulation_ of music. Who can forget the silliness of certain portions of his _Bedouin Hornbook_? What man or woman of taste must but laugh at the interminable drums, trumpets, blunderbusses, and cowry shells? "The insensate rhythm," writes Mackey's musician N., "into whose order we'd been inducted maintained neither a directly dialectical nor a directly diametrical but an oblique centrifugal relation to the metronomic center whose initiatic split between `bottom' and `top' now seemed so remote." The word "initiatic" describes well a quality of music Mackey's fiction _strains_ to attain, but which his verse quite carries easily, as a boat does its wake. Mackey's prose abounds in minute tonal lapses sufficient to assure me that--in common with all poets living and dead--he has neglected to make precise investigation of the principles of rhetoric; but on the other hand, so perfect is his instinct for the rhythms of speech, that like the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk, he seems _to see with his ear_. Professor Mackey is nearing 50; of the slender build and medium height, skin a warm brown; hair short and eyes cat-like, alert. He moves with a princely gait and his countenance expresses sensibility and benevolence. He converses slowly and with perfect deliberation. Teaches at U.C. Santa Cruz, where he is well known for his radio show, Tanganyika Strut. Mr. Mackey never appears in public without doffing a characteristic little cap, no small number of which he appears to have collected. His magazine _Hambone_ is scrupulously edited, a rare occurrence these days. A fine critic. He is married--to the French scholar Pascal Gaitet. The Last Days of the White Race Radiofree North America, 27 July 1995 *** all passages from "The Aerialist Narratives," _Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In_, E. Roberson (Iowa, 1995) *** In like manner the entire society remains up in the air black unaffirmed mirage a mountainous range teetering on its own upside down peak denying what it's risen of (I, III / Heading: The Landing) 5 simply because we have forward facing us in which we see these things 6 the beach grain by grain moving the length, walking the length of itself (I, VI / Cape Journal: At Sand Pile) We don't take the road as a way, but as a door for its shortness. (II, III / Heron Riddle Flashback) Up on black mountain a child will spit in your face. (III, I) we drown together in our living to drink from this bone (III, VI / Handed the Rain) hit in the head by the moon no one can take the stone of that light out of your human skull no one can tell (III, VIII / Ask for "How High the Moon") Playlist, WDIU (Imaginary Radio), Sandy Rock, 27 July 1995 Cesaria Evora / "Xandinha" / Cesaria Evora Maria Da Fe / "Ai Jesus" / Fados Leroy Jenkins / "Monkey on the Dragon" / Themes and Improvisations on the Blues Giuseppi Logan / "Rechid Saturday" / More Hadj M'Hamed Elanka / "Ya Ahl Ezzine Elfassi" / Le Chaabi Vol. V - Barry Guy and the Now Orchestra / "Witch Gone Game 11/10" / Study - Witch Gong Game 11/10 - The Hsaing Waing Orchestra / "Hsaing Waing" / Birmanie: Musique dart Parker - Guy - Lytton / "Identity" / Imaginary Values Charles Gayle Quartet / "Always Born" / Always Born The Reggie Workman Ensemble / "Ballad for silf" / Altered Spaces Never read your own shit, because it stinks-- the recipe is too involved for it to flow so whene'er we sit intent on hatching answers for the Sphinx like butterflies cocoonless from the knit brow of a carpet-bagger's errant moth or Cretans lying in a Theban broth innoculated by Harmachis's spit. But O! the stylus beak of distant Thoth pecks grains of hunted gold from chaffless script in vain; and from the ravenous crypt quoth "Never mind" the courteous cobalt blue- haired Averill, armed with lettering clipped from a cookbook dry Van Wettering knew. --BaFeBiGoCuByCaFeNiL Descriptions of an Imaginary Universe sponsored by the logic of bioluminescence cf2785@cnsvax.albany.edu