[syndicate] My Life at the Edge of the World

[Alan Sondheim]

My Life at the Edge of the World


Who set me adrift but my fathers and mothers, releasing non-existent
shackles, tightening the reins of no-horse. I meander among extractive
industries, worlds the poorer for them. My share is meager; I scratch
surfaces, dig into the abject muck of fires and desires. To date, I have
had enough to eat, but this is temporary; from date, I shall be eaten. Of
water, there is thirst, of food, there is hunger. This area has memories
of roads. This area is like any other. My life, at the edge of the world,
that's all.

What remains, what is not all, forms a culture, residue, forms a story,
theory, forms something to be said. The edge thins to non-existence; in
the absence of gravity, the worst that can be expected is cuts, fractures,
divisions. At the edge the only economics is that of want, beings are in
solitary, smeared, transformed; moving inwards, they're cauterized. Every
acceptance is cauterization, every process of acceptance is cauterization-
mechanics. At the edge hydraulic models no longer hold; what is sublimated
may not appear anywhere at all, comes forward frothing. The liquidity of
the edge is vascular, viscous, uncanny among collapsing divisions of
states of matter. Economies flow into negative space, arbitrary quantific-
ations, decisions beyond the Pale where doormen wait. Holes are breaches
are holes.

Life at the edge is insipid, Dostoevsky had it right, illnesses, livers,
spleens. Something's always wrong, something's gone amuck, that something
sure is something, is already gone, broken, splattered, sputtered, splin-
tered, spat. My life at the edge of the world garners the world, inscribes
the world with its broken edges, decathects the world with its buckets of
blood, disinvests the world with its poverties and suicides. At the edge
of the world there are no events, no non-events, no states, no operators.
At the edge of the world, no-name procedures of procedures, no-name
protocols of protocols, no-name processes of processes; no name is not
no-name, nor forgotten name, nor a-name, nor anomie, nor division and
construction by negation. No-name is left at the edge of the world where
my life is, where life is, skeins are skins, bones are borne. Only members
are dismembered, clubs are clubbed, puns seep, split spilt pees. Tropes
choke at the edge of the world where life is, life neither originated nor
dissolved, life was earlier and later, life was middled, muddled, and life
in the interior was harvesting, harvested, disenchanted. I'd write the
story of my life as this life at the edge of the world, but it would be a
story, and this is not a story but a claim, a claim from the edge - from
an edge without gates, roads, byways, vectors, paths. Unclaimed this edge,
unclaimed this life, unclaimed this world without edge.