[syndicate] In response to the singing of death, repertoire, life-in-death, digital

[Alan Sondheim]

iii

In response to the singing of death, repertoire, life-in-death, digital
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnzPy6SfvYo (both small)
or looped http://www.asondheim.org/faceoff3.mov (better resolution)

Death doesn't become a song; the song is prior to death. The threshold
which lays poetics to rest perhaps, something Auschwitz clearly didn't do,
is that - at least for me - of everything we might hold dear - that is,
the wild, the compassionate, survival with grace. It's hard to visualize
the catastrophe around the corner, when we associate catastrophe literally
with sudden transformation, war, trauma - not this slow rise of tempera-
ture, or the picking off of animals one by one. We react as if it were
another turn or fear of the apocalypse, i.e. 'we've heard it all before' -
as if this means it's not there now, we're in a permanent state of crying
wolf. But animals literally on their last legs have heard it as well, time
and time again, and still it comes. I'm at a loss for the poetics here,
just as in I think Parmenides, Socrates was at a loss when muck, mud, was
brought to the foreground in the discussion of ideal forms.

Within the digital, within the idealized digital, there is no in-between -
either here/there, or 0/1, or whateverx/whatevery - the rest of the world
is held at bay behind the walls of a potential well sufficient to permit
communication in the small - i.e. to permit communication. One might say:

within the liminal, the digital doesn't exist -
the analogic exists only within the liminal.

Aphoristic, but accurate, perhaps nothing more needs to be said, or what
else might be said might be of or within an/other register.