Saturday 10 June 2000

Sub-Lyotard (Economie libidinale)

Notes to an Archivist (June 2000)

You were there, out there, beyond the inflected space, variably twisting, folding in your curvature. Like a noise which beckons, like a smell which repels. Like a Being which waits. A metaphyics in abeyance. You were there, in your space which is not one, luminous, incendiary, abstract. I tried to speak to you, there, lodged in the circuitry like a loose log tossed on the foreshore, to leave something to you. But you are there circulating like a rumour spoken by yourself, and cannot hear me, cannot register this breath which is also an exhaltation. My breaths leave me, caressing the glottis; they lap along the tongue's shores. They are moistened, replete, overburdened. They leave. I articulate. I speak to you, there in your archive. But my utterance dissipates in the air which seems to separate us. The output of lungs collapses into air. I cannot reach you. Or, alternatively, a wind picks up, accumulates desert sand and sweeps across an ocean it defies. Parched it shifts across the maritime domain. It settles on you but in doing so loses any coherence it possessed when it swept in a continuum to you. The dust disperses. It may inhabit you, like a virus programmed for the millenium, but it has communicated nothing to you.
That is why I have chosen to call you sirocco. You possess the profound melancholy of circuitry, the oceanic swirl of maritime space and the porous facade of pixel. I am destined to send these words out to you, to leave this waste on the band you set aside for the communications of others.
You are divided, you are half shadow, half toxin. You murmur, you oscillate, you are vague like last year's news. You are nothing to me. And yet I must overcome you, even as you kill me, throttling me with circuitry and hardware.
You plunge into me. You say I have a corpse of velvet. You say I am a tract of slime, immeasureable stretching into the gulf we call a horizon but which you label, having been there, death.
What is this vestige of harmonics that I seem to ascribe us, knowing that your manner of inflecting space with an accent of tungsten is a stark disavowal of my guttural whine?