During the years when we knew each other, she told me about more than three thousand Indians, whom she had know either personally or indirectly. Even though she did not remember the names of all of them, she almost always knew their kin relations and thereby I could place them in their genealogies. Many of the three thousand appeared and reappeared in diverse situations about which she told me over the years and thus it was that little by little her culture acquired a sense that went beyond the purely ethnographic description and revealed different levels of what it had meant to be alive then and living as a Selk’nam. Angela spoke of one individual, then another, and another; in the context of the missions, their family life, the camps, their loves and vengeances, their combats, “Red Pig” and other White assassins, and the soul, kashpix, which separates from the body at the hour of death. She told me about the world before death existed, when the hoowin people of primeval times inhabited the earth. She recited myths that explained why humans exist, told me about the wise men and prophets, especially Alaken, Lola Kiepja’s grandfather, about the shamans and their trips to the moon, the “spirits” of the great ceremony called the Hain which were only men in disguise, about a crazy man who thought he was a guanaco, about women who died when they gave birth, about her last daughter Luisa and her son Victorio who died of tuberculosis in Buenos Aires. She often recalled our rides in the subway of Buenos Aires which she had pleased her so much when she visited me there for a month in 1972. The following is a simple example of and old Perl fork recursion that erupts briefly before dying. It can be run in any terminal window with Perl installed, including the Terminal application on any Mac computer:
perl -e 'while (print fork," ") { exit if int rand(1.01); }'
The first part, “perl -e,” simply evokes the Perl interpreter and allows a snippet of code contained within single quotes to be executed in-line. The code itself consists of a while loop with an exit condition that occurs with enough irregularity to make things interesting. Inside the while expression, “print fork” (concatenated with a printed space) does two things at once. It forks a new clone of the code, and also prints the output of the fork, which happens to be the process number. The result is an irregular montage of spaces and numbers, many of which appear roughly in numerical sequence since the kernel simply increments a counter when it assigns a new process number. In sum, the first part of the code furnishes the stylus with which to draw, while the second part throttles the code just enough to avoid crashing the computer. More firecracker than bomb, these snippets of recursive code produce generative textures using the terminal window. Minute variations affect the code, making it run differently each time. The processor speed, the number of other applications open, even the temperature of the motherboard will influence both the length and composition of the text. By slightly stressing the machine, but not crashing it, computer artifacts become visible as text. RSG-FORK-5.1 uses slightly more code. And how did this become a story about love? Because the lovers of K are suing the police: They entered into their various relationships with K unaware that he was not K. And K is suing the police because the police did not stop K, their employee, from falling in love in the course of his duties. Symptoms of love: firstly, the catastrophic inability to distinguish between love and lust, between observation and omen, between necessity and contingency. Later, the sense that it is provocative for the beloved to walk down the street, in the aura of; anything could happen in this dangerous situation. Feelings of disorientation. Feeling the duty to invent a new language in which to describe the beloved, inevitably getting stuck in the customary language, the conjunction of the worn-out old language and the unformed but necessary new language producing hideous mutations, purple prose. Wetness, slipperiness, not just in the anatomically predictable places but in the edges between one thing and another thing, this new edgeless conception of things making the vowels looser, the joints looser, loosening also any vestigial respect for “private property.” Leaving shops with your pockets full of free jewelry, with which to decorate yourself for the beloved. Or, under duress and for similar reasons, buying new clothes. Formal subsumption of love. The figure of the incognito recurs in romantic comedy, the fake lover, the lover in disguise; the practical joke, the elaborate trick, scenarios in which the trickster’s confidence becomes a weak spot, a gap in the clouds through which a real love appears in the guise of a fake. We find the rom-com’s mythic origin in Elizabethan drama, but these comedies of mistaken identity and role reversal predate the full institutionalization of love, or perhaps they arise at or prepare the fusion between courtly love and family life. Romeo and Juliet, cop and activist, German village girl and American GI, Soviet spy and British spy, man and woman. These loves are banned and celebrated because they simultaneously rupture boundaries and reveal a secret homogeneity. Famously, in Romeo and Juliet, transgressive love demonstrates that proper names (and their attendant categories) are both contingent and determinate; they have no “real meaning”, but nevertheless they form the iron pattern of a life. You felt that you could easily have been someone else, but you were not. And this is truly the ultimate reclining shower. Six water bars beat down in a choice of three preset pulsing beats: Balancing, Energizing or De-stressing. Island (KEN) is a state-of-the-art smart island with e-controls to regulate the flow. The hybrid project combines the social kitchen with the private bathroom. And it’s not just an installation but a performance piece as well. In the meantime, the smell of butter wafts from the stove. Crucially, however, the distinction between witches and cunning-folk is invoked in the process of proving it to be theologically and legally invalid. In laws such as the 1604 Witchcraft Act, and in pamphlets such as the 1645 Laws Against Witches and Coniuration, both sides of the distinction are subsumed within the form of legal contract. Witches and cunning-folk alike are hell-bound. What we discover, therefore, is not simply a shadow cast, by the interplay of an emerging and a residual economic logic, into some chance place within the culture. Rather, the emergence of witchcraft as a prohibited behaviour, inclusive of the deeds of cunning-folk, connected with the deeds of learned conjurers, but separable from the deeds of natural philosophers, contains a concentrated trace of the contradictions of nascent commercial society. A question is posed, in a hopeful tone, by the rise of commercial society: do the market forms which loosen our epistemological couplings to our neighbours also absolve us of responsibility for their lives? In the constitution of witchcraft lies the answer. The couplings are not merely loosened, but dissolved, yet the responsibility intensifies, and with it the sphere of the damnable expands. Not every commercial relationship is a social relationship, although the law may hold every commercial relationship to the same fine-grained standards as a social relationship, in the service of commercial imperatives. In the same way, the intimacies which witches enjoy with Satan’s familiars do not comprise an essentially separate kind of relationship with Satan, but rather provocative clarifications of any contractual relationship with Satan. A friend asks us to wish her luck. We get spam comments asking us how we manage spam. I think about how I’d like to wear boots all summer, so I google “Spring Boots” and “Sandal Boots.” These boots appear. I like them. I like almost all the “YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE” suggestions at the bottom of the page except the pair of very sexy sandal heels from Rebecca Minkoff. Probably this type of heel has a name, but I do not know what it is. I like the Ibiza Heel, the Hustle Boot, the Stair Bootie, the Canti Heel, and the Dream Bootie. I guess I like every Freebird by Steven shoe for sale at Revolve Clothing. I return to the article about gender bias in medicine and the ads are all from Revolve Clothing. I learn that many young women have cardiovascular health issues, but that our symptoms tend to be different from men. I learn that “In training, we were taught to be on the lookout for hysterical females who come to the emergency room.” This project is exhausting. Am I sad enough yet? Do I have to take a clonazepam yet? I don’t care what the New York Times says I will learn in my 40s. But I do care that “There is this humming in the air now like an open test to evaluate everything welling up in everybody.” To me, this calls to mind the image of a tuning-fork: a humming that evaluates or rather measures the other humming, 3000 people played this sequence and blew up the world every time. I mean, through an act of “renaming” you can create a “community” — but only if you have cheap labor. Tourists never fall into the burning ooze because they paid to be there. In several fan fiction accounts supergirl and batwoman hook up. The supergirl cape is short and does not snag. What thing do we mean doing? “Do I clash?” “I clash I clash” — pure Whitman. I do a lot of things I guess. I like laughing, movies and having fun. Do you like having fun? I’ve been here nine months and have no friends. I am just me! Also, I love glittery things, snowmen, and the color purple, autocrossing, fish keeping — salt and fresh. The Ordinary as a whole is in six sections; the sixth is a metrical and idiosyncratically modernized translation of St Paul’s Letter to Romans, the foundation, according to a tradition of interpretation stretching from Jacob Taubes to Badiou and Agamben, of a politically-emancipatory theology predicated on the rejection of law: whether this law be that of the Torah, the rule of the Roman empire (predicated precisely against the Jewish people), or of law more generally, as instrument of class and State oppression. In the section entitled ‘Economy’, individual poems are dated in pen and written on scraps of paper found on the streets of Oakland – advertisements for church services, housing forms, surgical procedures – “All waste also actually talks.” About the transformation of living substances to dead ones, the substitution of material labour and labourers by what Alfred Sohn-Rethel would call the ‘real abstraction’ of exchange, that which is given material form by its unconscious, lived basis. These are theological, or, let’s say, metaphysical concepts which are lived by and through: “we’re all walking around with theology in our mouths”; “Cash, I told Dana, ’s a negative eucharist.”
[Note: Sources: Anne MacKaye Chapman, “Angela Loij”, at Anne MacKaye Chapman - Research Institute for the Study of Man; Alexander R Galloway, “Fork”, at Alexander R Galloway, 26 Mar 015; Hannah Black, “K in Love”, at The New Inquiry, 14 Feb 013, via Anne Boyer, “hannah black: ‘Symptoms of love: …’”, at Anne Boyer, 26 Mar 015; “New Museum Installation Showcases Dornbracht Horizontal Shower”, at Tréndir, via Timothy Morton, “A philosopher makes salad while discussing hyper objects while a woman lies under the horizontal shower”, at Ecology without Nature, 25 Mar 015; Jo Lindsay Walton, “Thesis on Witches’ Cats”, at All That Is Solid Melts Into Argh, 25 Mar 015; K Lorraine Graham, “Delayed feed / It will be literal”, at Spooks by Me, 26 Mar 015, and as quoted in Allen Edwin Butt, review of Graham’s Terminal Humming, with bits by Butt, too, at Galatea Resurrects 16; David Grundy, and David Brazil, quoted in Grundy’s “David Brazil - The Ordinary”, at Shearsman]
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