A Question Concerning Video Games

On the question posed
to me: what do
poetry and video games
share in common...
should I answer:
information? Words,
language forms, as first
informed, the rest,
as Zukofsky notes in his
"A - 12," risk:
"A poetics is informed
and informs -- / Just
informs perhaps --
the rest a risk." What is
the "rest" of "risk"
after informing?
Is it the "recklessness"
(a risk?) of the musician
Zukosfky also speaks of
in Bottom? The master
mastered by music
in virtuosic playing?
To "master"
form form masters you.
We are in-formed,
we are mastered. This is
where "the work,"
the value
of the work comes from.
The work's vitality,
perhaps, also.
To inform: for there
to be "basic" / simple
forms / "structures"
for creation; tendencies of
composition, generation.
"A - 12" is a poem
of generations in touch
or informed of
Stein's own "makings of":
"Or: remember,
G.S. begins / "Making of
Americans" / With
a quote / From Nicomachus'
father -- / With patient
father and Angry son -- /
That she said, 'How can
you know / More than
you do know / And we
are still in the shadow /
Of explanation.'"
From this form, this
in-forming, a lot can happen.
This informing as ultimately
rhythmic, a rhythm
of material, (in)formable
material. A kind of
"tendency" or
"culture" about the poem.
WITHOUT CODE. One
assumes after our
current parlance information
is a code. But what
informs is not
merely binary data; but
the data of what Bergson
may have called
"the intuitive":
the immanence of
composition itself, poetic
or otherwise. Information
makes a form
in which to dwell; it is
this form in which
to dwell and to
extend forms in time.
Being at home - being
"rest"-less - informing in
"rest"-lessness - "reckless-
ness" - "recklessness" re-turning
to basic information -
a kind of "home" or
more familiar (however
alter-able) dwelling:
the real question may then be
how and when
does risk occur?

Thinking Cures

The act of thinking became identical with suffering, and suffering with thinking. From this fact, Nietzsche posited the coincidence of thought with suffering, and asked what a thought would be that was deprived of suffering. Thinking suffering, reflecting on past suffering -- as *the impossibility of thinking* -- then came to be experienced by Nietzsche as the highest joy. But does thought really have the power to *actualize itself* without itself suffering, without reconstituting its own suffering? Does thought itself suffer from its own ability to actualize itself? What then is doing the suffering or enjoying? The brain? Can the cerbral organ enjoy the suffereing of the body of which it is a function? Can the body rejoice in the suffereing of its supreme organ?
-- Pierre Klossowski

Beuys --------------------- Nietzsche
Sickness ------------------ Health
Alchemy ----------------- Physics / Biology
Cross --------------------- Circle

Homepathy = contagion = swallowing a little poison goes a long way = migrain = talking cure = drawing cure = thinking cure = impulsive contagions = a semiotics = contagion as information

Or:

STOP FEELING TEACH
A DEAD HARE
TO STOP FEELING AND
PLAY DEAD

Dying to live / Gnostic Holographies

--To Matthew Ronay after Beuys's Codex

What we mean to write and what
We mean

To draw what
We mean by having

Insides and having
Other insides

(The inside
Of inside) is somehow

A matter of sex it is
Somehow

A matter of death.
Or Eros otherwise

A lag
Time of perception

A perceptive
Dark an occultation

Of the eyes
Of the hand

Drawing the eyes
As they don’t see

Fever balloons and
Madness blisters.

They trace
A therapy

A constant therapy
To heal

By writing words
As one might

Draw them
The pressure of this

A pressure
Not unlike

Death bearing
Down

Bearing
Down on an inside.

You will reconstruct
What organs you will

Reconstruct
By drawing

Organs without
Community bereft

Impermeable collective.
Bereft in slipping

The interminable
Slipping

Of affects
From body

To transmutable
Body

Your multiple
Bodies are

A distraction
Instances

Of time themselves
The floating

Organs of a draughtsman.
The sovereign holography

Feverish topology
Of pain and what is

Not quite pain
Not actually

Your organs
Your organs no longer

With outsides
For or

In themselves.
As one must always be

Alert to heal
As trauma

Has no end
Nor beginning

Except in
These occultations

Ex-orcisms /
In-orcisms

Dying in your codex
To live.

Wake Games (Every Name in History)

-- for Catherine Sullivan

"Questioner: Where are you going now?
Reply: Stealing the goats from Hell.
Questioner: Swear that you are.
Reply: I swear that I am."

Convince ourselves
We are not dead
That we are pretending
To be dead
We are
Dead children we are
Dead we play
Dead to be alive
We play dead
To be alive again

Pretend impulses
To act
On impulse
Or
Not act
Re-action
Makes all
The difference
“Swear that you are”
“I swear that I am”

The actor makes
The world wearing
Both masks
Noontide
Of that obscurer
Crystal
That dark night
The burden
Of mirrors
To scratch their tains

A mirror of sorts
The backside
To act
Is a mirror of sorts
For the world to be two
Split in two
And to take you with me
Into “the fire
of our future”
The actor is
An abyss of repetition

The actor played
By impulse
By not acting
On these words
Our words
Are masks
We are masks too
Growing
Out of crystal
Parousia of
Our history

Our impulses
Are the memory
Of time itself
Crosses of
Night over
Night
“where the sun don’t
ever shine”
Crises of mid-
Night
Over the shoulder in
Backward
Motions of the mind

Orpheus-like
Or Eurydice
Or Rachael
Orphans wake to
Mimetic withdrawals
Percept of this
Emotion to act
Out the names
Is to become them

Sovereign emotion
This will take time
The names of events
In time my angel
Of repetition night
Indifferent from light
When one has acted
When one
Has yet to act

To create the world again
The fire of this theater
The bombs
Of this theater the
Threatening gas
To create
This world again
Incendiary an angel says yes
Children play dead

As history falsens
Angels say yes
Say no to say yes
As history falsened
Radiant apparition (Docetic)
Split in this mirror
Inward dwelt and informed
Disassociated by fragments
The fragments of fragments
For the Whole

Split in this mirror
This is the present face and
The present wrist
This is the present split
The repeated gestures of song
Presupposing what the
Actor will say
An hysteric mood
Of their gestures

Empty of foci
To form the dark
Perceptive dark
Of that fork and her water
Speechless speeches
Perceptive emptying
Of mimesis withdrawing
The foci of first words
First gestures
Made for all time
The trade an imminent
Trade in persona

Beyond extension
Beyond any particular
Extensity
Of the hand
Any comprehending
A gesture
The backward
Motion of the hand
As the hand reflects itself
Discontinuously
A continuous motion
Of all time
To be or not to be
To be felt
Singing oneself to sleep
To pose this problem first

Of first-ness this-ness
And parody
Of the hand
The hand
Twisting in parousia
Paradise of history
Your traumas are
For all time
All time trying
To be born again
Pretending to all identities
No one.