A chereme is the smallest unit, akin to a phoneme in language, of a sign in sign language. Think of this gesture, or quasi-gesture or micro-gesture...

The midflip of the infamous bird.
The murdering hand of Abraham stopped in mid-strike.
The aborted flagging of a bus driver when it is too late.
The intent to point at something that is now being explained.
The smile mothballed before it could be seen by someone who is not the person you thought s/he was.
A dead man's hand in the half-formed shape of a sign orphaned by its "speaker".

Deleuzian cartography / tracing…failure of referentiality…the regime of nouns over verbs…the history of pointing…the integral reliance upon an entire corporeal body of relevance to establish gestural salience in a given field to be indicated by the finger or hand. 



Envision a collection of video stills where indexicality and reference fail to refer to the object. A few means of demonstrating this, the possible law of necessary failure (Derrida). Pointing directs the eye. The Wittgenstein problem of atomic facts. 

I see my books, the ones that I have written, alongside a variety of hastily shelved and disorganized - what I call remainders, bric-a-brac - journals, papers, all presumably by my authorship. They are lined up without temporal sequence, but they occupy their space together, united just in the same way that all my Joyce (or, shall we say, Joyces if we can believe that each book is a different reflection of James Joyce, and so multiple Joyces). They reside together in their categorical or alphabetical similarity, and they more than anything foretell my own death. They sit there in my line of vision, and this line may travel a certain empirical distance, say, 60 centimetres. There is in this measure of books by my authorship the promise of my own death, one that I have no choice but to own. No matter if I produce and publish two more shelves' worth, three, more, there is still the promise of a cessation of production. And, following behind that if not contemporaneous with the end of production, my death. 

It is vanity to think that the last book to be shelved there would act as the summary, the capstone, the definitive compendium of all the works that temporally precede it. Although we may write a book - our final book - that would be written with an imminent and foreseeable death in mind, it will fail to capture all that has come before it since there is no way that this I that wrote book x can faithfully reproduce the state of life that made that book x the way it is. But this is the same problem that adheres to even writing this line, and then the next, since the singularity of the event, imbued with its minute deviations of experience and the anticipation of the line after, can never retrieve that past into the present. Which is to say, that the present of line 1 is lost at line 2, and even at the end of line 2 - even with enjambment - that line's present has vanished and is ungraspable. Certainly, I can grasp a representation of it, perhaps even summarize or rephrase it, but a rephrasing is always a new creation. We cannot relive what we have written, and so we can only acts as external commentators who try to bring that line into the present, and so fail. The end of this line will be the end of my life as it was lived in that line, and I must surrender what I have written to the past, forever blockaded from accessing its "noumenal" being. I can only revisit the line through an interpretation which is always an act of reinterpretation. Divided as I am from that line, I am even further distanced from the last book, or the five books before that. 

This end is assigned right from the beginning, just as the first book of one's own authorship is made to appear on a shelf. There is also the finitude of the entire collection of books by other authors, and what is lost at the point of my death is the "truth" of my having read each and every one, my possibility in reading what I have not read, and how "carefully" I read the books that I have actually read. This is lost forever at the point of my death. And yet it is this "yet" that promises the possibility while I still live to read them, or choose not to (either of which does not absolutely nullify my possibility since I can change my mind many times). 

This "not-yet" also furnishes the possibility of my writing what book will come next. It is close to Heidegger's "Sein zum Tode" - the Being-towards-death that orients the authenticity of Dasein toward that imminent horizon of death, granting meaning to the project(s) of Dasein. 

This split between life and work, what Derrida identifies as the aporia biography (bios + graphein) presents us with the idea that although we may feel entitled to some special relation between the life and the work or works we create, this is not necessarily the case in actuality. I own my works, which belong to that other me in the past, just as I own my own death in the future (which I cannot technically experience). This is a problem that is playfully brought to the fore in Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "Borges and I", that division between the "famous" Borges who collects the mail, writes the stories, and so forth, while the other Borges is consigned to always operate at a distance, to be the passive observer. Eventually, the other-Borges takes all that constitutes the uniqueness of the observer Borges, turns that into a work, pillaging what may be of value in the name of the work.

The work or works. Opus or opera. That one work may be considered as such, or plural, just as a series of books can constitute the singular and the plural. We speak of work and works as a noun, but it is the implication of the verb. As we know, verbs tend to vanish once their "work" is done to unite two nouns, defining a relationship or orientation between the subject and the object. The verb announces action, but that action when put in writing or speech is always at least a moment behind. The verb functions as the spectral thread between the life and the work (or works). It serves to grant the illusion of unity, effacing the temporal succession that blocks what one is and what one writes or has written. My works occupy a given space that I have assigned them, but that me is gone, and I merely haunt what was written. The very condition of me having written constitutes my orientation toward that most authentic of realities; namely, my own death. My work signifies the inevitability of my death regardless of how much space is assigned to them, their number of centimetres laid out like a body from end to end. These centimetres do not correspond to some conspiracy of equals, for there are those specific centimetres that will resonate with much more value for some, the discourse of said value assigned from without by others. The remaining centimetres of my "work(s)" will be peripheral editions, ranking lower in the discourse of externally imposed value. Moreover, the broken hyphen that suspends the specific episode of life and the specific work...

Roll the credits / credits roll in dice

cetera desunt /

A performance audit. There's no efficacious method for plumbing and salvaging from memory without ending up in a distracting scrap. The bone-and-skin separating machines applied to memory will not suffice to disentangle the abstract components desired - memory matter will always trail shredded referential ganglia, gut-gore, and streamer sinews. Off to the central processing plant with the raw hunk of memory flesh, try to shear off the messy offal while taking care not to damage the core of that abstract sentiment or glimmering idea. My performance? This or that performative, always the scene of a theatrical offering - only a prose-geared thespian can truly understood the necessity of donning one mask at a certain time rather than another. 

The hitherto unrecognized mental condition of Cerebral Static Syndrome (CSS) has thus far resisted its greying clinical enfolding within mental institutional law. That, perhaps, the moon is glued in a particular unwavering spot, klieg lights orbiting about it so that it is unfree to wane...well, CSS in action - so many of these clutterstuck thoughts emerging in an upward smoke-rill from a kind of neural trench warfare. There are certain short distances harder to abolish and much more awkward than that vacuum wedged between two pairs of lips virgin to each other's kiss. Mental static knows the lesson of the clinamen, that slightest swerve, the smallest deviation, the shortest possible distance like monads touching but not quite. White noise atomism, like some kind of radio dial wanderlust, tracing a tangential vector well beyond the ambit of linear thought. When this mental static distinguishes its individual parts, each component carved off by the illumination of conscious perception, then it is sharp staccato. And this, the conscious grip? - Grip slackens, opens the field to insufflate deviations of space that disconnects all the dots. An airy dispersion, even if but the gentlest zephyr.

The process of writing, its very practice, succumbs to a textual fanaticism. One would have to be a zealot of the pen or keystroke to secure proper bearing in this most nebulous of churches. As the notes multiply, one must be a weaver to thread them in, to hide the weft in the grain. 

-No spiritu sancti, but the crossing motion of pitter against pater.

Great m/oral ministrations, circumnavigating one's own heavily cluttered landscape of impedimenta. Notes virally overcode previous notes, exchanging vicious RNA in the imminent subversion of the plot. In one deft act of logomancy, my arm creases the air to reach out blindly for whatever comes most readily to hand amidst a tower of scrawled notes (and their infinitive footnotes thereof). The jumble is teased into some approximation or farce of shape, steadied erect by a vibrating prose sculptor's hands, and made to walk. Of these notes I make, strange incantations composed of freeform words or scattered disjecta membra, I ghoulishly construct a golem, so many novels monstrous homunculi composed as they are of these assiduous mini-machines of exported thought. All of these, stretched in taut, yet pliable leathers of prose stretched around the skeleton of my writing algebra.