Alan Sondheim

The Essay in All its Forms

The Beginning

This is where the essay begins, with the title of this line
performing modernism.

The Middle

The twitching in my left frontal lobe apparently isn't the result
of TIA, but a stylistic device originating in postmodernism.

The End

I came and wrote and died, an original ending stemming from my own
immutable style related to early European phenomenology and late
American (including Canada of course) new media content.

The Middle of the End

I extend my life through writing, this could just as easily be
Wittgenstein's laundry list or post-mortem memo. Back to the
twitches: I haven't had any today, creating a sense of worry in
the reader who might assume something is coming like the metaphor
of a dust-storm just over the horizon.

The End of the End

I pride myself on the cleverness of my cleverness, in imitation of
current writers (there must be many) who - later, rather than
sooner (I'm always optimistic) - will inevitably fall through the
cracks.

So a new beginning, and here I am. If I've learned anything, it's
this - there's no way I can look around and understand everything
I'm seeing.

Whatever I cut up will have a new beginning and a new invocation -
where the essay begins, performing a new style, having been borne
across any number of genres and motivations.

So again "I find myself in the middle of things" and the middle is
always where I find myself, and is always a muddle. Like <your name
here> I pride myself on the clarity of my words.

Aren't our words always clear to ourselves? Or we might return to
the beginning of the sentence or book, appalled at what we have
found, which we'd gladly erase if we hadn't already been in the
middle of it - the middle of the beginning.

The End of the End is a phrase constituting a breath or pause in an
essay taking its roots from what is already plagiarized, there's no
need to go into details.

Or necessity. There's no necessity to go into details.

It's a reached point but it's also a phrase that might or might
not need correcting. Think of correction as a place: a
correctional institute for example, which filters language inmates
in and out of incarceration, inmates held in abeyance.

Then nothing has changed and we might add that America (Canada
excluded) has the greatest number of words undergoing continuous
correction, of any country on the planet. It depends (again of
course) since every correction is already a strategy, and has
nothing at all to do with the greater good; in fact, goodness has
nothing to do with anything here. There is no constitutionality in
relation to the correctness of words.

Every use modifies every other use and so in a sense every use is
useless.

For a newness might always collapse, always necessitate correction
- it's the same old story here, tawdry and abject, promising the
world but delivering nothing in its stead.

The Beginning of the Beginning

This is better, an escape clause from the thinking police,
increasingly turning paramilitary and at the service of the upper
one per cent of the upper one per cent. Remember they know each
other, but at the beginning of the world everything is erased.

Being erased is also the erasure of beings and of Being, so we
might dream of new mediums, new ectoplasms, new technologies,
carrying us forward, but carrying us without history, without
origin, naked except for the clothes on our backs. Did we, at one
point, say words? Were any of them saved?

And does or will this end here?

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