Article: 11126 of fa.future-culture Path: nntp.uio.no!ifi.uio.no!internet-mailinglist From: Alan Sondheim Newsgroups: fa.future-culture Subject: Michael Current Date: 26 Sep 1994 13:26:42 +0100 Organization: Internet mailing list Lines: 176 Message-ID: <366em2$rbc@ifi.uio.no> Reply-To: Future Culture NNTP-Posting-Host: ifi.uio.no Return-Path: Original-Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 02:58:41 -0400 Comments: To: futurec@uafsysb.uark.edu To: Multiple recipients of list FUTUREC Original-Message-ID: <"alfie.uib..640:26.08.94.12.26.22"@uib.no> Kristina Lerman asked for some information on Michael Current, and to that end I will write what I can and include the message before, sent out the day before his death. This was is first attempt as far as I know at writing other than critique or commentary or personal posting. Michael died of what, at first, was thought to be insulin shock, at 31, but now is thought to be a heart attack, at least so far as I have heard. He was the founder of Iowa Dignity and Equality Advocates, working for gay rights, and was the past executive director of GLRC, a gay and lesbian center. His mother lives in Davenport, Iowa, and he was living in Des Moines. He was one of the leading posters here on Future Culture; someone referred to him (and Marius Watz) as the "gods" of the list. He also moderated a list on the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (Anti- Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus) on world.std.com, and was active in a number of other lists, including Foucault, Walkers, and Lacan. He and I began and co-moderated Cybermind, also on world, together. (After he died, I asked Judith Rodenbeck from Columbia to co-moderate, which she did for a while. Due to her time restrictions, I now moderate alone.) He was interested and talking about starting a new e-list, Embodiment, shortly before his death. Michael lived in a fair degree of pain, which he shared, not for sympathy, but as a fact of life, in his posts. This sharing wasn't narcissistic or whining; it was, in fact an opening. He was diabetic, and needed psychotropic drugs as well as insulin. He had been the victim of a particularly brutal gay-bashing. He was unemployed and depressive. He was also amazingly intense and amazingly kind. I think of him, among other things, as an expert on Deleuze and Guattari, but the kind of person who would lead you carefully through difficult texts without hurting anyone. As a result he inspired some of the best and most thoughtful discussion I have seen anywhere in cyberspace. And he lived both the lists (his roomate said he was on fifteen hours a day, an exag- geration, but indicative of real exploration - not remaining in Muds and Moos and Irc) and thought itself in a way I have rarely seen. He was both excited by philosophical discussion, and knowledgable; what he speculated on came from both experience _and_ reading. I only knew him in cyberspace, or on the telephone. We were communicating daily around the time of his death. (His death, by the way, was acciden- tal. Michael was in a good mood, excited by Embodiment, by some of the developments on Cybermind, by Alphonso Lingis' work which we were starting to talk about. And Lingis, by the way, is a touchstone, sounding very much like Michael; the book we were discussing was _The Community of Those who have Nothing in Common,_ and the community Lingis discusses is that of the dying, in the midst of the murmur of the world.) Michael also was always _there,_ always present, spanning a number of lists and even, on occasion, Irc. (He had been on Irc extensively years ago.) And his presence was never obtrusive; I gravitated towards him when I found his were the only posts I was saving, early on, as a matter of course. And ironically, there was an event on Future Culture - the April Fool's joke of someone saying he would kill himself - which Michael did not find funny and reacted strongly against - that probably brought us together. I think the thing of it all was that Michael took _this_ space as seriously as the space you would see if you turned your head, now, just now. He took the emotions of this space, and especially the pain, and held it up in a kind and intelligent way. This was a form of innate responsibility, compassion, and empathy that he felt, literally felt. After the post below, there were none. I ended up erasing my reply to him. We had Unix-talked Wednesday (split-screen real-time conversation), and then I didn't hear from him on Thursday (the last person to see him, I think, was a workman who saw him in the window of his apartment). On Friday, I wrote two or three notes, asking if he was ok; on Saturday, an obituary came through on Cybermind. No one can speak for him, but I think he would urge on all of us a kind of intelligent gentleness here, and an attempt to be as truthful in our posts as we would be if, interrupted, we turned around, just now, and spoke to a person facing us in tears. Alan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 20 Jul 1994 01:48:15 -0500 (CDT) From: Michael Current To: ALAN SONDHEIM , sondheim@newschool.edu Subject: A little something. . . I wrote this while sitting at the cafe tonight, much to my surprise. Comments? Please be gentle, this is not something I am used to/ comfortable with. CARE OF THE BODY A stranger writes to me of the body. Of his concern for the body. Answering my e-mail, he tells me he is skeptical of e-mail, concerned about the detachment of thought and affect from the fleshbonesandblood. An ethical matter, a concern that we will abandon our environment, that our being-in-the-world will be replaced by being-in/being-with/being- one-with/becoming-with the machine. . . . Tracing back through endless stacks of mail headers, we find the stranger at his home, on a quiet street in a Midwestern college town, around midnight. He is reading my message, addressed not to him but to a multiple that includes him, that he intersects. There is soft jazz in the headphones from a beat-up old cassette deck as he reads, sitting, naked, in a chair in the corner of his bedroom, books on every side, the screen propped to the proper height by a pile of books and a couple of dusty old manuscripts. He is reading, deleting, saving, replying; _harvesting_ the list which grows, in fits and starts, but grows, in its non-organic medium. His hands move on the keyboard, and sometimes, unconsiously, during the reading of a long message, they slip from the keyboard to the pile of books to his left side, books long unread. Sometimes, unconsciously, he caresses the books. Sometimes, too, unconsciously, his hand slips from the stack of books into his lap, unto his semi-erect penis which, from time to time, unconsciously, he also caresses. . . . Reading my post he feels concern. He needs to speak to me. He wonders if I cannot see the irony of discussing embodiment by e-mail. He wonders what I look like, what I am doing at that very moment, and what would happen if we were to meet in the flesh. He must reach out to me, touch me with his concern. His hands linger in his lap as he pounders the words, stroking himself. Then they move to the keyboard and he begins to type, sharing with a disembodied stranger - who has not, in any case, addressed _him_ exactly - his concern about the abandonment of the body. Carefully, he composes clear, direct, generous sentences, filling them with more than he dare say or even acknowledge he is thinking about. We must not abandon the body. Finishing the message, he hits the key sequence that will send it off to me, feeling satisfied that he has pointed out the danger he sees, and something else, too, has been communicated, something that should not be brought to the level of thought. . . . He hits a switch and powers down the computer, stands and turns out the lights. A sudden breeze through the window makes him aware, for a moment, of his body, and he muses, absently, for a moment, at how he has managed to become erect during the hour he has spent carefully reading, deleting, filing, replying. . . . He crawls into bed, mind wandering from the pleasant sensation of cool sheets on his cock, balls, nipples to vague, tangential thoughts about my message, his reply - for a moment imagining himself speaking to me, his words convincing, compelling - and about Marx, Sartre, Immanuel Wallerstein. . .thoughts of pleasure and the lack of it rising and receeding in Kondratiev waves across the longue duree of his life. At some point he is asleep, dreaming. Fifteen, he is on the beach, with Wendy, his hands reaching and reaching for the clasp that holds on her bikini top. A couple of weeks ago, he is peering out the window for a second and then a third time at the smooth, well-formed chest of the tanned boy who is mowing the lawn, feeling all the different kinds of difference that seperate the boy's body from his own. Last night, he is in my bedroom, watching me read the reply he has written, pleased to see that I, too, am at home, alone, naked in my bedroom before my terminal reading the text of his desire. His mind is touching mine. Dreaming of me, he wakes to find his chest sticky, his hand on his slowly receeding erection. We wipes his hand on the sheets and turns over, feeling, for a moment, as he falls back into sleep - something like. . .concerned. "We must not abandon the body," he murmurs. . . . In the corner, the computer listens for his breathing to steady, then switches itself on and dials, disks spinning with anticipation. -- ---------------------------Michael J. Current---------------------------- mcurrent@picard.infonet.net -or- @ins.infonet.net -or- @nyx.cs.du.edu Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression, & Unemployment :) 737 - 18th Street, #9 * Des Moines, IA * 50314-1031 *** (515) 283-2142 "AN IMAGE OF THOUGHT CALLED PHILOSOPHY HAS BEEN FORMED HISTORICALLY AND IT EFFECTIVELY STOPS PEOPLE FROM THINKING." - GILLES DELEUZE --------------------------------------------------------------------------