"Who am us, anyway?"

Consciousness is a non-local phenomenon. The thoughts inside a head easily enough slip out and into words through the air or on paper or through keyboard. Thoughts move in and out of individual brains in much the same way they move around inside brains.

The idea that thoughts are somehow owned by individuals or that they exist as isolated epiphenomena is an absurdity beyond even the meaningless nonsense of the "avant-garde." Consciousness cannot exist in isolation any more than lungs can breathe without air.

We share our thoughts and our thoughts are what we are; therefore, we share ourselves. We are Karen Eliot after all, aren't we?

NEOISM IS NOW!

-*- we are so many of you -*-

i am karen eliot.

you are lit dimly e2.

E2 Administration Concedes to Neoist Demands

In a laudable Henry Kissinger-like move, members of the E2 administration wisely agreed to return the Collectivity individually realised and abandoned writeup to its rightful place in the network. In utter gratitude for this "concession," Karen Eliot has quit the strike and returned to the infinitesimal, the evanescent.

In returning Karen Eliot's faith in "the system," the administration has cleverly ensured that she would add heaps of neoist material to the E2 database. Clearly, the powers that be finally realised that spoon accumulation of neoist material would concretise the neoist tendency, and hence accelerate the inevitable utter annihilation of neoism and restore Karen Eliot's freedom.

Karen Eliot would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the administration who have taken the trouble to treat her with patience and diplomacy, avoiding vituperations like "take your crap elsewhere" or "You think your (sic) so smart, don't you". This Karen Eliot has found that the most helpful member was, of course, name withheld by request, and my prays is far and few between, so mark those words for now.

So. There is a change in the whether. Karen abandons her pretense of hysterical persecution and exchanges it for the less grating posture of oblique humility. Unfortunately, she also now opts to refer to herself in the third person some of the time. This is because her identity is struck through a variety of bodies. You will pass dimly e2.

my own involvement with neoism began when i was just a little girl growing up at the invisible college in akademgorodok, siberia. i spent my youth with scientists and technicians, and almost without friends of my age. a computer programmer gave me the nickname eliot canterel. i didn't know where this name came from and i already thought it would remain a mystery to me when its inventor lost his memory one year later in a medical self-experiment. he had drilled a hole into his skull, soaked it with a yodine solution after having his hair shaved off and having stunned himself locally with three injections. he made three indentations with a scalpel, pulled the loosened lobe of skin back and penetrated a surgical plug-in driller through the skull bone. the misfortune happened because he forgot to pay attention that the metal did not reach the brain mass. his girlfriend found him lying unconscious on the floor in a lake of blood, the driller still in his head.

i later learned about the so-called elliot-trepanation and, just having read the waste land by t.s. eliot whom i often confused with george eliot, the once mysterious verses 125 to 127

i remember
those are pearls that were his eyes
are you alive, or not?
is there nothing in your head?

when reading pynchon's novel about pierce inverarity's testament, i discovered that the latin verb "inerat" forms the common quantity of "inverarity" and "eliot canterel". i read the remaining letters, e-k-o-l, as "ecole," which reminded me of my childhood. the sum of their alphabetical values - 5+11+14+12 - is twenty-three, in the total of the digits five, and hence results in the first name of my nickname, again; so "inverarity" appears as the code for "inerat ecole" and "inerat eliot", and the remaining letters v-ri-y could mean "verity" or "variety".

it was at the same time that i met the cellist david "oz" zack at a music festival in eindhoven. in a pub, we discussed the possibility of contradictions in absolute music. after some beers, zack mentioned his project of the "open pop star". i urged him to tell me more, but, simulating a fit of coughing, he claimed to have sworn silence to the "fourteen secret masters of the world". he said that he could reveal one fact, the name of the open pop star: monty cantsin.

ten years later, i was told that zack had been arrested for faking welfare checks and that he died in a mexican prison after his severe diabetes had not allowed him to recover from a leg amputation. meanwhile, i had come up with the conclusion that "monty cantsin" was alluding to maris kundzins and istvan kantor, the first and the second bearers of the name, to monte cazazza, the cover star of VILE magazine, and to martial canterel, the magician and novel hero in raymond roussel's "locus solus", paris 1914. in german, locus solus or "der stille ort" means a toilet, and i was surprised to find out that it was almost a palindrome of "eliot". confusing raymond roussel with henri rousseau, i came to jean-jacques rousseau's nouvelle heloise, and recognized in it the anagram of "he only loves u, lee", a modest variant of duchamp's "elle a chaud au cul". the fact that duchamp exhibited an upside down urinal under the pseudonym r. mutt seemed to fit "locus solus" and the inversion of my name. i worked through a duchamp-monography, read of his obsession about roussel, and stopped in a footnote about arthur cravan. cravan was once supposed to be identical with b. traven, a writer of adventure novels. arthur cravan's name was actually fabian lloyd. he was married with the poetress mina loy who is frequently confused with the actress myrna loy. there were other speculations about traven being ambrose bierce - pierce inverarity? -, jack london or j.d. salinger, or even the grandson of kaiser wilhelm. it is however sure that he contributed as hal croves on the screening of his novel "the treasure in the sierra madre". similarly, the bord computer in the science fiction movie "2001" was called "hal", to allude to ibm and its founder, the computer pioneer norman hallerith. i also recognized that my name is, apart from the initials, included in "norman hallerith". then i read that traven originated from germany where he had published anarchist literature under the name ret marut. so was the urinal autographed with r. mutt actually a work by traven or cravan? or was zack, who seemed to have moved to mexico just when traven had appeared and cravan had vanished there, traven/cravan/cantsin?

it was about that time that i learned that monty cantsin was the figurehead of a strange new phenomenon called neoism. it seems that neoists confuse the public by drinking human blood and wearing dead cats, fish and mushrooms on their heads. these so-called neoists had certainly managed to confuse me. on the hand there were parallels to my own life: martial canterel, keter elyon, and my own metaphysics, which i used to call one-ism. the similarity was just too much. on the other hand, this blood-drinking and fish-habidahery nonsense. despite myriad instances of synchronicity, i decided that i was not the fulfillment of the monty cantsin prophecy.

...

i hope this letter will shed some light on just who this monty cantsin is, but the question remains: what the fuck is neoism?