The Digital Writer |
The Digital Writer had the habit of scrawling his assumptions on a piece of paper and tacking it on a wall. Or, sending the list to his favorite woman who lived thousands of miles away. "You must have this," he said. "It represents the culmination of years of thought."
- Trust the world as it should be trusted.
- Know which confusions are a hoax.
- Everything one needs to make a beautiful creation is already in the world.
- Significant health comes from the creative soul but doesn't have to search endlessly in itself for inspiration or the "key."
- The desire to "go inward," is nature's revenge for the obscenity that has been done to it; be taught by the revenge but don't surrender to it.
She wrote back detailing each one with comments, including the phrase, "this doesn't make sense to me."
What he didn't tell her was the feeling of enormity, the feeling of moment, as it became clear that the culture struggled between the forces of the human and inhuman.
"We can not afford to be the generation that dared not," he e-mailed to her, but didn't get a response.
But, we will have compassion because, after all, we are them; they are us. We are no better or worse than the lot of them; God bless them all. Perhaps we believe in what they can't afford themselves: Imagination, spirit, and even that savage, Intellect. They have qualities that we don't possess and are dependent on. It evens out.
The eternal struggle between nations never improved anything. The struggle in the self was the supreme struggle. It was the struggle for truth, within the individual self that created real worlds. The fantasies of madmen would always take on the role of gods and destroy and be destroyed.
But, why do you go on?
One of these days people are going to figure out that the Internet tipped the pyramid so that the "bottom" was on top, the top on the "bottom." At least in this one sense: The top is going to have to scramble like crazy in the coming years to keep market share. The bottom, including writers and thinkers, are going to create new and startling forms simply because there's the freedom, willfulness, and medium to do so. When the poet becomes a Net millionaire then we shall all laugh and celebrate heartily the beauty of justice. It's true that the poet has to struggle against the pornographer and other bottom-feeders for that largesse, but that's part of the legacy I suppose.
Since the Digital Writer has been on the Net, working on it every day and publishing a good deal of his writing, he has formed a greater sense of loyalty to it, as a publishing medium. The print publishing world is still formidable and impressive. It has a credibility the Net can't possibly match at this time. But, then thought and literature don't have much legitimacy in American society anyway, so why not develop on the new medium?
What did the new interface permit?
In his experience on the Net he came to the conclusion that it was not books that were threatened by the new medium; TV and radio were threatened and for some excellent reasons. Both those mediums required high levels of investment and had to recover enormous costs. They could only do this with programming that was so low, so awful and trivial that it could be termed an addiction. And the addiction was only broken when a person experienced the wonders of growth and development that could happen on the interactive Net. As TV and radio sucked energy from people, the Net, used rightly, put energy back into people by adding value to their lives and allowing improvement and expansion on every level.
The American writer often had the mistaken notion that he was creating everything over again. Experience taught that he was simply repeating the mistakes of anonymous writers through the ages who, too, were fully disgusted at life and the disgust was blown up into a philosophy that justified everything. The American people, in large part, were the same way; believing that they were the first and last people on Earth when, in reality, they were often living out the poorest, meanest lives that the poorest and meanest had ever lived. The celebration of the American Now had ended in dismal failure and was, in fact, commanded by the spirit of P.T. Barnum rather than any necessity.
And the suckers lapped up their books without stint.
He realized that literature existed in successive era's; each of which made room for the next. That is, the era of public literature, signaled by the large-scale novel; and the era of personal literature, signaled by a revival in poetry and journal writing.
The challenge for writers is to write as if each person will read each word but still be comprehended by those who scan the text. When I pick up a classic novel written in the Victorian period, for instance, I find myself "reading in chunks," absorbing huge pieces of the page and moving rapidly through the text. This is part of a modern phenomena for those born in front of TV sets. We'll let the experts figure out the consequences.
The Digital Writer understood that we were in an era where power was not having money but in denying its value and preparing small, significant holes to the future.
This explained a few of his actions over the years but not all.
David