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green_dreamsThere's a type of candy called blue wires. Maybe six inches long, half the width of my finger, a thin blue-raspberry coating around a white-coconut core, like the stuff you can find in Licorice Allsorts.
I want some. Right now. The sort of "I'd get the bike out of the closet and bike the half-hour to South Keys if there was anyplace open down there that sold it" want that is just not being negotiable. Fortunately there are no inadequate substitutes in the house. It's a very specific want.
I looked up Richard Brautigan's "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", and found it suitably hyperlinked off a ?personal? site at the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Why didn't anyone tell me there was poetry about the Internet? I mean, I don't think it's all that great--it seems too stuck in parallelling online to the physical world, a hunt for data, a landscape charred by flamewars, a world that's just a metaphor away from one you can walk around it. But the metaphors feel jammed in, forced to fit.
Makes me think of Watership Down, to be honest. There's this part where Our Heroes come to a warren where the rabbits aren't quite right in the head. They're all very sleek and well-fed. They recite poetry, for Frith's sake. They never ask "where", and they never answer questions with that word in them[1]--you know, there's this general impression of Lotus-Eater Land. And at one point one of them gets shown a pattern of stones pushed into the wall of a burrow, and asks what it is.
He is told it is Elil-Hrair-Ra, stealing the King's lettuce.
And he kind of blinks, and says no it isn't, it's rocks pushed into a wall.
It's that kind of disconnect. Shouldn't there be some way of seeing this other than as a physical land?
Sondheim's What Happens When Dreams Look at the World is interesting, though; still with the physical metaphors, but they seem more Dali/Never-Ending Story-esque, a more delirious world. More of a feeling of a setup fuelled by desire; and for all its practical value, I think that's what fuels most of the interaction and experience online. I want to see this. I want to show you this. I want to know this, find this. I want to know that someone's died in London seven minutes after it happened, I want to see what someone I've just run across had to say five years and two countries ago, I want to extract the original documented appearance of that lovely funny quote about English being as pure and pristine a language as a cribhouse whore.[2]
Ellis described a representation of the connections once as a blue rose opening, a diagram that added a point of light every time a connection was made spreading out, unfolding in a kind of brilliant blue glory as the world woke up and the data sank in. All mapped across someone's eye in a high-tech decoration for a contact lens. Because it's fun, it's fashionable, it might be useful but by damn it's mostly there for what you want and what you want are pretty things, distractions, connections.
Random four a.m. thoughts.
---
[1] "O embleer Frith! [...] And kill them, you say, and help ourselves to the great burrow? We shall help ourselves to a roof of bones, hung with shining wires! Help ourselves to misery and death!"
Fiver always rocked.
[2] Because she is. Lovely lady, wonderful tricks, but a damn thieving tramp who'll roll you and rifle your pockets for linguistic nonsense if you happen to walk by her in the street. Now I'm doing it with the physical-world metaphors. It's really hard to escape. I'm tempted to label it Jungian.
I want some. Right now. The sort of "I'd get the bike out of the closet and bike the half-hour to South Keys if there was anyplace open down there that sold it" want that is just not being negotiable. Fortunately there are no inadequate substitutes in the house. It's a very specific want.
I looked up Richard Brautigan's "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", and found it suitably hyperlinked off a ?personal? site at the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Why didn't anyone tell me there was poetry about the Internet? I mean, I don't think it's all that great--it seems too stuck in parallelling online to the physical world, a hunt for data, a landscape charred by flamewars, a world that's just a metaphor away from one you can walk around it. But the metaphors feel jammed in, forced to fit.
Makes me think of Watership Down, to be honest. There's this part where Our Heroes come to a warren where the rabbits aren't quite right in the head. They're all very sleek and well-fed. They recite poetry, for Frith's sake. They never ask "where", and they never answer questions with that word in them[1]--you know, there's this general impression of Lotus-Eater Land. And at one point one of them gets shown a pattern of stones pushed into the wall of a burrow, and asks what it is.
He is told it is Elil-Hrair-Ra, stealing the King's lettuce.
And he kind of blinks, and says no it isn't, it's rocks pushed into a wall.
It's that kind of disconnect. Shouldn't there be some way of seeing this other than as a physical land?
Sondheim's What Happens When Dreams Look at the World is interesting, though; still with the physical metaphors, but they seem more Dali/Never-Ending Story-esque, a more delirious world. More of a feeling of a setup fuelled by desire; and for all its practical value, I think that's what fuels most of the interaction and experience online. I want to see this. I want to show you this. I want to know this, find this. I want to know that someone's died in London seven minutes after it happened, I want to see what someone I've just run across had to say five years and two countries ago, I want to extract the original documented appearance of that lovely funny quote about English being as pure and pristine a language as a cribhouse whore.[2]
Ellis described a representation of the connections once as a blue rose opening, a diagram that added a point of light every time a connection was made spreading out, unfolding in a kind of brilliant blue glory as the world woke up and the data sank in. All mapped across someone's eye in a high-tech decoration for a contact lens. Because it's fun, it's fashionable, it might be useful but by damn it's mostly there for what you want and what you want are pretty things, distractions, connections.
Random four a.m. thoughts.
---
[1] "O embleer Frith! [...] And kill them, you say, and help ourselves to the great burrow? We shall help ourselves to a roof of bones, hung with shining wires! Help ourselves to misery and death!"
Fiver always rocked.
[2] Because she is. Lovely lady, wonderful tricks, but a damn thieving tramp who'll roll you and rifle your pockets for linguistic nonsense if you happen to walk by her in the street. Now I'm doing it with the physical-world metaphors. It's really hard to escape. I'm tempted to label it Jungian.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-24 12:13 pm (UTC)We experience through our senses.
Of course we're using physical-world metaphors. It's what we know!
It's certainly the only thing we share (as in, that doesn't exists only inside our individual heads) that is easy to comprehend no matter what your back-ground is. (Within limmits -- I'm not going to really understand Nuer metaphors, no matter what, even though I already know that they're based mostly on cows).
My do you think we talk about cars like they're alive? (E.G.: "My car was on its last legs, and then it died".)
Just my two cents. :-)
- Nam'ara,
- Amazon. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-24 05:32 pm (UTC)I mean, I'd at least expect a transient reference to synesthesia or something.
Tangent that the cars reference brought up; I'd also expect at least some reference to the tendancy to regard things as extensions of the operator--in a car accident, you say "He hit me!" or maybe "He hit my car!", not so much "His car hit my car!" And there's none of that describing the Internet--it's always described as distinctly other, and with something that's so much a matter of interpretation and effort, that strikes me as a rather artificial boundary.