15.05.00 : cyberplace

Mon. 15 th May

"Assembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half-blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with from dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest. When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future." (Shelley Jackson)

Ever get the feeling that you're not "all there"? The "I" that comes out of my mouth is usually tightly wrapped up in inverted commas, taking on someone else's words - and this is much easier in cyberspace, since all you have are these words, no physical presence - you can't see the rolling eyes, raised eyebrows, the involuntary hand-to-forehead tic, the "I-can-tell-you're-not-going-to-like-this" quaver in the Cork accent (now becoming an endangered species vis-ˆ-vis my vocal chords).
The physical "me" would love to be outside under that tree (the one which is beginning to block my view of the chocolate machine across the way from my first-floor office) - but I don't have a lap-top, and when I venture into cyberspace, it's always from this desk. But I do have two skylights, where the wasps can venture in, searching out the crumbs of that bar which I was saving for tomorrow (I never quite manage the self-denial bit).
Although this place is comfortable, I like my e-locations . . . replying to your e-mails is like a space-walk or a stepping out into the stream, on what you hope are stones. . . my e-locutions are simply times when I can step outside myself (protected by those inverted commas, mind) . . . my e-xistence seems more ephemeral, especially if you can't save the emails (not like paper - "these words have been taken down, and may be used against you ...")

More hiding:
"The dotted line is the best line: It indicates a difference without cleaving apart for good what it distinguishes. It is a permeable membrane: some substance necessary to both can pass from one side to the other.It is a potential line, an indication of the way out of two dimensions (fold along dotted line): In three dimensions what is separate can be brought together without ripping apart what is already joined, the two sides of a page flow moebiusly into one another. Pages become tunnels or towers, hats or airplanes, cranes, frogs, balloons, or nested boxes. Because it is a potential line, it folds/unfolds the imagination in one move. It suggests action (fold here), a chance at change, yet it acknowledges the viewer's freedom to do nothing but imagine. It is paradoxical: more innocent than the solid line (above which rises, on a sewing pattern, half a pair of scissors, oddly askew), it can be coerced into fiercer uses than the pacifist fold:: on the photograph of a cow, the classic cuts are sketched out in dotted lines. The cow doesn't know it yet, but it is an assemblage of dinners. A dotted line demonstrates: even what is discontinuous and in pieces can blaze a trail." (Shelley Jackson)

This is the dotted line of the stitching, the patchwork of words, phrases, quotations, misquotations, citations, cliches - the stitching which is most effective in a cyberspace hypertext - click, and then we're off in another direction, to another place
(which is not the page) . . .

Shane