The whole of this is predicated on your delight in what I think (this takes us back to Horace, of chorus). What in this sort of text the gelernted object to is opening up the self to such discovery. I am the boy at the head of the table with potatoes on my nose. Either you find me witty or not.
(“Didn’t know you could yodel” is of course the punchline to the knockknock joke but am I alone in finding it a (yodeling) rhyme with its middle term, the actual (factual) yodel: littleoldladywho? Is a rhyme more than a matching rhythm?)
It doesn’t matter. You can stay or leave. But you may wonder what happened to the woman who wanted to die. You may wonder what happens to those of us who do not. You may wonder whether we each eventually reach out toward death’s forlorn embrace. You may wonder about Glenn Gould or Emily’s father. I get up from the keyboard (distracted by a Bach partita); outside in the Holidome five sullen people watch a self-help tape that echoes like a headache as I try to type. This is all happening: writing, as Wim Wenders says of film, keeps things from going away.
In the beginning this section was meant as an attempt to footnote meaning away, atomizing it until it scattered like chaff. I meant to play on what Terry Harpold suggests is the unkept promise of the hypertextual, “a duplicitous faith in the principle of chance, because chance is always assumed to be meaningful, which is the same thing as assuming there is no real chance.”
(What are the chances you won’t die? What are the chances someone else didn’t? Is there a heaven? “I don’t know,” I said. It was important to tell the truth. “What do you think?”)
And at first I was certain (viz. “Does Henry See?”) that I could exhaust at least this set of links. The whole thing seemed to me a story, something stratified that I could work my way down through. Then time passed. Lu cuntu nun meti tempu. I was no longer certain of the sequences I had in mind and each time I tried to find them again I became frustrated. (Perhaps this is happening to you. Perhaps you lean along with Walt Whitman at the rail of the ferry into Brooklyn wondering at the notion of time and authorship. To know what I mean you will have to go beyond this space. It is, ironically, the pure boundedness of the linked space that will distinguish hyperfiction in the age of the web. Do you find me hard to follow?)
Now as I work at them other sequences show themselves (fathers and the cryptic word and so on) and another web shows itself where the last dissolved. (One morning, many Christmases ago, we woke to find the tree spun round with spiders’ webs more magical than the spun fiberglass clouds of the angel hair of my youth. Sven wonders will the web keep us from seeing the wonder of the real spider’s web.)
In the interim we tried this same strategy:
The Mola project is a densely linked web of surfaces
which attempts to defuse (diffuse) hierarchy by spatializing
and weaving its links-- inspired by (literally:breathing in)
the successive adjacencies and eddying of multiple conversations
which have for centuries accompanied quilting and other
traditional forms of embodied collaborative art.
http://www.world3.com/meme1/Mola/index.html 3/96
There was a page within it which, much as the one which follows inexorably here, explains the heuristic, functioning something in the way a score does for an aleatory piece, Cage’s opera aperta. Nancy Lin forwarded a reaction from someone who read the web with increasing frustration and mixed delight until he happened on that page.
Oh I see now, he wrote.
As if that were the meaning.