Living Memorial

(Poetry Thursday)

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All this year, I have enjoyed a maddening love-hate relationship with the nascent literary medium that is the blog.

This fascination extends back more than 10 years, to when I first began to use the Internet at home (before I used the Web, back when you really could do one without doing the other). Even then I wanted to know how the 'Net would influence writers. I knew there'd be a form, I just didn't know what it was or what we'd call it.

Now I do. It's called the blog.

A new art form has to add a dimension of texture, a new confluence (current favorite word) of experiences not offered by existing forms. And no, Luddites, it does not supplant others. Did cinema supplant theatre? Did musical theatre supplant opera? Did contemporary composition supplant classical? Did photography supplant painting?

The blog supplants neither the essay nor the memoir, its closest literary cousins. The screen will not replace the page. Somewhere, someone will always want the physical reassurance of paper, and increasingly that experience will be an integral part of a newish sensual art form, the print book (funny, it doesn't look Newish).

I am stating the obvious here: the blog adds Time to Space, and gives us a quantum literature experience.

I have been fascinated and infuriated by the temporary nature of the blog form. Fascinated especially when, for example, I happened to be reading in that nanosecond of time right as the blogger was finishing his or her most current post, so when I refreshed the page I saw new content.

Infuriated by the drive to keep going, to seize the new, to get more--in blogs as in our culture, and in human nature so no surprises here.

I have been fretting about the time it takes, all the waste, and the fact that as a working writer I actually ought to be, well, working. All year I have been thinking that I should be using this time to write a book, and I have written one.

It is called The Truth Hurts.

It stands in the satisfying grey area between the writer's desk and the bookstore window. It is happening before my readers' eyes, it is happening because of and in response to my readers' comments, it is increasingly an accurate, aggregate reflection of one quirky little personality currently on the planet's surface. And it is free. It only costs you time. The Quantum Age's new currency.

It is an ememoir, the diary of a consciousness in one temporal year of its life, 2005-2006 in the Common Era, 5765-5766 in the Jewish calendar, 4,500,000,000 in the Earth's age, and 41-and-change to 42-and-change in my own life.

So like all good books, now it needs to be revised.

For as long as I live. While you read it.
I read recently of a 1992 poetry project undertaken by cyberauthor William Gibson (quoted once as saying, "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed.")

His Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) it commemorates his father by examining--viscerally, virtually--the weird possibilities of the physical book in the electronic age.

Lovely, really.

See, I am changing this blog to something like that, perhaps kinder to our illusions of endurance and memory, less uncompromising than Gibson's book, a diskette that erases itself page by page as it is being read. My ememoir will be more like a snake swallowing its tail, and like any good predator it will use virtually all of its prey--the posting space, comment space, marginalia, outlinks and inlinks--in the service of its growth and survival.

For a long time, especially since losing so many people between 1992 and now, I have not been predisposed to move forward. I really think forward is overrated. Forward is the model child the whole family devotes itself to, while Backward hangs back and Sideways looks askance, and Under can rarely be found at family functions at all (he's right there, people, under the table of course, and he's the center of every discussion though we don't dare speak his name).

Here's what will happen in this virtual space from now on.

Nothing and everything will change. The title of this post will remain what it is, the spirit of it and each post too (I think, though everything is subject to change). This particular top post will remain what it is: an explanation, a manifesto, a gateway, a challenge, and most important a greeting to my unseen, some unknown visitors.

I will make it ever better and reflect my ongoing life without altering its essence or changing the strictural relationship of this year's sequence of posts. I will take care of this year's worth of observations, fix its broken links and change content and images when it seems right. I will add and subtract links, sidebar material, and perhaps the profile. I will add to or change posts when it seems valuable. But I will not add any new posts themselves. And I will not delete a post or its title, per se. So in spirit this blog remains a record of July to July in one person's consciousness.

Won't it be interesting? I think it will.

This blog, this ememoir, will thus be more likelife as it grows within rather than onward. Or maybe it will be less like physical life, and more like inner life, which is its parent. More like memory, which seems fixed but isn't.

More like the truth.

* meantime, while I am figuring it out further, here's an interesting site--and important controversy--that's been absorbing some of my attention.