Trying to Get Prana Through the
Wire
by William F. Lantry
What are we up to? What have I been doing for the last three years, and the
other people I know, online and off? Why all the discussion, all the work,
the fascination, the moments of real triumph and real disappointment? What
keeps us going?
I ask myself such questions. I'm just back from Educom, the biggest
national conference on technology and universities. What's that got to do
with Art? Well, plenty, it turns out.
First problem: Over the last fifty years, the vast majority of artists made
their livings at universities. Even Nobel Prizewinners. That's about to
end. The message from the techno-front? Professors should take heed of that
old duck-and-cover joke: Get down underneath the table. Put your head
between your legs. Kiss your sweet you-know-what goodbye! The same holds
true for publishers, although both groups will resist it, and those with a
stake in the old game, like professors and writers, will resist the
inevitable. And yes, there will be heroic rallies, and proud and noble
stances, like the aristocrats in their carts on the way to the guillotines.
Still, it's all over but the speeches.
Books are dead. I know you don't believe me, and that's ok. Poetry is not
linked to books. For five hundred years, they were the best way to
distribute poetry to a wide audience, but that's history. This evening, if
I weren't writing this, I could write a poem. As soon as I clicked 'send',
it would be distributed to over a thousand people, and here's the kicker:
many of those people would read it! And, if past experience is to be
trusted, over two dozen people would respond within an hour. Yes, you'll
say "oh, but that doesn't have the prestige of a publishing house. You
won't get tenure, or literary prizes, or promotions. Or paid." Already,
it's easy to say "wrong on all five counts." And that is more and more the
case each day.
Besides, were books ever really very good at poetry? Yes, there were some
beautiful objects: Dore matched with Coleridge, Blake's painting and poems
together. Cite your own examples from this century. But who among us has
not said "I prefer a good reading."? The voice, the atmosphere, the
surroundings, the sense of the special, ephermeral event... all this goes
into what I would shamefully call the real poetic event. And no matter what
you call it, who among us has not felt it? The only argument book advocates
have left is 'yes, but you can't cuddle up in bed with a book.' How
romantic! And so what? Who wants to cuddle up to a dried mass of paper pulp
with a bunch of ink stains on it?
The second of my three subjects involves things I and you already know.
Still, the Reaction to Sherry Turkle's speech was stunning. What's the
purpose of machines? To run Applications? To compute artillary tables? To
keep track of things? No! Millions of people would not be logging on daily
for that. The real purpose is community, consensus, networking, and
collaboration. That's why the net has exploded over the last five years,
and this has led to a terrible conflict. There's a generational difference
between people who use the machines for computing, and those who use them
for connecting. Turkle had a CS professor in the 70s who tried to demystify
the machines by telling her, essentially, 'You can reverse-engineer
everything, all the way down to the lowest level machine language, all the
way down to the way electrons move across the chip.' Maybe. But who, in the
net community now, could do this, or would even try? Who would want to?
What we do is what poets have done for centuries: we maniplulate the
symbols for our own ends. We learn just enough to get things done.
But who are we? Put a finger on identity, and say 'Yes, that's me.' Good
luck. Singularity may be gone forever. Bricolage is the french term for
tinkering, reinventing, putting things together trying to get something to
work. We do this with machines. We do this with poetry. And we also do it
with our selves. On one list I am someone, on another, I am someone else,
in each poem, I am different from the self of the last poem. Multiplicity
is a virtue. Turkle argues that we work through all of our selves, and that
this is healthy (although she does acknowledge that some people on the net
are 'acting out', rather than 'working through'). She sees the self as a
'multiple, distributed, time-sharing system.' On the net, experimentation
becomes the rule, our time on the screen is one of passionate, frenetic
activity, more real than IRL (which should be read In the Rest of Life).
And what's offered by this experience? Something like a cross between the
Bergsonian moment and the Joycian epiphany. When, Rilke asks, are we
*really* alive? Most of our lives, Bergson says, we're running on
autopilot. But in certain moments, something triggers a more intense
experience, a poem, an emotion, a few words spoken, even, say, tasting a
chocolate eclair, can trigger these moments, and it's the collection of
these moments that make up our lives. More and more, people are
experiencing these moments on the screen, through interaction and
connection in a complex environment. Yes, we make the machines, but our
experiences through them remake who we are.
But the best thing came at the end, and I've saved it for last. You've
probably heard of John Perry Barlow, or at least his works and terms: "The
Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace", the term "Cyberspace" itself,
in its present meaning. He started out by saying the net will change
everything, all power relationships, all institutions, including
universities and even art. He talked about our being "good ancestors" for
the coming culture, of managing the transition from an industrial to an
informational culture. Are we, as poets or as teachers, preserving the
things that were, or getting things ready for what will be? He argued, to a
bunch of people whose whole economic lives are based on copyrights, that if
something is in bits, there should be no copywrite. I know a poet online,
who I much admire, who says "please steal 'my' poem!" The ancient chinese
poet Po Chu-i, after accumulating all the possible imperial honors, was
most flattered when he walked into an inn, in a remote province, and heard
a working girl singing one of his poems. His work had become a free
communal property, and I can't imagine he demanded a royalty on the spot!
There's this curious thing I've found: if I write a poem out by hand, and
find it two days later, I know it's 'mine'. But if I put it on the screen,
and send it off across the net, and it returns to me as pixels, I ask
myself "who wrote that?" I have a completely different feeling on reading
it. Perhaps that's because it has gone out into what he calls "a new
environment of mind, a collective organism of conciousness." I don't know,
and the term seems dangerously close to Jung. But *something* happens. And
the poem has far more cultural value if it's distributed widely. In fact,
it can take on an intrinsic value of its own, and this value is not based
on scarcity. How different from a book, whose first edition is valuable
precisely because it's scarce.
But all that is simply prologue. Let me return to the question I asked on
opening: "What are we up to?" Three years ago, I couldn't type a single DOS
command, like CD\