About Me:
I have terrible trouble getting organized, because I'm all about the connections. I would dearly love to generate a bunch of nodeshells based on the connections that I am constantly noticing and have somebody else fill in the content. (Never fear, gentle reader, I am not about to do this!) This is because, by the time I get around to filling out the content for just one of the connections I have made, I am likely to have lost track of a large number of new connections I made in the process. I want to move on - at lightning speed - and I know, I know, I can't.
My "mission drive" within everything2, the webspace as opposed to my purpose in "Life, the Universe and Everything" could be defined as developing my capacity to slow down and do the tedious work of filling in at least a few of my own connections. I acknowledge that my writing often exhibits the glaring weakness of defying common sense to the degree of potentially giving anybody, let alone my grandmother, a heart attack just trying to understand it. I'm long on generalities and short on practical examples. And I'm an aficionado of the postmodern prose style that is laced with puns, neologisms, and parenthetical asides. My enthusiastic haste to follow the proliferating connections of my own thought process drives me to assume far too much prior knowledge on the part of my readers. Because human connections are just as important to me as semantic ones, I am here to learn how to stop "losing" the people I want to communicate with. The kick-ass logical abilities I have always admired in my beloved ones play a big (albeit counterintuitive) role in keeping me connected to some kind of social reality,which constitutes for me an internal moral imperative of intellectual integrity.
My Noding Philosophy: A Hypertextual Poetics
Nonetheless, E2 is the best medium I have yet found for my poetry. In my Master's Thesis, I discuss the "unpredictable and uncontrollable" process of connective meaning-making in language, particularly poetic language, which I call semantic eros - a hypertextuality which cannot be adequately portrayed in either speech, writing, or graphics, nor even physical hypertext. This semantic-erotic aspect of my evolving poetics provides a serendipitous rationale for publishing my work on E2, evident in the following passage quoted at length from my preface:
Iconic, or visually representative, only in the barest sense, hypertext’s primary functions are indexical, as pointer, and symbolic (or semantic), as text, as any blind user of text-based computer interfaces can attest. In polysemy, language is always at least unconsciously hypertextual, but in my poetry I consciously call attention to these potential multiple linkages. In other words, I believe that hypertext more accurately represents the semantic associative webs of language than can any forcible manipulation of the appearance of text fixed to a page. Optional interpretations are unlimited in the reader’s mind; semantic eros opens up the poem so as to invite these interpretations without forcing the reader’s eyes to choose between predetermined blocks of text. Hypertextual seduction via semantic eros is absolutely consensual because it does not happen on the page, but in the mind of the reader…and only if he or she is willing. If it happens in the mind of the reader, however, the seduction is no longer entirely abstract but becomes embodied: he or she has permitted certain interpretive trains of thought linked to the poem’s words to affect his or her body via the tactile sensations of the nervous system. Seduction by semantic eros thus acknowledges the Beloved/reader as subject. This unconditional invitation to interpretation risks rejection by willingly losing all “claims”—either possessive claims on the Beloved or declarative claims about him or her. As with hypertext, the Beloved/reader’s participation is not guaranteed, as it were, by his or her clicking on the proferred link, since a hyperlink releases him or her to an utterly unpredictable and uncontrollable path of interconnected meanings of his or her own choosing.
Hypertext, in turn, represents or signifies the concept of protocol, of which it is also one instance. Protocol, in turn, becomes a signifier as a metaphor for metaphor (or the “first gluing” that binds a metaphor). At the symbolic level of convention or law, a diplomatic protocol allows people of different countries to interact without offending one another by way of an agreed-upon set of customs, in its turn based upon some set of underlying values common to their cultures. In the world of computer networking, protocols allow different computer systems to interact by establishing what functions they have in common, and what the different terms are for those similar functions. Like ambassadors or networked computers, we transcend our differences through a process of analogy with each other. As the metaphor for metaphor, the multiplication of signifiers in the process of analogy is revealed as a potentially infinite regression of referential connections. Even the religions of the world are useful interfaces with an ultimately unstable transcendental signified (the paradox that unpredictable change, the Buddhist Noble Truth of impermanence, is the only certainty). We make these interfaces in our own images not so much for ego gratification as that we may come to terms, and come to be on speaking terms, with something beyond our present understanding, with the unspeakable. We come to terms with the unspeakable by staying with our feeling of being unable to put that something into words.
Like a network, language is for me a source of infinitely branching and multiplying links to the world, not a container, not a box or a prison for it. I see this kind of linking as something that the compressed (and therefore implicitly explosive) discourse of poetry does more characteristically than what we are used to thinking of as prose, which, if it also does so, may be said to aspire to the condition of “poetry”—though what is really happening is a transgression of the boundary between the two styles. Of course, a poem on a page does make a sort of box, but not one that can successfully contain its language, much less the world. Still, the attempt to contain a piece of reality in words may be the very thing that creates the pressure which ends up multiplying explosively its language’s links to meanings: Roland Barthes’ orgasmic text is definitely at play here. Iconoclast in the Mirror, 31-33.
The E2 features of hardlinking and softlinking are both well-suited to doing things that I have longed for readers to be able to do with my poetry - or, rather, for which I have long sought means and permission for my poetry to do to them. It has been an unending source of creative frustration being told in poetry workshops one of two things: a)that one of my poems makes so many topical or jargon-related references that it confuses and/or annoys a general audience, or b)that the notes I have occasionally provided to enrich readers' interpretive experience of a poem detract from their aesthetic appreciation of it. I intend for my readers to web-search or google - or better yet, in E2 now, softlink and node any word or phrase from my poetry that interests them, then "lose all claims" on the readers by letting their own linking process take them wherever they want to go. Physical hypertext remains limited in its ability to represent this more complex and powerful, richer and freer human consciousness - the recombinant polysemic chain of human language. With links instead of footnotes or endnotes (or Barthesian marginalia), no reader is forced to follow a particular path because no one way through the text has been "paved" in advance. While pipe links allow me to make brief, possibly tantalizing asides to beckon the reader down connective paths I happen to have noticed, he or she can ignore these promptings (thereby stepping to the beat of his or her own drummer) by keeping the cursor in the margin.
Even now that I am providing specific jumping off points with my own E2 links in my poems, I am acutely conscious that these are far from all the things I meant to be doing in connection with each given word or phrase, just within the context of a single poem. They (links) are, to start with, the closest things to what I was already thinking that other noders have already written up. Although I am committed to developing some factual nodes eventually, I am trying not to re-invent bridges or fix those that have not been broken or burned. Now that I have prepared two of my poems for noding, I see that choosing the links is an arduous but gratifying process with much the same addictive appeal for minds like mine as I imagine would belong to crack cocaine for the general population. Unfortunately, if I waited to find, or for someone to node, the perfect linking writeup for each node implicit within one of my poems, much less tried to do my own factual writeup for each poem node, I would never get anything off my ScratchPad.
A Short List of Items I Feel a Strong Compulsion to Write Up in the Near Future, If I Can Make the Time:
All of the above have had profound influences on my highly reluctant rejection of Christianity, of which I have seen many positive, loving, compassionate examples in my lifetime. I do not believe that the person described in the Gospels ever existed as a single historical person. I do believe that the Jesus of the Gospels was a completely fictional character, a composite of messiah-wannabes (cf. Monty Python's Life of Brian: "I've followed a few!"), teachers, preachers, and the gods, demigods, and heroes of other religious traditions. The plurals are significant: I am saying that I am convinced that the story of Jesus is not based on the life of ONE individual, and therefore I find it more likely that Jesus is fictional rather than historical.
Nonetheless, I do not denigrate works of the imagination. I know them by their fruits, and I do not expect the tree of religion to bear seed only after a single kind. Language and all its products, religion included, are polysemous - bearing many seeds of meaning and multiple consequences, most of them unintentional. What is important to me is to cultivate pragmatic awareness of the potential and actual outcomes of holding the particular values inspired by my favored fictions, based on observations of reality. The Buddhist and Pagan precepts of harmlessness or harming none, respectively, express the values most intimately related with my own pragmatic ideals (if I may be permitted the oxymoron). However, I do not have to accept any religion - Buddhism, Paganism, UUism, no matter how liberal - wholesale. I consider all unquestioning religious belief dangerous as well as anathema. (Naturally, I acknowledge that there are some practical, everyday matters it would be pretty dangerous TO question!)
The upshot of my poem "Incarnation" seems to be this: There should be, and there is, a Christ, and we have met Him: and He is Us. And being Christ is not at all glorious, but the most ignominious suffering, which we bear willingly for the good "of all sentient beings", as in the bodhisattva vow. The ambiguity in the word "pretentious" - as both arrogant presumption and pushing oneself to the limit - applied to the sentiments of "Incarnation," captures a trace of the essence of this experience of ignominy, which I would like to preserve in some way.
Oh, dear, it's starting again...my pretension in referring to "Incarnation" and Hamlet is beginning to sound a lot like hubris (not looking at all like Christmas), or tragic flaw, which is a term from Aristotle's Poetics on tragedy, which reminds me of famous bipolar poet suicide Sylvia Plath's possibly pretentious statement, "What is tragedy? I am." And now I see that I've conflated hubris with hamartia, because being pretentious is just one of many tragic flaws Sylvia or I could have.
SaraThustra's wu One Eternal Thingy reminds me of the title of one of the essays in Deconstruction and Theology, "The Being of God When God Is Not Being God," by Robert P. Scharlemann. I am also reminded by her wu in Hungry Ghost that my beliefs about the relationships among certainty, impermanence, and the Transcendental Signified are themselves impermanent and rapidly evolving.
I think my calling in life is to be some sort of moral philosopher, which is the language-and-people equivalent of a theoretical physicist. Both operate at the same almost absurdly high level of meta-awareness, where concreteness bends back upon itself to become abstraction.