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3107 lines
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ATMOSPHERICS
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volume 1, no. 1
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Summer 1994
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=========================================================
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Atmospherics Volume 1, number 1 Summer 1994
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=========================================================
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Contents
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When Father crossed the line G. L. Eikenberry
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At a nameless bend in the river Colin Morton
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We are always leaving, Sandra Colin Morton
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Woman on her Way to Market Colin Morton
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The Orality/Literacy Dichotomy:
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James Joyce and the pre-history of Cyberspace
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Donald F. Thall
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The Movers E. Russell Smith
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=========================================================
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Susan Keeping, editor
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Submissions, requests and correspondance: joyce@io.org
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=========================================================
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This text may be freely shared amongst individuals, but it may
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not be republished in any medium without express written
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consent from the authors and advance notification of the editor.
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Rights to stories remain with the authors. Copyright 1994, the
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authors.
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====================================================================
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Editorial:
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Why start a literary journal when there are hundreds of them
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in cyberspace already?
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Well, it's always been a dream of mine to edit my own journal.
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I don't know when I first decided that this was my goal in life.
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Maybe it was after reading my 12th book about Paris in the
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20's and 30's where expatriate American writers found a home.
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Ezra Pound, Jane Heap, and others edited literary magazines
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which gave their peers a platform when more established
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magazines turned up their noses at the new writers.
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I feel it is like that today. The New Yorker and the Atlantic
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are virtually impossible to get published in unless you are
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already a famous and well established writer. Cyberspace is
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the new underground, where anyone with the desire to can be
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published. There isn't any difference being read all around the
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world on the Internet than being read around the world in a
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printed journal. In fact, since the Internet is the hot new toy
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more people may read electronic journals than print ones.
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I don't know if Atmospherics will be superior to many journals
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already out there in cyberspace, I just know I will strive to make it
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a quality publication. If the stories, poems and essay found
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in this issue are any indication then there will be no problem
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with quality.
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So, enjoy this issue. If you like it tell your friends to read it,
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tell them to send submissions, spread the word! Hopefully,
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Atmospherics will be published quarterly.
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Susan Keeping, editor
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___________________________
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WHEN FATHER CROSSED THE LINE
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by
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G. L. Eikenberry
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It was raining. There was no other reason a twelve
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year old would hang around the house after lunch in the
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middle of July. The summer holiday had not yet gone stale.
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I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to convince myself
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I was more interested in a new model kit than trying to talk
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mother into letting me go to Al's to play football in his
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basement when Father threw open the back door and hit the
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kitchen like a tidal wave. It was just barely two o'clock.
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I couldn't think what might bring him home from work so
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early, especially in the middle of the week.
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"Michael, you're home. Good. Where's your sister?"
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He always talked like that when he was in one of his moods -
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- his jaw clenched, the muscles popping out below his
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temples, the furrows in his forehead deep enough to stick
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pennies in. I never knew anybody else that could yell as
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loud as he could, hardly opening his mouth.
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"I think she's at Valerie's."
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"Go get her. I want everyone here in half an hour.
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We're going on a trip."
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"A trip? Today? I was just starting a new model."
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It seemed a little too strange to get excited over.
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"No lip. Just move. Is your mother upstairs?" He
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didn't wait for an answer. "And tell that sister of yours
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no dawdling. Understand?"
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"Yes sir." I really beat it down to Valerie's and
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got back as fast as I could. Becky promised she'd be home
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as soon as she helped Valerie put things away. As I opened
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the back door I could hear Mother and Father upstairs.
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Their voices were loud.
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I was glad Becky wasn't back yet. I didn't think a
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seven year old should hear her such yelling. I was quiet so
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they wouldn't know I was back.
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Mother's voice was shrill, almost brittle, "I just
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don't understand why it has to be so soon. Why does it have
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to be this very day?"
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"When the Lord speaks, his servants act. They don't
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say, 'Give me a couple of days to sort things out,' They
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obey. I'm going down to the church. I expect you and the
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children to be packed and ready to go by the time I get
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back. Remember, we'll be needing warm clothes where we're
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going. Pack a supper. We'll be driving straight through."
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"Do you mind telling me where the Lord's supposed to
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be sending us that we'll need warm clothes in July?"
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"'Supposed to?'" He made a sound like some kind of
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animal. I heard it when he hit her. It scared me. I could
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only remember one other time when he had hit her. That was
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when she borrowed from the mission money to buy Becky's new
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Easter shoes on the last day of a sale. It didn't seem
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right that God always seemed to fit into the picture when he
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hit her. "I'll hear no more of your blasphemy. I'll be
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back before five. Be ready."
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I heard him on the stairs. I scrambled back out the
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door so I could pretend I was just coming in.
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"What took you so long? And where's your sister?"
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"I -- she --"
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"Never mind the excuses. Just get upstairs and help
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your mother. We leave as soon as I get back from church --
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before supper. Your mother will pack some sandwiches for
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the car."
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The door slammed behind him.
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#
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#
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Nobody spoke. There was only the thrumming of the
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tires and the chattering of the valves in the rattly old
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Ford. Even Becky was quiet, and Becky was one of those kids
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that never stopped talking.
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At first I tried to ask questions like where were we
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going and when would we be back. I complained a little
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about not having any time to tell my friends. I knew that
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Father's sudden journey would pretty well wreck any chance I
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had of getting in with Al's crowd. You can't just disappear
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in the middle of summer without people thinking you're
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weird. I probably said a lot more than I usually would have
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because he was driving and he couldn't hit me. I was
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sitting on the other side of the car behind Mother. The
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only way he could get at me was by thundering away like he
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used to when I was little and he was afraid to hit me. That
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was before he quit drinking and got religious. If he came
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home drunk and forgot I was too little to hit I had to hide
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back in under the sink where he couldn't get at me. I could
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stay there for a long time. Then he'd boom at me with that
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big voice, cursing and saying nasty things. After he
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started going to church the words changed, but not much else
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did.
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"Michael, you will learn that there are some things
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a child does not question. There are some things that even
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a man does not question. Do you think the Lord gives a --
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fig -- about how you get on with that those brats you
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idolize? You must put aside such things and embrace His
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Greater Purpose."
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"Yeah, well, okay, but --"
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"No buts. And don't get smug over there. I can
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stop this car and thrash you if I have to. Now be quiet and
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pray. Pray for the Lord's guidance, for His help to see
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beyond your petty, childish concerns. Pray that He will
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show you where you fit in His Plan."
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When he started in with the praying business I knew
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I was on the verge of going too far. I knew better than to
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get him too stirred up, even if he couldn't get at me right
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away. I shut up and sulked.
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Mother tried to reassure us as she passed out the
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sandwiches and carrot sticks, almost whispering vague
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assurances that things would be all right.
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That's when the car started to fill up with that
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thick, syrupy feeling that made everybody feel numb and not
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say anything. We didn't even have books. Usually when we
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travelled we had new books or something. There was nothing
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to do but read road signs.
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I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. The old car stink
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and the stickiness of the vinyl upholstery on my cheek
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wouldn't let me forget that I was in a lousy situation
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headed for something that was bound to be worse.
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When we crossed the line into Quebec, somehow, the
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way Father always talked, I expected everything to be
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different, but nothing changed. There wasn't even a line,
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just a sign.
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We were supposed to be going some place cold, but I
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couldn't figure out where. I wondered about places like the
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Yukon or the Northwest Territories -- some place like that
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wouldn't be so bad, but it couldn't be any place good like
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that. Even if we did go some place neat, he'd find a way to
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make it turn out bad. I wanted to be excited, but I
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couldn't. Everybody would just think I was on some kind of
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weird missionary trip with my weird father, Crazy Old Walter
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Cleary -- off on another God binge. That's the way they
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talked about Father. I heard them once in the barber shop
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when nobody in the back room, where Mr. Collins kept the rum
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and the poker deck knew I was there.
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I tried counting trees for a while -- not all the
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trees, just hardwoods bigger around than me. Then it got
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too for that. There was nothing left but thinking. I hated
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thinking at times like that. He told me to pray, but how
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was I supposed to pray? If I prayed the things I was
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thinking, the Lord would strike me dead. I hated anyone --
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anything -- that would do rip me right out of the middle of
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the summer. Deep down, I didn't really believe God had
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anything to do with it. I had even thought about running
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away instead of getting into the car but I didn't dare.
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God's wrath was terrifying. Father's wrath was worse.
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#
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#
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It was dark -- like hiding in the hall closet,
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wrapped up in Grandpa's big black coat when I was six. We
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were almost the only car on the road. I had been sleeping.
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Father was still driving, his hands clamped to the top of
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the steering wheel, monster movie greenish from the glow of
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the dashboard lights. I wondered what time it was. I
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wondered where we were -- but not enough to shift around so
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I could look out the window.
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"Today we cross over the line into a new life. We
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re-dedicate our lives into the service of the Lord. Right
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now we're driving through Quebec. Tonight we sleep in the
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car. Tomorrow the car will be loaded onto a train and
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carried, with us, into Labrador. Then we'll drive over
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long, rugged roads eventually to come to a place where I was
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stationed during the war."
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No one had asked him anything. He just boomed out
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his revelation without warning. Becky woke up with a start
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and just about jumped out of her skin. I wanted to ask why
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the Lord couldn't think of someplace better than some hole
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at the end of the world where Father happened to have been
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during the war, but I knew enough to strike the question
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down before it ever crossed my lips. I had learned the
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habit of guilt quite well. I was agonizing over my doubt
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and my unspoken blasphemy when the flashing lights appeared
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in the rear window.
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At first Father seemed to accelerate -- not abruptly
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-- not enough to worry us. Then he eased off and brought
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the car slowly over to the shoulder. He was out of the car
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quickly.
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I heard Father say "I trust we can do this in your
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vehicle, officer. There's no reason for them to hear."
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That was it.
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At first I didn't catch on that Father was in really
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serious trouble. He had gotten speeding tickets before.
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But we sat there for a long time -- long enough for me to
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give up counting how many times the light on the R.C.M.P.
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car went around. Mother was trying not to let on that she
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was crying. She never cried over speeding tickets. When
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they moved Father to the back seat of the police car it
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finally began to dawn on me that God was off the hook. None
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of this had anything to do with God -- or at least, it
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hadn't been His idea.
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The rest of the night was a jumble. Mother told us
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to keep quiet and stay in the car when they came back to
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talk to her. Then, after a few minutes, the one big R. C.
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M. Policeman stood outside the car while she got back in and
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told us that Father would be going with the other
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"gentleman" while the one waiting by the car drove us to a
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place where we could spend the night. She said she would
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call Aunt Jo and Uncle Randy so one of them could come and
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drive us back home the next day. She didn't actually come
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out and say it, but I knew Father wouldn't be going with us.
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I didn't try to explain much to Becky except that we
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wouldn't be going to Labrador.
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After that there was a motel where everybody spoke
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French, and mother was out by the Coke machine for long time
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talking on a pay phone while Becky cried. It wasn't that
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she knew what was going on, it was just that everything was
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strange and she was tired.
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The only other thing I remember about the motel is
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that it was cold for July and the heat register smelled like
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the dust under the dresser in the spare room in Grandma's
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house. Later, the next day, came the long drive back in
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Uncle Randy's new red car while Aunt Jo drove Mother in
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ours. I never saw Father again after that night. Even
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after he got out of jail, Mother never allowed it.
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Father had worked in the maintenance department of a
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hospital. I guess he had been stealing drugs from the
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pharmacy for a long time. He never denied stealing them,
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but he claimed his actions were at the bidding of the Lord.
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He sent the drugs, anonymously, to a Christian mission
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group. The mission people grew suspicious of the
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unsolicited drugs that rarely matched their needs, and
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reported them to the police. I don't know how Father found
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out that they were on to him, but something happened make up
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his mind that the time had come to answer God's call in
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person and in a hurry.
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Of course I didn't know any of this at the time. I
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learned more than I'd like to admit -- some of it true and
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some of it pretty far fetched -- from the other kids over
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the next few weeks. Their mothers weren't censoring the
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news the way mine was. It kind of made me a celebrity for a
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while.
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The only thing that almost made me cry was the guilt
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I felt about not missing him.
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______________________
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At a nameless bend in the river
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We don't understand the first thing
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about most of what goes on around us.
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The operating system
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without which the disk drive won't boot.
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The inner workings
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of the sewage treatment plant downstream.
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Currents that lead fish to this reedy spot
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where we cast our lines from shore.
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How to cleanse the putrid
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streams of Eastern Europe.
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How a dollar is still worth a dollar
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after all that's gone down. Even this:
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why at sunset white-tailed deer
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come down to the river and graze
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unconcerned at our presence
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where all the parched afternoon
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they hid in shadow.
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The heaviness of flesh and bone
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we dream of more often than hold, and hold
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too tight sometimes, not quite believing. You.
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The simple rise and setting of the sun
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confound our pretentions. The way we still
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dial a touch-tone phone, confide our secrets
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more readily to pollsters than lovers.
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How we can speak in any voice
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other than our own. The constitution.
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How the fish we counted on slip our hooks
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and glide away into darkness.
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The red sky is omenless, our string bag
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empty. White-tailed deer
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lie panting in a field of clover
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under skeletal hydro towers.
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On the far shore throbbing windpipes
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unnumbered as leaves on the trees
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sing the only tune they know
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to the waning light.
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@ Colin Morton 1994
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-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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We are always leaving, Sandra
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and always returning.
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In a snowbound mountain pass
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near the great divide
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I read Cohen
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In Search of the Millenium
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and that other Cohen
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who sang of Montreal streets
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on his Aegean isle
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And on the red sands
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of a island in the Gulf
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of St. Lawrence I wrote
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of the joys of picking garbage
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from the post-war streets
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of Germany.
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Self-exiled Joyce
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established his claim
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to the streets of Dublin
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Blind Milton saw
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in the bright room of a dream
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his departed wife.
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And here's a prediction Sandra
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one snowy day before long
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you will look out
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on ice-bound Northumberland Strait
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and see this room in Ottawa
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all our faces around you
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and though you may write
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of Tierra del Fuego
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or Neptune or the dialogue
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of particle and wave
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we will see ourselves too
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reflected in your lines
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and thinking of you
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or dawn on the picket line
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or guitars in the desert
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we each will take up a pen
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and begin to write.
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@ Colin Morton 1994
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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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Woman on Her Way to Market
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No matter what negotiators said
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It cost her life to walk across a street -
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A sniper put a bullet through her head.
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She began to cross then crossed herself instead.
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An inky pool of blood grew around her feet
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No matter what negotiators said
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Around a table with the best intent.
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She wondered what to give her family to eat
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Then a sniper put a bullet through her head.
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Shots flew over her where she lay and bled
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Her last words out into the empty street.
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No matter what negotiators said.
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No time was given to remove the dead.
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None claim victory, none admit defeat.
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A sniper put a bullet through her head
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Then went home to supper, children, wife and bed
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To lose her memory in a sound night's sleep.
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No matter what negotiators said
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A sniper put a bullet through her head.
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@ Colin Morton 1994
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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY:
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JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE
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by
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DONALD F. THEALL
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University Professor
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Trent University
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<dtheall@trentu.ca>
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Copyright (c) 1992 by Donald F. Theall
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all rights reserved.
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Reprinted from:
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_Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)
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****************************
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|
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_The Gutenberg Galaxy_, a book which redirected the way
|
|
that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the
|
|
role of technological mediation in communication and
|
|
expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to
|
|
write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has
|
|
not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's
|
|
major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures
|
|
(such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida,
|
|
Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about
|
|
aspects of communication involving technological mediation,
|
|
speech, writing, and electronics. While all of these
|
|
connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic
|
|
Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific
|
|
bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist
|
|
contemporaries to the development of electric communication
|
|
and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality.
|
|
McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_"
|
|
established him as the first major disseminator of those
|
|
Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis
|
|
for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive
|
|
McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an
|
|
unconscious one, of our verbal heritage.
|
|
In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the
|
|
emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the
|
|
development of electromechanical communications, telematics
|
|
and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the
|
|
simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of
|
|
multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data:
|
|
All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon
|
|
city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of
|
|
grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it
|
|
was too complicated, trying to find your way to the
|
|
particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry
|
|
called that.^1^
|
|
This "consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted
|
|
from the banks of every computer in the human system"
|
|
creates an "unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged
|
|
in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of
|
|
data. Like city lights receding."^2^ Almost a decade
|
|
earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the
|
|
late 70s) display some striking similarities:^3^
|
|
It steps up the velocity of logical sequential
|
|
calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to
|
|
body count by touch . . . . It brings back the
|
|
Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers
|
|
are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy
|
|
in favor of decentralization. When applied to new
|
|
forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and
|
|
videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric
|
|
texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging
|
|
ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.^4^
|
|
McLuhan's "hieroglyphs" certainly more than anticipate
|
|
Gibson's "iconics" and McLuhan's particular use of
|
|
hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily
|
|
derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico.
|
|
It is not surprising then that McLuhan's works, side by
|
|
side with those of Gibson, have been avidly read by early
|
|
researchers in MIT's Media Lab^5^, for these researchers
|
|
also conceive of a VR composed, like the tribal and
|
|
collective "global village," of "tactile, haptic,
|
|
proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements."^6^
|
|
The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such
|
|
as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of
|
|
individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei
|
|
Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the
|
|
semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and
|
|
involvements. Duchamp, for example, became an early leading
|
|
figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of
|
|
painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light,
|
|
movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his _Large
|
|
Glass_^7^ and the serial publication of his accompanying
|
|
notes from _The Box of 1914_ through _The Green Box_ to _A
|
|
l'infinitif_. His interest in the notes as part of the
|
|
total work echo Joyce's own interest in the publication of
|
|
_Work in Progress_ and commentaries he organized upon it
|
|
(e.g., _Our Exagmination Round his Factification for
|
|
Incamination of Work in Progress_). Joyce also explores
|
|
similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and
|
|
concept. So the road to VR and MIT's Media Lab begins with
|
|
poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth
|
|
and early twentieth century; later, as Stuart Brand notes,
|
|
many of the Media Lab researchers of the 60s and 70s placed
|
|
great importance on collaboration with artists involved in
|
|
exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating
|
|
new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other
|
|
senses.^8^
|
|
Understanding the social and cultural implications of
|
|
VR and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the
|
|
inter-relationships between Gibson's now commonplace
|
|
description of cyberspace, McLuhan's modernist-influenced
|
|
vision of the development of electric media, and the
|
|
particular impact that Joyce had both on McLuhan's writings
|
|
about electrically mediated communication and on the views
|
|
of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco and Lacan regarding problems
|
|
of mediation and communication. Such a reassessment
|
|
requires that two central issues be discussed: (i) the
|
|
crucial nature of VR's challenge to the privileging of
|
|
language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used
|
|
by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the
|
|
idea of VR's presence as *the* super-medium that encompasses
|
|
and transcends all media. The cluster of critics who have
|
|
addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter
|
|
Ong, H.A. Innis and Eric Havelock, have--like them--failed
|
|
to comprehend the fact that McLuhan was disseminating a
|
|
Joycean view which grounded communication in tactility,
|
|
gesture and CNS processes, rather than promulgating the
|
|
emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality.
|
|
This emphasis on the tactile, the gestural and the play of
|
|
the CNS in communication is a key to Joyce's literary
|
|
exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist
|
|
colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual
|
|
development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would
|
|
integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and
|
|
neurological information in currently existing and newly
|
|
emerging art forms.
|
|
Joyce's work should be recognized as pioneering the
|
|
artistic exploration of two sets of differences--
|
|
orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media--that have
|
|
since become dominant themes in the discussion of these
|
|
questions. _Finnegans Wake_ is one of the first major
|
|
poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media
|
|
present to the traditionally accepted relationships between
|
|
speech, script and print. (_Ulysses_ also involves such an
|
|
encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic
|
|
development of mediated communication.) Imagine Joyce
|
|
around 1930 asking the question: what is the role of the
|
|
book in a culture which has discovered photography,
|
|
phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and
|
|
telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines,
|
|
advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion? What people
|
|
once read, they will now go to see in film and on
|
|
television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and
|
|
more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in
|
|
television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the
|
|
potentialities of sound recording.^10^ -> BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY
|
|
**********************************
|
|
|
|
The "counter-poetic," _Finnegans Wake_, provides one of
|
|
*the* key texts regarding the problem presented by the
|
|
dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its
|
|
frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or
|
|
language. This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic,
|
|
encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous
|
|
involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book
|
|
about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of
|
|
the new technology.^11^ The _Wake_ is the most
|
|
comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, of the
|
|
ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for
|
|
the arts of language and the privileged position of the
|
|
printed book. The _Wake_ dramatizes the necessary
|
|
deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world
|
|
where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with
|
|
entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting
|
|
information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety
|
|
of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print and
|
|
writing. Joyce's selection of Vico's _New Science_^12^ as
|
|
the structural scaffolding for the _Wake_--the equivalent of
|
|
Homer's _Odyssey_ in _Ulysses_--underscores how his interest
|
|
in the contemporary transformation of the book requires
|
|
grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of
|
|
communication, especially gesture and language and the
|
|
"prophetic" role of the poetic in shaping the future.
|
|
As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the
|
|
construction of artifacts and processes of communication in
|
|
the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the transformation
|
|
(not the death) of the book--going beyond the book as it had
|
|
historically evolved. Confronted with this situation, Joyce
|
|
seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the
|
|
book within this new communicative cosmos, while
|
|
simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development
|
|
of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium,
|
|
"virtual reality." Since the action takes place in a
|
|
dreamworld, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic
|
|
imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future.
|
|
His dreamworld envelops the reader within an aural sphere,
|
|
accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise
|
|
from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the
|
|
visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily
|
|
the most complex multi-media forms and envisions how they
|
|
will utilize his present, which will have become the past,
|
|
to transform the future.^13^
|
|
The hero(ine)^14^ in the _Wake_, "Here Comes
|
|
Everybody," is a communicating machine, "This harmonic
|
|
condenser enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an electric
|
|
transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a
|
|
presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and
|
|
ohmes." Joyce envisions the person as embodied within an
|
|
electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic
|
|
environment), which becomes an extension of the human body,
|
|
an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the
|
|
playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling
|
|
attention to the interplay of sensory information within the
|
|
electro-chemical neurological system. This medley of
|
|
elements and concerns, focussed on questioning the place of
|
|
oral and written language in an electro-mechanical
|
|
technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive
|
|
modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks
|
|
Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality.
|
|
Acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of
|
|
speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the
|
|
kinesthetic and other modes of expression, Joyce roots all
|
|
communication in gesture: "In the beginning was the gest he
|
|
jousstly says" (468.5-6). Here the originary nature of
|
|
gesture (gest, F. geste = gesture)^15^ is linked with the
|
|
mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale
|
|
(gest as a feat and a tale or romance). Gestures, like
|
|
signals and flashing lights that provide elementary
|
|
mechanical systems for communications, are "words of silent
|
|
power" (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, "Belisha beacon,
|
|
beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "Where
|
|
flash becomes word and silents selfloud." Since gestures,
|
|
and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from
|
|
the body, the "gest" as "flesh without word" (468.5-6) is "a
|
|
flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the
|
|
original sinse" [originary sense + the temporal, "since" +
|
|
original sin (239.1)]. "Communicake" parallels eating to
|
|
speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of
|
|
communion as participation in, and consumption of, the
|
|
Word--an observation adumbrated in the title of one of
|
|
Marcel Jousse's groundbreaking books on gesture as the
|
|
origin of language, _La Manducation de la Parole_ ("The
|
|
Mastication of the Word"). By treating the "gest" as a bit
|
|
(a bite), orality and the written word as projections of
|
|
gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a
|
|
communicating machine.^16^ The historical processes that
|
|
contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the
|
|
growing emphasis, in theories such as Kenneth Burke's, on
|
|
the idea that the goal of the symbolic action called
|
|
communication is *secular, paramodern communion*.^17^
|
|
The _Wake_ provides a self-reflexive explanation of the
|
|
communicative process of encoding and decoding required to
|
|
interpret an encoded text, which itself is
|
|
characteristically mechanical:
|
|
The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately
|
|
is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the
|
|
raiding there originally. That's the point of
|
|
eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in
|
|
soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded
|
|
can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere
|
|
grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have
|
|
occasioning cause causing effects and affects
|
|
occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me
|
|
take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's
|
|
tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the
|
|
hand is the hand of Sameas. (482.31-483.4)
|
|
The dreamer as a poet, a Hermetic thief, an "outlex"
|
|
(169.3)--i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and,
|
|
therefore, the law, "invents" the writing by originally
|
|
discovering the reading of the book and does so by "raiding"
|
|
[i.e., "plundering" (reading + raiding)].^18^ This reading
|
|
encompasses both the idealistic "eschatology" and the
|
|
excrementitious-materialistic (pun on scatology) within the
|
|
designing of this "book of kills" (deaths, deletions,
|
|
drinking sessions, flows of water--a counterpoint of
|
|
continuity and discontinuity),^19^ a book as carefully
|
|
crafted or machined as the illuminations of the _Book of
|
|
Kells_ are. Seeing and hearing are intricately involved in
|
|
this process, so the reader of this night-book also becomes
|
|
a "raider" of the original "reading-writing" through the
|
|
machinery of writing. It is a production "in soandso many
|
|
counterpoint words" that can be read only through the
|
|
machinery of decoding, for "What can't be coded can be
|
|
decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for"
|
|
(482.34). The tale that the pen writes is transmitted by
|
|
the post, and the whole process of communication and its
|
|
interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily
|
|
gesture-language: "The gist is the gist of Shaum but the
|
|
hand is the hand of Sameas" (483.3-4).[11]
|
|
Orality, particularly song, is grounded in the machinery of
|
|
the body's organs: "Singalingalying. Storiella as she is syung.
|
|
Whence followeup with endspeaking nots for yestures"
|
|
(267.7-9).^20^ The link is rhythm, for "Soonjemmijohns will
|
|
cudgel some a rhythmatick or other over
|
|
Browne and Nolan's divisional tables" (268.7-9). Gesture,
|
|
with its affiliation with all of the neuro-muscular
|
|
movements of the body, is a natural script or originary
|
|
writing, for the word "has been reconstricted out of oral
|
|
style into verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics"
|
|
(36.8-9). Since the oral is "reconstricted" (reconstructed
|
|
+ constricted or limited) into the verbal, words also are
|
|
crafted in relation to sound, a natural development of which
|
|
is "wordcraft": for example, hieroglyphs and primitive
|
|
script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.^21^ Runes and
|
|
ogham are literally "woodwordings," so pre- or proto-writing
|
|
(i.e., syllabic writing) is already "a mechanization of the
|
|
word," which is itself implicit in the body's use of
|
|
gesture.
|
|
Joyce's practice and his theoretical orientation imply
|
|
that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of
|
|
the word, the image, and the icon also changes. Under the
|
|
impact of electric communication, it is once again clear
|
|
that the concept of the word must embrace artifacts and
|
|
events as well.^22^ Writing and speech are subsumed into
|
|
entirely new relationships with non-phonemic sound, image,
|
|
gesture, movement, rhythm, and all modes of sensory input,
|
|
especially the tactile. To continue to speak about a
|
|
dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a misleading
|
|
over-simplification of the role that electric media play in
|
|
this transformation, a role best comprehended through
|
|
historical knowledge of the earliest stages of human
|
|
communication where objects, gestures and movements
|
|
apparently intermingled with verbal and non-verbal sounds.
|
|
Marschak's study of early cultural artifacts, the Aschers'
|
|
discussion of the quipu, and Levi-Strauss's discussions of
|
|
the kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of
|
|
some ancient, non-linguistic systems of communication.^23^
|
|
Adapting Vico's speculation that human communication begins
|
|
with the gestures and material symbols of the "mute," Joyce
|
|
early in the _Wake_ presents an encounter between two
|
|
characters whose names deliberately echo Mutt and Jeff of
|
|
comic strip fame. Mutt (until recently a mute) and Jute (a
|
|
nomadic invader) "excheck a few strong verbs weak oach
|
|
eather" (16.8-9).
|
|
Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce
|
|
traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine
|
|
development, right down to the TV and what it bodes for the
|
|
future. For example, an entire episode of the _Wake_
|
|
(I,5)^24^ is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and
|
|
the theory of their interpretation--textual hermeneutics--in
|
|
which the _Wake_ as a book is interpreted as if it were a
|
|
manuscript, "the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of all
|
|
scripture" (107.8). At each stage, Joyce recognizes how the
|
|
machinery of codification is implicit in the history of
|
|
communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes
|
|
that
|
|
on holding the verso against a lit rush this new
|
|
book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent
|
|
query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out
|
|
the piquant fact that it was but pierced but not
|
|
punctured (in the university sense of the term) by
|
|
numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged
|
|
instrument. . . . (123.34-124.3)
|
|
This illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the
|
|
telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the
|
|
early manuscript, just as any manuscript is a transformation
|
|
of the "wordcraft" of "woodwordings." "Morse code" is
|
|
indicative of the mechanics of codification, for while code
|
|
is essential to all communication (thus prior to the moment
|
|
when the mechanical is electrified), the role of
|
|
codification is radically transformed by mechanization.
|
|
The appearance of the printing press demonstrates the
|
|
effect of this radical transformation:
|
|
Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast
|
|
and great primer must once for omniboss step
|
|
rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no
|
|
virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one
|
|
warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
|
|
hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though
|
|
not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister
|
|
Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies.
|
|
Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word
|
|
will be bound over to carry three score and ten
|
|
toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends
|
|
Jined . . . . (20.7-16)
|
|
As "Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and
|
|
great primer" steps "rubrickredd out of the wordpress," the
|
|
dream reminds us that "papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
|
|
hints and misses in prints." Topics (L. topos) and types
|
|
(L. typus) as figures, forms, images, topics and
|
|
commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing and rhetoric,
|
|
are now realized through typesetting. Implicit in the
|
|
technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal
|
|
ambivalence, for "every word will be bound over to carry
|
|
three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book
|
|
of Doublends Jined." Printing sets in place the "root
|
|
language" (424.17) residing in the types and topes of the
|
|
world and potentially eliminates a multitude of alternate
|
|
codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects,
|
|
movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the
|
|
electromechanical march towards VR and cyberspace.
|
|
By the 1930s, in a pub scene in the _Wake_, Joyce
|
|
playfully anticipated how central sporting events or
|
|
political debates would be for television when he described
|
|
the TV projection of a fight being viewed by the pub's
|
|
"regulars" (possibly the first fictional TV bar room scene
|
|
in literary history). Joyce's presentation of this image of
|
|
the battle of Butt and Taff, which is peppered with complex
|
|
puns involving terminology associated with the technical
|
|
details of TV transmission, has its own metamorphic quality,
|
|
underscored by the "viseversion" (vice versa imaging) of
|
|
Butt and Taff's images on "the bairdboard bombardment
|
|
screen" ("bairdboard" because John Logie Baird developed TV
|
|
in 1925). Joyce explains how "the bairdboard bombardment
|
|
screen," the TV as receiver, receives the composite video
|
|
signal "in scynopanc pulses" (the synchronization pulses
|
|
that form part of the composite video signal), that come
|
|
down the "photoslope" on the "carnier walve" (i.e., the
|
|
carrier wave which carries the composite video signal) "with
|
|
the bitts bugtwug their teffs." Joyce imagines this
|
|
receiver to be a "light barricade" against which the charge
|
|
of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed,
|
|
reproducing the "bitts." Although (at least to my
|
|
knowledge) bit was not used as a technical term in
|
|
communication technology at the time, Joyce is still able,
|
|
on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or
|
|
photons as bits of information creating the TV picture.
|
|
Speech, print and writing are interwoven with
|
|
electromechanical technologies of communication throughout
|
|
the _Wake_. References to the manufacture of books,
|
|
newspapers and other products of the printing press abound.
|
|
Machineries and technological organizations accompany this
|
|
development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad
|
|
men who produce "Abortisements" (181.33). Since complex
|
|
communication technology is characteristic of the later
|
|
stages, in addition to newspapers, radio, "dupenny"
|
|
magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), there is "a
|
|
phantom city phaked by philm pholk," by those who would
|
|
"roll away the reel world." Telecommunications materialize
|
|
again and again throughout the night of the _Wake_, where
|
|
"television kills telephony."
|
|
The "tele-" prefix, betraying an element of futurology
|
|
in the dream, appears in well over a dozen words including
|
|
in addition to the familiar forms terms such as "teleframe,"
|
|
"telekinesis," "telesmell," "telesphorously," "televisible,"
|
|
"televox," or "telewisher," while familiar forms also appear
|
|
in a variety of transformed "messes of mottage," such as
|
|
"velivision" and "dullaphone." This complex verbal play all
|
|
hinges on the inter-translatability of the emerging forms of
|
|
technologically mediated communication. In the opening
|
|
episode of the second part, the "Feenicht's Playhouse," an
|
|
imaginary play produced by HCE's children in their nursery
|
|
is "wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in
|
|
cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four
|
|
tubbloids" (219.28-9). Like the cinema, "wordloosed"
|
|
(wirelessed but also let loose) transglobally, all such
|
|
media are engaged in a "crowdblast" of existing languages
|
|
and cultures, producing an interplay between local cultures
|
|
and a pan-international hyperculture.
|
|
In the concluding moments of the _Wake_, Joyce
|
|
generalizes his pre-cybernetic vision in one long intricate
|
|
performance that not only concerns the book itself, but also
|
|
anticipates by twenty years some major discussions of
|
|
culture, communication, and technology. A brief scene
|
|
setting: this is the moment in the closing episode just as
|
|
the HCE is awakening. In the background he hears noises
|
|
from the machines in the laundry next door. It is breakfast
|
|
time and there are sounds of food being prepared; eggs are
|
|
being cooked and will be eaten, so there is anticipation of
|
|
the process of digestion that is about to take place.^25^
|
|
At this moment a key passage, inviting interminable
|
|
interpretation, presents in very abstract language a
|
|
generalized model of production and consumption, which is
|
|
also the recorso of the schema of this nocturnal poem, that
|
|
consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself
|
|
digests and produces new cells and excrement--how else could
|
|
one be a poet of "litters" as well as letters and be
|
|
"litterery" (114.17; 422.35) as well as literary?
|
|
The passage begins by speaking about "our wholemole
|
|
millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational
|
|
gazebocroticon," which may be the book, a letter to be
|
|
written, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the
|
|
sexual process, the mechanical "mannormillor
|
|
clipperclappers" (614.13) of the nearby Mannor Millor
|
|
laundry, the temporal movement of history, or a theory of
|
|
engineering, for essentially it relates the production of
|
|
cultural artifacts or the consumption of matter (like
|
|
reading a book, seeing a film or eating eggs; the text
|
|
mentions a "farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as
|
|
eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can"
|
|
(614.28)). The passage concludes, "as sure as herself
|
|
pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs"
|
|
(615.9-10). Here the frequent pairing of speaking
|
|
(writing) with eating is brought to a climax in which it is
|
|
related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of
|
|
nature, decomposing into "bits" and recombining.
|
|
These bits, described as "the dialytically [dialectic +
|
|
dialysis] separated elements of precedent decomposition,"
|
|
may be eggs, or other "homely codes" such as the
|
|
"heroticisms, catastrophes and ec-centricities" (the stuff
|
|
of history or the dreamers stuttering speech or his
|
|
staggering movements) transmitted elementally, "type by
|
|
tope, letter from litter, word at ward, sendence of sundance
|
|
. . ." (614.33-615.2). All of these bits--matter, eggs,
|
|
words, TV signals, concepts, what you will--are
|
|
"anastomosically assimilated and preteri-dentified
|
|
paraidiotically," producing "the sameold gamebold adomic
|
|
structure . . . as highly charged with electrons as
|
|
hophazards can effective it" (615.5-8). In anticipation of
|
|
the contemporary electronic definition of the "bit," Joyce
|
|
associates the structure of communication (ranging from TV
|
|
and telegraphic signals to morphophonemic information and
|
|
kinesthesia) with bits of signals, "data" and information.
|
|
He presents it as essentially an assemblage of
|
|
multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing
|
|
moment, for it occurs by the crossing of pluralistic
|
|
branches of differing motifs, through a process of
|
|
transmission involving flows, particularly the flowing of
|
|
blood, water and speech, and breaks such as the
|
|
discontinuous charges of electrical energy, telegraphy, and
|
|
punctuation--those "endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.8).
|
|
|
|
-> BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY
|
|
**********************************
|
|
|
|
Here Joyce's entire prophetic, schizoid vision of
|
|
cyberspace seems somewhat Deleuzian. It is an ambivalent
|
|
and critical vision, for the "ambiviolence" of the
|
|
"langdwage" throughout the _Wake_ implies critique as it
|
|
unfolds this history, since Joyce still situates parody
|
|
within satire. He does not free it from socio-political
|
|
reference, as a free-floating "postmodernist" play with the
|
|
surface of signifiers would. This can be noted in the way
|
|
that Joyce first probes what came to be one of the keystones
|
|
of McLuhanism. Joyce plays throughout the work with spheres
|
|
and circles, some of which parody one of the mystical
|
|
definitions of God frequently attributed to Alan of Lille
|
|
(Alanus de Insulis), but sometimes referred to as Pascal's
|
|
sphere. Speaking of a daughter-goddess figure, he says:
|
|
our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima to expense herselfs as
|
|
sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all
|
|
directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the
|
|
infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and
|
|
manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has
|
|
thoughts of that eternal Rome) . . . . (298.27-33)
|
|
Here a sphere is imagined whose center is everywhere and
|
|
circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and
|
|
undescribable (though apparently the paradigmic perimeter is
|
|
sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself
|
|
without apparent limit. This is both an embodied and a
|
|
disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentering the image so
|
|
as to impede any closure. The same spherical principle is
|
|
applied more widely to the presentation of the sense of
|
|
hearing. The reception of messages by the hero/ine of the
|
|
_Wake_, "(Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)" (108.23), is
|
|
accomplished by "bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down
|
|
in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a
|
|
melegoturny marygoraumd" (309.22-4), a sphere for it
|
|
requires "a gain control of circumcentric megacycles"
|
|
(310.7-8). It can truly be said of HCE, "Ear! Ear! Weakear!
|
|
An allness eversides!" (568.26),^26^ precisely because he is
|
|
"human, erring and condonable"(58.19), yet "humile,
|
|
commune and ensectuous" (29.30), suffering many deprivations
|
|
his "hardest crux ever" (623.33) [italics mine].
|
|
Though "humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this]
|
|
exposition of failures" (589.17) living with "Heinz cans
|
|
everywhere"(581.5), still protests his fate "making use of
|
|
sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would
|
|
challenge their hemosphores to exterminate them"
|
|
(81.25) by decentering or dislocating any attempts to
|
|
enclose him.
|
|
This discussion of sphere and hearing critically
|
|
anticipates what McLuhan later called "acoustic space"--a
|
|
fundamental cyberspatial conception with its creation of
|
|
multi-dimensional environments, a spherical environment
|
|
within which aural information is received by the CNS--that
|
|
also embodies a transformation of the hermetic poetic
|
|
insight that "the universe (or nature) [or in earlier
|
|
versions, God] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is
|
|
everywhere, the circumference nowhere."^27^ Today, VR, as
|
|
Borges' treatment of Pascal's sphere seems to imply, is
|
|
coming to be our contemporary pre-millennial epitome of this
|
|
symbol, a place where each participant (rather than *the*
|
|
deity), as microcosm, is potentially the enigmatic center.
|
|
People englobed within virtual worlds find themselves
|
|
interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual
|
|
multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through
|
|
complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks.
|
|
All of this must necessarily relate back to the way
|
|
Joyce treats the subject of and produces the artifact that
|
|
is *the book*. While, beginning with Mallarme, the themes
|
|
of the book and the death of literature resound through
|
|
modernism, Joyce's transformation of the book filtered
|
|
through the "mcluhanitic" reaction to "mcluhanism" becomes,
|
|
in the usual interpretation of McLuhan, the annunciation of
|
|
the death of the book, *not* its transformation, as with
|
|
Joyce. Joyce is important, for following Marcel Jousse and
|
|
Vico,^28^ he situates speech and writing as modes of
|
|
communication within a far richer and more complex bodily
|
|
and gestural theory of communication than that represented
|
|
by the reductive dichotomy of the oral and the literate. As
|
|
the predominance of print declines, the _Wake_ explores the
|
|
history of communication by comically assimilating the
|
|
method of Vico's _The New Science_--which, as one of the
|
|
first systematic and empirical studies of the place of
|
|
poetic action in the history of how people develop systems
|
|
of signs and symbols, attributes people's ability for
|
|
constructing their society to the poetic function.
|
|
Joyce avoids that facile over-simplification of the
|
|
complexities of print, arising from the orality/literacy
|
|
dichotomy, which attributes a privileged role to language as
|
|
verbal--a privilege based on theological and metaphysical
|
|
claims. The same dichotomy creates problems in discussing
|
|
technological and other non-verbal forms of mediated
|
|
communication, including VR and TV. At one point in the
|
|
_Wake_ "Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our
|
|
eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!" (52.18-9), for
|
|
TV also comprehends the visual and the kinesthetic. Yet
|
|
most McLuhanites who have opted for the orality/literacy
|
|
split still call it an oral medium in opposition to print.
|
|
The same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on
|
|
gesture and rhythm, is analyzed as an oral medium. As the
|
|
_Wake_ jocularly observes:
|
|
seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the
|
|
cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second
|
|
parents . . . the touching seene. The solence of that
|
|
stilling! Here one might a fin fell. Boomster
|
|
rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape from Wildu
|
|
Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as
|
|
Mum's mutyness, this mimage . . . is odable to os
|
|
across the wineless Ere no dor nor mere eerie nor liss
|
|
potent of suggestion than in the tales of the
|
|
tingmount. (52.34-53.6)
|
|
The mime plays with silence, sight, touch and movement
|
|
seeming like a landscape or a movie.
|
|
Facile over-simplification also overlooks that long
|
|
before the beginnings of the trend towards cyberspace, print
|
|
had not been strictly oriented towards linearity and
|
|
writing, for the print medium was supplemented by its
|
|
encyclopedic, multi-media nature, absorbing other media such
|
|
as illustrations, charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and
|
|
tables, not all aspects of which are precisely linear.
|
|
While writing may have had a predominantly linear tendency,
|
|
its history is far more complex, as Elizabeth Eisenstein has
|
|
established.^29^ The orality/literacy distinction does not
|
|
provide an adequately rich concept for dealing with print,
|
|
any more than it does for the most complex and comprehensive
|
|
images of virtual reality and participatory hyperspace
|
|
(e.g., sophisticated extensions of the datagloves or the
|
|
Aspen map), which, to adapt a Joycean phrase, directly
|
|
transmit "feelful thinkamalinks." Since VR should enable a
|
|
person to feel the bodily set of another person or place,
|
|
while simultaneously receiving multiple intersensory
|
|
messages, understanding the role of the body in
|
|
communication is crucial for understanding VR. When McLuhan
|
|
and Edward Carpenter first spoke about their concept of
|
|
orality (linked to aurality, mouth to ear, as line of print
|
|
to eye scan), it entailed recognizing the priority and
|
|
primacy of tactility and inter-sensory activity in
|
|
communication, for "In the beginning there was the gest."
|
|
As Kenneth Burke realized in the 30s, Joyce's grounding
|
|
communication and language in gesture is distinctly
|
|
different from an approach which privileges language, for it
|
|
involves a complete embodying of communication. While the
|
|
oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire CNS is
|
|
necessarily involved in all communication, including speech.
|
|
As John Bishop has shown in _Joyce's Book of the Dark_, the
|
|
sleeper primarily receives sensations with his ear, but
|
|
these are tranformed within the body into the world of signs
|
|
that permeate the dream and which constitute the _Wake_.^30^
|
|
Joyce views language as "gest," as an imaginary means of
|
|
embodying intellectual-emotional complexes, his "feelful
|
|
thinkamalinks." From this perspective, the semic units of
|
|
the _Wake_ (integrated complexes constructed from the
|
|
interaction of speech and print involving, rhythm,
|
|
orthography as sign and gesture and visual image) assume the
|
|
role of dialogue with other modes of mediated communication,
|
|
exploiting their limitations and differences. Joyce crafts
|
|
a new lingua for a world where the poetic book will deal
|
|
with those aspects of the imaginary that cannot be
|
|
encompassed within technologically mediated communication.
|
|
Simultaneously, he recognizes that a trend towards virtual
|
|
reality is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or
|
|
technologically mediated modes of communication. This
|
|
process posits a continuous dialogue in which _Ulysses_ and
|
|
the _Wake_ were designed to play key roles.
|
|
As Joyce--who quipped that "some of the means I use are
|
|
trivial--and some are quadrivial"^31^--was aware, ancient
|
|
rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the Aeolus
|
|
episode of _Ulysses_ and in the "Triv and Quad" section (II,
|
|
2) of the _Wake_) also included those interactive contexts
|
|
where the body was an intrinsic part of communication.
|
|
Delivery involved controlling the body, and the context
|
|
within which it was presented, as well as the voice. The
|
|
actual rhetorical action (particularly in judicial oratory)
|
|
also frequently involved demonstration and witnesses. This
|
|
analysis, closer to the pre-literate, recognized the way
|
|
actual communication integrated oral, visual, rhythmical,
|
|
gestural and kinesthetic components. Recent research into
|
|
the classical and medieval "arts of memory," inspired by
|
|
Frances Yates,^32^ have demonstrated that memory involves
|
|
the body, a sense of the dramatic and theatrical, visual
|
|
icons and movement, as well as the associative power of the
|
|
oral itself. Joyce playfully invokes this memory system
|
|
familiar to him from his Jesuit education: "After sound,
|
|
light and heat, memory, will and understanding. Here (the
|
|
memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for
|
|
wringwrowdy wready are . . ." (266.18-22). A classical
|
|
world, which recognized such features of the communicative
|
|
process, could readily speak about the poem as a "speaking
|
|
picture" and the painting as "silent poetry." Here, there
|
|
is an inclusiveness of the means available rather than a
|
|
dependency on a single channel of communication.
|
|
Joyce was so intrigued by the potentials of the new
|
|
culture of time and space for reconstructing and
|
|
revolutionizing the book that he claimed himself to be "the
|
|
greatest engineer," as well as a Renaissance man, who was
|
|
also a "musicmaker, a philosophist and heaps of other
|
|
things."^33^ The mosaic of the _Wake_ contributes to
|
|
understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the
|
|
radical constitution of the electronic cosmos that Joyce
|
|
called "the chaosmos of Alle" (118.21). In this "chaosmos,"
|
|
engineered by a sense of interactive mnemotechnics, he
|
|
intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of
|
|
cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic
|
|
organization of a network, "the matrix," which underlies the
|
|
construction of imaginary and virtual worlds. One crucial
|
|
reason for raising the historic image of Joyce in a
|
|
discussion of cyberspace is that he carries out one of the
|
|
most comprehensive contemporary discussions of virtual
|
|
recollection (a concept first articulated by Henri Bergson
|
|
as virtual memory).^34^ In counterpoint to the emerging
|
|
technological capability to create the "virtual reality" of
|
|
cyberspace, Joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the
|
|
creation of virtual worlds within natural language.
|
|
That tactile, gestural-based dreamworld has built-in
|
|
mnemonic systems:
|
|
A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall
|
|
memorise. By her freewritten. Hopely for ear that
|
|
annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. Is it in the
|
|
now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the
|
|
branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and
|
|
yesters outcome . . . . (280.01-07)
|
|
Joyce's virtual worlds began with the recognition of
|
|
"everybody" as a poet (each person is co-producer; he quips,
|
|
"his producers are they not his consumers?"). All culture
|
|
becomes the panorama of his dream; the purpose of poetic
|
|
writing in a post-electric world is the painting of that
|
|
interior (which is not the psychoanalytic, but the social
|
|
unconscious) and the providing of new language appropriate
|
|
to perceiving the complexities of the new world of
|
|
technologically reproducible media:
|
|
What has gone? How it ends?
|
|
Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every
|
|
sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's
|
|
truth, tomorrow's trend. (614.19-21)
|
|
Joyce's text is embodied in gesture, enclosed in words,
|
|
enmeshed in time, and engaged in foretelling "Today's truth.
|
|
Tomorrow's trend." The poet reproducing his producers is
|
|
the divining prophet.
|
|
If speaking of Joyce and cyberspace seems to imply a
|
|
kind of futurology, the whole of McLuhan's project was
|
|
frequently treated as prophesying the emergence of a new
|
|
tribalized global society--the global village, itself
|
|
anticipated by Joyce's "international" language of
|
|
multilingual puns. In fact, in _War and Peace in the Global
|
|
Village_, McLuhan uses Wakese (mostly from Joyce, freely
|
|
associated) as marginalia. McLuhan flourished in his role
|
|
as an international guru by casting himself in the role of
|
|
"*the* prime prophet" announcing the coming of a new era of
|
|
communication^35^ (now talked about as virtual reality or
|
|
cyberspace, though he never actually used that word). The
|
|
prime source of his "prophecies," which he never concealed,
|
|
is to be found in Joyce and Vico.^36^ The entire Joycean
|
|
dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the
|
|
anticipated awakening (Vico's fourth age of ricorso
|
|
following birth, marriage, and death) is "providential
|
|
divining":
|
|
Ere we are! Signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that,
|
|
primeval conditions having gradually receded but
|
|
nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having
|
|
to a great extent persisted through intermittences of
|
|
sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn
|
|
sepulture and providential divining, making possible
|
|
and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves
|
|
and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under
|
|
consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary
|
|
military maritory monetary morphological
|
|
circumformation in a more or less settled state of
|
|
equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium.
|
|
(599.8-18)
|
|
Earlier, it is said of the dreamer that "He caun ne'er be
|
|
bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in
|
|
every past that is present . . ." (496.34-497.1). Joyce,
|
|
from whom McLuhan derived the idea, is playing with the
|
|
medieval concept of natural prophecy, making it a
|
|
fundamental feature of the epistemology of his dream world,
|
|
in which the "give and take" of the "mind factory," an
|
|
"antithesis of ambidual anticipation," generates auspices,
|
|
auguries, and divination--for "DIVINITY NOT DEITY [is] THE
|
|
UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE" (282.R7-R13).
|
|
Natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about
|
|
futurology with which Joyce and McLuhan were naturally
|
|
familiar from scholasticism and Thomism, occurs through a
|
|
reading of history and its relation to that virtual,
|
|
momentary social text (the present), which is dynamic and
|
|
always undergoing change. Joyce appears to blend this
|
|
medieval concept with classical sociological ideas--of
|
|
prophecy as an "intermediation"--quite consistent with his
|
|
concepts of communication as involving aspects of
|
|
participation and communion. It is only through some such
|
|
reading that the future existent in history can be known and
|
|
come to be. McLuhan's reading, adapted from Joyce, of the
|
|
collision of history and the present moment led him to
|
|
foresee a world emerging where communication would be
|
|
tactile, post-verbal, fully participatory and
|
|
pan-sensory.^37^
|
|
Why ought communication history and theory take account
|
|
of Joyce's poetic project? First, because he designed a new
|
|
language (later disseminated by McLuhan, Eco, and Derrida)
|
|
to carry out an in-depth interpretation of complex
|
|
socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic
|
|
production. Two brief examples: Hollywood "wordloosing
|
|
celluloid soundscript over seven seas," or the products of
|
|
the Hollywood dream factory itself as "a rolling away of the
|
|
reel world," reveal media's potential international
|
|
domination as well as the problems film form raises for the
|
|
mutual claims of the imaginary and the real. For example,
|
|
the term "abortisements" (advertisements) suggests the
|
|
manipulation of fetishized femininity with its submerged
|
|
relation of advertisement to butchering--the segmentation of
|
|
the body as object into an assemblage of parts.
|
|
Second, Joyce's work is a critique of communication's
|
|
historical role in the production of culture, and it
|
|
constitutes one of the earliest recognitions of the
|
|
importance of Vico to a contemporary history of
|
|
communication and culture.^38^ Third, his work is itself
|
|
the first "in-depth" contemporary exploration of the
|
|
complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking,
|
|
aurality, and orality. Fourth, developing Vico's earlier
|
|
insights and anticipating Kenneth Burke, he sees the
|
|
importance of the "poetic" as a concept in communication,
|
|
for the poetic is the means of generating new communicative
|
|
potentials between medium and message. This provides the
|
|
poetic, the arts, and other modes of cultural production
|
|
with a crucial role in a semiotic ecology of communication,
|
|
an ecology of sense, and making sense. Fifth, in the
|
|
creative project of this practice, Joyce develops one of the
|
|
most complex discussions of the contemporary transformation
|
|
of our media of communication. And finally, his own work is
|
|
itself an exemplum of the socio-ecological role of the
|
|
poetic in human communication.
|
|
VR or cyberspace, as an assemblage of a multiplicity of
|
|
existing and new media, dramatizes the relativity of our
|
|
classifications of media and their effects. The newly
|
|
evolving global metropolis arising in the age of cyberspace
|
|
is a site where people are intellectual nomads:
|
|
differentiation, difference, and decentering characterize
|
|
its structure. Joyce and the arts of high modernism and
|
|
postmodernism provide a solid appreciation of how people
|
|
constantly reconstruct or remake reality through the
|
|
traversing of the multi-sensory fragments of a "virtual
|
|
world" and of the tremendous powers with which electricity
|
|
and the analysis of mechanization would endow the paramedia
|
|
that would eventually emerge.
|
|
->
|
|
|
|
WHEN FATHER CROSSED THE LINE
|
|
|
|
by
|
|
|
|
G. L. Eikenberry
|
|
|
|
|
|
It was raining. There was no other reason a twelve
|
|
year old would hang around the house after lunch in the
|
|
middle of July. The summer holiday had not yet gone stale.
|
|
I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to convince myself
|
|
I was more interested in a new model kit than trying to talk
|
|
mother into letting me go to Al's to play football in his
|
|
basement when Father threw open the back door and hit the
|
|
kitchen like a tidal wave. It was just barely two o'clock.
|
|
I couldn't think what might bring him home from work so
|
|
early, especially in the middle of the week.
|
|
|
|
"Michael, you're home. Good. Where's your sister?"
|
|
He always talked like that when he was in one of his moods -
|
|
- his jaw clenched, the muscles popping out below his
|
|
temples, the furrows in his forehead deep enough to stick
|
|
pennies in. I never knew anybody else that could yell as
|
|
loud as he could, hardly opening his mouth.
|
|
|
|
"I think she's at Valerie's."
|
|
|
|
"Go get her. I want everyone here in half an hour.
|
|
We're going on a trip."
|
|
|
|
"A trip? Today? I was just starting a new model."
|
|
It seemed a little too strange to get excited over.
|
|
|
|
"No lip. Just move. Is your mother upstairs?" He
|
|
didn't wait for an answer. "And tell that sister of yours
|
|
no dawdling. Understand?"
|
|
|
|
"Yes sir." I really beat it down to Valerie's and
|
|
got back as fast as I could. Becky promised she'd be home
|
|
as soon as she helped Valerie put things away. As I opened
|
|
the back door I could hear Mother and Father upstairs.
|
|
Their voices were loud.
|
|
|
|
I was glad Becky wasn't back yet. I didn't think a
|
|
seven year old should hear her such yelling. I was quiet so
|
|
they wouldn't know I was back.
|
|
|
|
Mother's voice was shrill, almost brittle, "I just
|
|
don't understand why it has to be so soon. Why does it have
|
|
to be this very day?"
|
|
|
|
"When the Lord speaks, his servants act. They don't
|
|
say, 'Give me a couple of days to sort things out,' They
|
|
obey. I'm going down to the church. I expect you and the
|
|
children to be packed and ready to go by the time I get
|
|
back. Remember, we'll be needing warm clothes where we're
|
|
going. Pack a supper. We'll be driving straight through."
|
|
|
|
"Do you mind telling me where the Lord's supposed to
|
|
be sending us that we'll need warm clothes in July?"
|
|
|
|
"'Supposed to?'" He made a sound like some kind of
|
|
animal. I heard it when he hit her. It scared me. I could
|
|
only remember one other time when he had hit her. That was
|
|
when she borrowed from the mission money to buy Becky's new
|
|
Easter shoes on the last day of a sale. It didn't seem
|
|
right that God always seemed to fit into the picture when he
|
|
hit her. "I'll hear no more of your blasphemy. I'll be
|
|
back before five. Be ready."
|
|
|
|
I heard him on the stairs. I scrambled back out the
|
|
door so I could pretend I was just coming in.
|
|
|
|
"What took you so long? And where's your sister?"
|
|
|
|
"I -- she --"
|
|
|
|
"Never mind the excuses. Just get upstairs and help
|
|
your mother. We leave as soon as I get back from church --
|
|
before supper. Your mother will pack some sandwiches for
|
|
the car."
|
|
The door slammed behind him.
|
|
|
|
#
|
|
#
|
|
|
|
Nobody spoke. There was only the thrumming of the
|
|
tires and the chattering of the valves in the rattly old
|
|
Ford. Even Becky was quiet, and Becky was one of those kids
|
|
that never stopped talking.
|
|
|
|
At first I tried to ask questions like where were we
|
|
going and when would we be back. I complained a little
|
|
about not having any time to tell my friends. I knew that
|
|
Father's sudden journey would pretty well wreck any chance I
|
|
had of getting in with Al's crowd. You can't just disappear
|
|
in the middle of summer without people thinking you're
|
|
weird. I probably said a lot more than I usually would have
|
|
because he was driving and he couldn't hit me. I was
|
|
sitting on the other side of the car behind Mother. The
|
|
only way he could get at me was by thundering away like he
|
|
used to when I was little and he was afraid to hit me. That
|
|
was before he quit drinking and got religious. If he came
|
|
home drunk and forgot I was too little to hit I had to hide
|
|
back in under the sink where he couldn't get at me. I could
|
|
stay there for a long time. Then he'd boom at me with that
|
|
big voice, cursing and saying nasty things. After he
|
|
started going to church the words changed, but not much else
|
|
did.
|
|
|
|
"Michael, you will learn that there are some things
|
|
a child does not question. There are some things that even
|
|
a man does not question. Do you think the Lord gives a --
|
|
fig -- about how you get on with that those brats you
|
|
idolize? You must put aside such things and embrace His
|
|
Greater Purpose."
|
|
|
|
"Yeah, well, okay, but --"
|
|
|
|
"No buts. And don't get smug over there. I can
|
|
stop this car and thrash you if I have to. Now be quiet and
|
|
pray. Pray for the Lord's guidance, for His help to see
|
|
beyond your petty, childish concerns. Pray that He will
|
|
show you where you fit in His Plan."
|
|
|
|
When he started in with the praying business I knew
|
|
I was on the verge of going too far. I knew better than to
|
|
get him too stirred up, even if he couldn't get at me right
|
|
away. I shut up and sulked.
|
|
|
|
Mother tried to reassure us as she passed out the
|
|
sandwiches and carrot sticks, almost whispering vague
|
|
assurances that things would be all right.
|
|
|
|
That's when the car started to fill up with that
|
|
thick, syrupy feeling that made everybody feel numb and not
|
|
say anything. We didn't even have books. Usually when we
|
|
travelled we had new books or something. There was nothing
|
|
to do but read road signs.
|
|
|
|
I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. The old car stink
|
|
and the stickiness of the vinyl upholstery on my cheek
|
|
wouldn't let me forget that I was in a lousy situation
|
|
headed for something that was bound to be worse.
|
|
|
|
When we crossed the line into Quebec, somehow, the
|
|
way Father always talked, I expected everything to be
|
|
different, but nothing changed. There wasn't even a line,
|
|
just a sign.
|
|
|
|
We were supposed to be going some place cold, but I
|
|
couldn't figure out where. I wondered about places like the
|
|
Yukon or the Northwest Territories -- some place like that
|
|
wouldn't be so bad, but it couldn't be any place good like
|
|
that. Even if we did go some place neat, he'd find a way to
|
|
make it turn out bad. I wanted to be excited, but I
|
|
couldn't. Everybody would just think I was on some kind of
|
|
weird missionary trip with my weird father, Crazy Old Walter
|
|
Cleary -- off on another God binge. That's the way they
|
|
talked about Father. I heard them once in the barber shop
|
|
when nobody in the back room, where Mr. Collins kept the rum
|
|
and the poker deck knew I was there.
|
|
|
|
I tried counting trees for a while -- not all the
|
|
trees, just hardwoods bigger around than me. Then it got
|
|
too for that. There was nothing left but thinking. I hated
|
|
thinking at times like that. He told me to pray, but how
|
|
was I supposed to pray? If I prayed the things I was
|
|
thinking, the Lord would strike me dead. I hated anyone --
|
|
anything -- that would do rip me right out of the middle of
|
|
the summer. Deep down, I didn't really believe God had
|
|
anything to do with it. I had even thought about running
|
|
away instead of getting into the car but I didn't dare.
|
|
God's wrath was terrifying. Father's wrath was worse.
|
|
|
|
#
|
|
#
|
|
|
|
It was dark -- like hiding in the hall closet,
|
|
wrapped up in Grandpa's big black coat when I was six. We
|
|
were almost the only car on the road. I had been sleeping.
|
|
Father was still driving, his hands clamped to the top of
|
|
the steering wheel, monster movie greenish from the glow of
|
|
the dashboard lights. I wondered what time it was. I
|
|
wondered where we were -- but not enough to shift around so
|
|
I could look out the window.
|
|
|
|
"Today we cross over the line into a new life. We
|
|
re-dedicate our lives into the service of the Lord. Right
|
|
now we're driving through Quebec. Tonight we sleep in the
|
|
car. Tomorrow the car will be loaded onto a train and
|
|
carried, with us, into Labrador. Then we'll drive over
|
|
long, rugged roads eventually to come to a place where I was
|
|
stationed during the war."
|
|
|
|
No one had asked him anything. He just boomed out
|
|
his revelation without warning. Becky woke up with a start
|
|
and just about jumped out of her skin. I wanted to ask why
|
|
the Lord couldn't think of someplace better than some hole
|
|
at the end of the world where Father happened to have been
|
|
during the war, but I knew enough to strike the question
|
|
down before it ever crossed my lips. I had learned the
|
|
habit of guilt quite well. I was agonizing over my doubt
|
|
and my unspoken blasphemy when the flashing lights appeared
|
|
in the rear window.
|
|
|
|
At first Father seemed to accelerate -- not abruptly
|
|
-- not enough to worry us. Then he eased off and brought
|
|
the car slowly over to the shoulder. He was out of the car
|
|
quickly.
|
|
|
|
I heard Father say "I trust we can do this in your
|
|
vehicle, officer. There's no reason for them to hear."
|
|
That was it.
|
|
|
|
At first I didn't catch on that Father was in really
|
|
serious trouble. He had gotten speeding tickets before.
|
|
But we sat there for a long time -- long enough for me to
|
|
give up counting how many times the light on the R.C.M.P.
|
|
car went around. Mother was trying not to let on that she
|
|
was crying. She never cried over speeding tickets. When
|
|
they moved Father to the back seat of the police car it
|
|
finally began to dawn on me that God was off the hook. None
|
|
of this had anything to do with God -- or at least, it
|
|
hadn't been His idea.
|
|
|
|
The rest of the night was a jumble. Mother told us
|
|
to keep quiet and stay in the car when they came back to
|
|
talk to her. Then, after a few minutes, the one big R. C.
|
|
M. Policeman stood outside the car while she got back in and
|
|
told us that Father would be going with the other
|
|
"gentleman" while the one waiting by the car drove us to a
|
|
place where we could spend the night. She said she would
|
|
call Aunt Jo and Uncle Randy so one of them could come and
|
|
drive us back home the next day. She didn't actually come
|
|
out and say it, but I knew Father wouldn't be going with us.
|
|
I didn't try to explain much to Becky except that we
|
|
wouldn't be going to Labrador.
|
|
|
|
After that there was a motel where everybody spoke
|
|
French, and mother was out by the Coke machine for long time
|
|
talking on a pay phone while Becky cried. It wasn't that
|
|
she knew what was going on, it was just that everything was
|
|
strange and she was tired.
|
|
|
|
The only other thing I remember about the motel is
|
|
that it was cold for July and the heat register smelled like
|
|
the dust under the dresser in the spare room in Grandma's
|
|
house. Later, the next day, came the long drive back in
|
|
Uncle Randy's new red car while Aunt Jo drove Mother in
|
|
ours. I never saw Father again after that night. Even
|
|
after he got out of jail, Mother never allowed it.
|
|
|
|
Father had worked in the maintenance department of a
|
|
hospital. I guess he had been stealing drugs from the
|
|
pharmacy for a long time. He never denied stealing them,
|
|
but he claimed his actions were at the bidding of the Lord.
|
|
He sent the drugs, anonymously, to a Christian mission
|
|
group. The mission people grew suspicious of the
|
|
unsolicited drugs that rarely matched their needs, and
|
|
reported them to the police. I don't know how Father found
|
|
out that they were on to him, but something happened make up
|
|
his mind that the time had come to answer God's call in
|
|
person and in a hurry.
|
|
|
|
Of course I didn't know any of this at the time. I
|
|
learned more than I'd like to admit -- some of it true and
|
|
some of it pretty far fetched -- from the other kids over
|
|
the next few weeks. Their mothers weren't censoring the
|
|
news the way mine was. It kind of made me a celebrity for a
|
|
while.
|
|
|
|
The only thing that almost made me cry was the guilt
|
|
I felt about not missing him.
|
|
|
|
______________________
|
|
|
|
At a nameless bend in the river
|
|
|
|
|
|
We don't understand the first thing
|
|
about most of what goes on around us.
|
|
The operating system
|
|
without which the disk drive won't boot.
|
|
The inner workings
|
|
of the sewage treatment plant downstream.
|
|
|
|
Currents that lead fish to this reedy spot
|
|
where we cast our lines from shore.
|
|
How to cleanse the putrid
|
|
streams of Eastern Europe.
|
|
How a dollar is still worth a dollar
|
|
after all that's gone down. Even this:
|
|
|
|
why at sunset white-tailed deer
|
|
come down to the river and graze
|
|
unconcerned at our presence
|
|
where all the parched afternoon
|
|
they hid in shadow.
|
|
The heaviness of flesh and bone
|
|
we dream of more often than hold, and hold
|
|
too tight sometimes, not quite believing. You.
|
|
|
|
The simple rise and setting of the sun
|
|
confound our pretentions. The way we still
|
|
dial a touch-tone phone, confide our secrets
|
|
more readily to pollsters than lovers.
|
|
How we can speak in any voice
|
|
other than our own. The constitution.
|
|
How the fish we counted on slip our hooks
|
|
and glide away into darkness.
|
|
|
|
The red sky is omenless, our string bag
|
|
empty. White-tailed deer
|
|
lie panting in a field of clover
|
|
under skeletal hydro towers.
|
|
On the far shore throbbing windpipes
|
|
unnumbered as leaves on the trees
|
|
sing the only tune they know
|
|
to the waning light.
|
|
|
|
@ Colin Morton 1994
|
|
|
|
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
|
|
|
|
We are always leaving, Sandra
|
|
|
|
and always returning.
|
|
|
|
In a snowbound mountain pass
|
|
near the great divide
|
|
I read Cohen
|
|
In Search of the Millenium
|
|
and that other Cohen
|
|
who sang of Montreal streets
|
|
on his Aegean isle
|
|
|
|
And on the red sands
|
|
of a island in the Gulf
|
|
of St. Lawrence I wrote
|
|
of the joys of picking garbage
|
|
from the post-war streets
|
|
of Germany.
|
|
|
|
Self-exiled Joyce
|
|
established his claim
|
|
to the streets of Dublin
|
|
|
|
Blind Milton saw
|
|
in the bright room of a dream
|
|
his departed wife.
|
|
|
|
And here's a prediction Sandra
|
|
one snowy day before long
|
|
you will look out
|
|
on ice-bound Northumberland Strait
|
|
and see this room in Ottawa
|
|
all our faces around you
|
|
|
|
and though you may write
|
|
of Tierra del Fuego
|
|
or Neptune or the dialogue
|
|
of particle and wave
|
|
we will see ourselves too
|
|
reflected in your lines
|
|
|
|
and thinking of you
|
|
or dawn on the picket line
|
|
or guitars in the desert
|
|
we each will take up a pen
|
|
and begin to write.
|
|
|
|
@ Colin Morton 1994
|
|
|
|
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
|
|
|
|
|
|
Woman on Her Way to Market
|
|
|
|
|
|
No matter what negotiators said
|
|
It cost her life to walk across a street -
|
|
A sniper put a bullet through her head.
|
|
|
|
She began to cross then crossed herself instead.
|
|
An inky pool of blood grew around her feet
|
|
No matter what negotiators said
|
|
|
|
Around a table with the best intent.
|
|
She wondered what to give her family to eat
|
|
Then a sniper put a bullet through her head.
|
|
|
|
Shots flew over her where she lay and bled
|
|
Her last words out into the empty street.
|
|
No matter what negotiators said.
|
|
|
|
No time was given to remove the dead.
|
|
None claim victory, none admit defeat.
|
|
A sniper put a bullet through her head
|
|
|
|
Then went home to supper, children, wife and bed
|
|
To lose her memory in a sound night's sleep.
|
|
No matter what negotiators said
|
|
A sniper put a bullet through her head.
|
|
|
|
@ Colin Morton 1994
|
|
|
|
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY:
|
|
JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE
|
|
|
|
by
|
|
|
|
DONALD F. THEALL
|
|
University Professor
|
|
Trent University
|
|
<dtheall@trentu.ca>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright (c) 1992 by Donald F. Theall
|
|
all rights reserved.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reprinted from:
|
|
_Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)
|
|
|
|
|
|
****************************
|
|
|
|
_The Gutenberg Galaxy_, a book which redirected the way
|
|
that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the
|
|
role of technological mediation in communication and
|
|
expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to
|
|
write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has
|
|
not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's
|
|
major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures
|
|
(such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida,
|
|
Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about
|
|
aspects of communication involving technological mediation,
|
|
speech, writing, and electronics. While all of these
|
|
connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic
|
|
Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific
|
|
bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist
|
|
contemporaries to the development of electric communication
|
|
and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality.
|
|
McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_"
|
|
established him as the first major disseminator of those
|
|
Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis
|
|
for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive
|
|
McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an
|
|
unconscious one, of our verbal heritage.
|
|
In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the
|
|
emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the
|
|
development of electromechanical communications, telematics
|
|
and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the
|
|
simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of
|
|
multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data:
|
|
All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon
|
|
city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of
|
|
grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it
|
|
was too complicated, trying to find your way to the
|
|
particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry
|
|
called that.^1^
|
|
This "consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted
|
|
from the banks of every computer in the human system"
|
|
creates an "unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged
|
|
in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of
|
|
data. Like city lights receding."^2^ Almost a decade
|
|
earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the
|
|
late 70s) display some striking similarities:^3^
|
|
It steps up the velocity of logical sequential
|
|
calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to
|
|
body count by touch . . . . It brings back the
|
|
Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers
|
|
are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy
|
|
in favor of decentralization. When applied to new
|
|
forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and
|
|
videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric
|
|
texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging
|
|
ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.^4^
|
|
McLuhan's "hieroglyphs" certainly more than anticipate
|
|
Gibson's "iconics" and McLuhan's particular use of
|
|
hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily
|
|
derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico.
|
|
It is not surprising then that McLuhan's works, side by
|
|
side with those of Gibson, have been avidly read by early
|
|
researchers in MIT's Media Lab^5^, for these researchers
|
|
also conceive of a VR composed, like the tribal and
|
|
collective "global village," of "tactile, haptic,
|
|
proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements."^6^
|
|
The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such
|
|
as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of
|
|
individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei
|
|
Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the
|
|
semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and
|
|
involvements. Duchamp, for example, became an early leading
|
|
figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of
|
|
painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light,
|
|
movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his _Large
|
|
Glass_^7^ and the serial publication of his accompanying
|
|
notes from _The Box of 1914_ through _The Green Box_ to _A
|
|
l'infinitif_. His interest in the notes as part of the
|
|
total work echo Joyce's own interest in the publication of
|
|
_Work in Progress_ and commentaries he organized upon it
|
|
(e.g., _Our Exagmination Round his Factification for
|
|
Incamination of Work in Progress_). Joyce also explores
|
|
similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and
|
|
concept. So the road to VR and MIT's Media Lab begins with
|
|
poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth
|
|
and early twentieth century; later, as Stuart Brand notes,
|
|
many of the Media Lab researchers of the 60s and 70s placed
|
|
great importance on collaboration with artists involved in
|
|
exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating
|
|
new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other
|
|
senses.^8^
|
|
Understanding the social and cultural implications of
|
|
VR and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the
|
|
inter-relationships between Gibson's now commonplace
|
|
description of cyberspace, McLuhan's modernist-influenced
|
|
vision of the development of electric media, and the
|
|
particular impact that Joyce had both on McLuhan's writings
|
|
about electrically mediated communication and on the views
|
|
of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco and Lacan regarding problems
|
|
of mediation and communication. Such a reassessment
|
|
requires that two central issues be discussed: (i) the
|
|
crucial nature of VR's challenge to the privileging of
|
|
language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used
|
|
by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the
|
|
idea of VR's presence as *the* super-medium that encompasses
|
|
and transcends all media. The cluster of critics who have
|
|
addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter
|
|
Ong, H.A. Innis and Eric Havelock, have--like them--failed
|
|
to comprehend the fact that McLuhan was disseminating a
|
|
Joycean view which grounded communication in tactility,
|
|
gesture and CNS processes, rather than promulgating the
|
|
emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality.
|
|
This emphasis on the tactile, the gestural and the play of
|
|
the CNS in communication is a key to Joyce's literary
|
|
exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist
|
|
colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual
|
|
development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would
|
|
integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and
|
|
neurological information in currently existing and newly
|
|
emerging art forms.
|
|
Joyce's work should be recognized as pioneering the
|
|
artistic exploration of two sets of differences--
|
|
orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media--that have
|
|
since become dominant themes in the discussion of these
|
|
questions. _Finnegans Wake_ is one of the first major
|
|
poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media
|
|
present to the traditionally accepted relationships between
|
|
speech, script and print. (_Ulysses_ also involves such an
|
|
encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic
|
|
development of mediated communication.) Imagine Joyce
|
|
around 1930 asking the question: what is the role of the
|
|
book in a culture which has discovered photography,
|
|
phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and
|
|
telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines,
|
|
advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion? What people
|
|
once read, they will now go to see in film and on
|
|
television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and
|
|
more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in
|
|
television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the
|
|
potentialities of sound recording.^10^ -> BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY
|
|
**********************************
|
|
|
|
The "counter-poetic," _Finnegans Wake_, provides one of
|
|
*the* key texts regarding the problem presented by the
|
|
dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its
|
|
frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or
|
|
language. This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic,
|
|
encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous
|
|
involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book
|
|
about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of
|
|
the new technology.^11^ The _Wake_ is the most
|
|
comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, of the
|
|
ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for
|
|
the arts of language and the privileged position of the
|
|
printed book. The _Wake_ dramatizes the necessary
|
|
deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world
|
|
where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with
|
|
entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting
|
|
information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety
|
|
of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print and
|
|
writing. Joyce's selection of Vico's _New Science_^12^ as
|
|
the structural scaffolding for the _Wake_--the equivalent of
|
|
Homer's _Odyssey_ in _Ulysses_--underscores how his interest
|
|
in the contemporary transformation of the book requires
|
|
grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of
|
|
communication, especially gesture and language and the
|
|
"prophetic" role of the poetic in shaping the future.
|
|
As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the
|
|
construction of artifacts and processes of communication in
|
|
the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the transformation
|
|
(not the death) of the book--going beyond the book as it had
|
|
historically evolved. Confronted with this situation, Joyce
|
|
seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the
|
|
book within this new communicative cosmos, while
|
|
simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development
|
|
of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium,
|
|
"virtual reality." Since the action takes place in a
|
|
dreamworld, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic
|
|
imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future.
|
|
His dreamworld envelops the reader within an aural sphere,
|
|
accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise
|
|
from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the
|
|
visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily
|
|
the most complex multi-media forms and envisions how they
|
|
will utilize his present, which will have become the past,
|
|
to transform the future.^13^
|
|
The hero(ine)^14^ in the _Wake_, "Here Comes
|
|
Everybody," is a communicating machine, "This harmonic
|
|
condenser enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an electric
|
|
transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a
|
|
presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and
|
|
ohmes." Joyce envisions the person as embodied within an
|
|
electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic
|
|
environment), which becomes an extension of the human body,
|
|
an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the
|
|
playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling
|
|
attention to the interplay of sensory information within the
|
|
electro-chemical neurological system. This medley of
|
|
elements and concerns, focussed on questioning the place of
|
|
oral and written language in an electro-mechanical
|
|
technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive
|
|
modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks
|
|
Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality.
|
|
Acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of
|
|
speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the
|
|
kinesthetic and other modes of expression, Joyce roots all
|
|
communication in gesture: "In the beginning was the gest he
|
|
jousstly says" (468.5-6). Here the originary nature of
|
|
gesture (gest, F. geste = gesture)^15^ is linked with the
|
|
mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale
|
|
(gest as a feat and a tale or romance). Gestures, like
|
|
signals and flashing lights that provide elementary
|
|
mechanical systems for communications, are "words of silent
|
|
power" (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, "Belisha beacon,
|
|
beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "Where
|
|
flash becomes word and silents selfloud." Since gestures,
|
|
and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from
|
|
the body, the "gest" as "flesh without word" (468.5-6) is "a
|
|
flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the
|
|
original sinse" [originary sense + the temporal, "since" +
|
|
original sin (239.1)]. "Communicake" parallels eating to
|
|
speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of
|
|
communion as participation in, and consumption of, the
|
|
Word--an observation adumbrated in the title of one of
|
|
Marcel Jousse's groundbreaking books on gesture as the
|
|
origin of language, _La Manducation de la Parole_ ("The
|
|
Mastication of the Word"). By treating the "gest" as a bit
|
|
(a bite), orality and the written word as projections of
|
|
gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a
|
|
communicating machine.^16^ The historical processes that
|
|
contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the
|
|
growing emphasis, in theories such as Kenneth Burke's, on
|
|
the idea that the goal of the symbolic action called
|
|
communication is *secular, paramodern communion*.^17^
|
|
The _Wake_ provides a self-reflexive explanation of the
|
|
communicative process of encoding and decoding required to
|
|
interpret an encoded text, which itself is
|
|
characteristically mechanical:
|
|
The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately
|
|
is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the
|
|
raiding there originally. That's the point of
|
|
eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in
|
|
soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded
|
|
can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere
|
|
grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have
|
|
occasioning cause causing effects and affects
|
|
occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me
|
|
take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's
|
|
tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the
|
|
hand is the hand of Sameas. (482.31-483.4)
|
|
The dreamer as a poet, a Hermetic thief, an "outlex"
|
|
(169.3)--i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and,
|
|
therefore, the law, "invents" the writing by originally
|
|
discovering the reading of the book and does so by "raiding"
|
|
[i.e., "plundering" (reading + raiding)].^18^ This reading
|
|
encompasses both the idealistic "eschatology" and the
|
|
excrementitious-materialistic (pun on scatology) within the
|
|
designing of this "book of kills" (deaths, deletions,
|
|
drinking sessions, flows of water--a counterpoint of
|
|
continuity and discontinuity),^19^ a book as carefully
|
|
crafted or machined as the illuminations of the _Book of
|
|
Kells_ are. Seeing and hearing are intricately involved in
|
|
this process, so the reader of this night-book also becomes
|
|
a "raider" of the original "reading-writing" through the
|
|
machinery of writing. It is a production "in soandso many
|
|
counterpoint words" that can be read only through the
|
|
machinery of decoding, for "What can't be coded can be
|
|
decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for"
|
|
(482.34). The tale that the pen writes is transmitted by
|
|
the post, and the whole process of communication and its
|
|
interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily
|
|
gesture-language: "The gist is the gist of Shaum but the
|
|
hand is the hand of Sameas" (483.3-4).[11]
|
|
Orality, particularly song, is grounded in the machinery of
|
|
the body's organs: "Singalingalying. Storiella as she is syung.
|
|
Whence followeup with endspeaking nots for yestures"
|
|
(267.7-9).^20^ The link is rhythm, for "Soonjemmijohns will
|
|
cudgel some a rhythmatick or other over
|
|
Browne and Nolan's divisional tables" (268.7-9). Gesture,
|
|
with its affiliation with all of the neuro-muscular
|
|
movements of the body, is a natural script or originary
|
|
writing, for the word "has been reconstricted out of oral
|
|
style into verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics"
|
|
(36.8-9). Since the oral is "reconstricted" (reconstructed
|
|
+ constricted or limited) into the verbal, words also are
|
|
crafted in relation to sound, a natural development of which
|
|
is "wordcraft": for example, hieroglyphs and primitive
|
|
script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.^21^ Runes and
|
|
ogham are literally "woodwordings," so pre- or proto-writing
|
|
(i.e., syllabic writing) is already "a mechanization of the
|
|
word," which is itself implicit in the body's use of
|
|
gesture.
|
|
Joyce's practice and his theoretical orientation imply
|
|
that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of
|
|
the word, the image, and the icon also changes. Under the
|
|
impact of electric communication, it is once again clear
|
|
that the concept of the word must embrace artifacts and
|
|
events as well.^22^ Writing and speech are subsumed into
|
|
entirely new relationships with non-phonemic sound, image,
|
|
gesture, movement, rhythm, and all modes of sensory input,
|
|
especially the tactile. To continue to speak about a
|
|
dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a misleading
|
|
over-simplification of the role that electric media play in
|
|
this transformation, a role best comprehended through
|
|
historical knowledge of the earliest stages of human
|
|
communication where objects, gestures and movements
|
|
apparently intermingled with verbal and non-verbal sounds.
|
|
Marschak's study of early cultural artifacts, the Aschers'
|
|
discussion of the quipu, and Levi-Strauss's discussions of
|
|
the kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of
|
|
some ancient, non-linguistic systems of communication.^23^
|
|
Adapting Vico's speculation that human communication begins
|
|
with the gestures and material symbols of the "mute," Joyce
|
|
early in the _Wake_ presents an encounter between two
|
|
characters whose names deliberately echo Mutt and Jeff of
|
|
comic strip fame. Mutt (until recently a mute) and Jute (a
|
|
nomadic invader) "excheck a few strong verbs weak oach
|
|
eather" (16.8-9).
|
|
Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce
|
|
traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine
|
|
development, right down to the TV and what it bodes for the
|
|
future. For example, an entire episode of the _Wake_
|
|
(I,5)^24^ is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and
|
|
the theory of their interpretation--textual hermeneutics--in
|
|
which the _Wake_ as a book is interpreted as if it were a
|
|
manuscript, "the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of all
|
|
scripture" (107.8). At each stage, Joyce recognizes how the
|
|
machinery of codification is implicit in the history of
|
|
communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes
|
|
that
|
|
on holding the verso against a lit rush this new
|
|
book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent
|
|
query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out
|
|
the piquant fact that it was but pierced but not
|
|
punctured (in the university sense of the term) by
|
|
numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged
|
|
instrument. . . . (123.34-124.3)
|
|
This illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the
|
|
telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the
|
|
early manuscript, just as any manuscript is a transformation
|
|
of the "wordcraft" of "woodwordings." "Morse code" is
|
|
indicative of the mechanics of codification, for while code
|
|
is essential to all communication (thus prior to the moment
|
|
when the mechanical is electrified), the role of
|
|
codification is radically transformed by mechanization.
|
|
The appearance of the printing press demonstrates the
|
|
effect of this radical transformation:
|
|
Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast
|
|
and great primer must once for omniboss step
|
|
rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no
|
|
virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one
|
|
warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
|
|
hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though
|
|
not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister
|
|
Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies.
|
|
Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word
|
|
will be bound over to carry three score and ten
|
|
toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends
|
|
Jined . . . . (20.7-16)
|
|
As "Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and
|
|
great primer" steps "rubrickredd out of the wordpress," the
|
|
dream reminds us that "papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
|
|
hints and misses in prints." Topics (L. topos) and types
|
|
(L. typus) as figures, forms, images, topics and
|
|
commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing and rhetoric,
|
|
are now realized through typesetting. Implicit in the
|
|
technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal
|
|
ambivalence, for "every word will be bound over to carry
|
|
three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book
|
|
of Doublends Jined." Printing sets in place the "root
|
|
language" (424.17) residing in the types and topes of the
|
|
world and potentially eliminates a multitude of alternate
|
|
codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects,
|
|
movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the
|
|
electromechanical march towards VR and cyberspace.
|
|
By the 1930s, in a pub scene in the _Wake_, Joyce
|
|
playfully anticipated how central sporting events or
|
|
political debates would be for television when he described
|
|
the TV projection of a fight being viewed by the pub's
|
|
"regulars" (possibly the first fictional TV bar room scene
|
|
in literary history). Joyce's presentation of this image of
|
|
the battle of Butt and Taff, which is peppered with complex
|
|
puns involving terminology associated with the technical
|
|
details of TV transmission, has its own metamorphic quality,
|
|
underscored by the "viseversion" (vice versa imaging) of
|
|
Butt and Taff's images on "the bairdboard bombardment
|
|
screen" ("bairdboard" because John Logie Baird developed TV
|
|
in 1925). Joyce explains how "the bairdboard bombardment
|
|
screen," the TV as receiver, receives the composite video
|
|
signal "in scynopanc pulses" (the synchronization pulses
|
|
that form part of the composite video signal), that come
|
|
down the "photoslope" on the "carnier walve" (i.e., the
|
|
carrier wave which carries the composite video signal) "with
|
|
the bitts bugtwug their teffs." Joyce imagines this
|
|
receiver to be a "light barricade" against which the charge
|
|
of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed,
|
|
reproducing the "bitts." Although (at least to my
|
|
knowledge) bit was not used as a technical term in
|
|
communication technology at the time, Joyce is still able,
|
|
on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or
|
|
photons as bits of information creating the TV picture.
|
|
Speech, print and writing are interwoven with
|
|
electromechanical technologies of communication throughout
|
|
the _Wake_. References to the manufacture of books,
|
|
newspapers and other products of the printing press abound.
|
|
Machineries and technological organizations accompany this
|
|
development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad
|
|
men who produce "Abortisements" (181.33). Since complex
|
|
communication technology is characteristic of the later
|
|
stages, in addition to newspapers, radio, "dupenny"
|
|
magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), there is "a
|
|
phantom city phaked by philm pholk," by those who would
|
|
"roll away the reel world." Telecommunications materialize
|
|
again and again throughout the night of the _Wake_, where
|
|
"television kills telephony."
|
|
The "tele-" prefix, betraying an element of futurology
|
|
in the dream, appears in well over a dozen words including
|
|
in addition to the familiar forms terms such as "teleframe,"
|
|
"telekinesis," "telesmell," "telesphorously," "televisible,"
|
|
"televox," or "telewisher," while familiar forms also appear
|
|
in a variety of transformed "messes of mottage," such as
|
|
"velivision" and "dullaphone." This complex verbal play all
|
|
hinges on the inter-translatability of the emerging forms of
|
|
technologically mediated communication. In the opening
|
|
episode of the second part, the "Feenicht's Playhouse," an
|
|
imaginary play produced by HCE's children in their nursery
|
|
is "wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in
|
|
cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four
|
|
tubbloids" (219.28-9). Like the cinema, "wordloosed"
|
|
(wirelessed but also let loose) transglobally, all such
|
|
media are engaged in a "crowdblast" of existing languages
|
|
and cultures, producing an interplay between local cultures
|
|
and a pan-international hyperculture.
|
|
In the concluding moments of the _Wake_, Joyce
|
|
generalizes his pre-cybernetic vision in one long intricate
|
|
performance that not only concerns the book itself, but also
|
|
anticipates by twenty years some major discussions of
|
|
culture, communication, and technology. A brief scene
|
|
setting: this is the moment in the closing episode just as
|
|
the HCE is awakening. In the background he hears noises
|
|
from the machines in the laundry next door. It is breakfast
|
|
time and there are sounds of food being prepared; eggs are
|
|
being cooked and will be eaten, so there is anticipation of
|
|
the process of digestion that is about to take place.^25^
|
|
At this moment a key passage, inviting interminable
|
|
interpretation, presents in very abstract language a
|
|
generalized model of production and consumption, which is
|
|
also the recorso of the schema of this nocturnal poem, that
|
|
consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself
|
|
digests and produces new cells and excrement--how else could
|
|
one be a poet of "litters" as well as letters and be
|
|
"litterery" (114.17; 422.35) as well as literary?
|
|
The passage begins by speaking about "our wholemole
|
|
millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational
|
|
gazebocroticon," which may be the book, a letter to be
|
|
written, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the
|
|
sexual process, the mechanical "mannormillor
|
|
clipperclappers" (614.13) of the nearby Mannor Millor
|
|
laundry, the temporal movement of history, or a theory of
|
|
engineering, for essentially it relates the production of
|
|
cultural artifacts or the consumption of matter (like
|
|
reading a book, seeing a film or eating eggs; the text
|
|
mentions a "farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as
|
|
eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can"
|
|
(614.28)). The passage concludes, "as sure as herself
|
|
pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs"
|
|
(615.9-10). Here the frequent pairing of speaking
|
|
(writing) with eating is brought to a climax in which it is
|
|
related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of
|
|
nature, decomposing into "bits" and recombining.
|
|
These bits, described as "the dialytically [dialectic +
|
|
dialysis] separated elements of precedent decomposition,"
|
|
may be eggs, or other "homely codes" such as the
|
|
"heroticisms, catastrophes and ec-centricities" (the stuff
|
|
of history or the dreamers stuttering speech or his
|
|
staggering movements) transmitted elementally, "type by
|
|
tope, letter from litter, word at ward, sendence of sundance
|
|
. . ." (614.33-615.2). All of these bits--matter, eggs,
|
|
words, TV signals, concepts, what you will--are
|
|
"anastomosically assimilated and preteri-dentified
|
|
paraidiotically," producing "the sameold gamebold adomic
|
|
structure . . . as highly charged with electrons as
|
|
hophazards can effective it" (615.5-8). In anticipation of
|
|
the contemporary electronic definition of the "bit," Joyce
|
|
associates the structure of communication (ranging from TV
|
|
and telegraphic signals to morphophonemic information and
|
|
kinesthesia) with bits of signals, "data" and information.
|
|
He presents it as essentially an assemblage of
|
|
multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing
|
|
moment, for it occurs by the crossing of pluralistic
|
|
branches of differing motifs, through a process of
|
|
transmission involving flows, particularly the flowing of
|
|
blood, water and speech, and breaks such as the
|
|
discontinuous charges of electrical energy, telegraphy, and
|
|
punctuation--those "endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.8).
|
|
|
|
-> BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY
|
|
**********************************
|
|
|
|
Here Joyce's entire prophetic, schizoid vision of
|
|
cyberspace seems somewhat Deleuzian. It is an ambivalent
|
|
and critical vision, for the "ambiviolence" of the
|
|
"langdwage" throughout the _Wake_ implies critique as it
|
|
unfolds this history, since Joyce still situates parody
|
|
within satire. He does not free it from socio-political
|
|
reference, as a free-floating "postmodernist" play with the
|
|
surface of signifiers would. This can be noted in the way
|
|
that Joyce first probes what came to be one of the keystones
|
|
of McLuhanism. Joyce plays throughout the work with spheres
|
|
and circles, some of which parody one of the mystical
|
|
definitions of God frequently attributed to Alan of Lille
|
|
(Alanus de Insulis), but sometimes referred to as Pascal's
|
|
sphere. Speaking of a daughter-goddess figure, he says:
|
|
our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima to expense herselfs as
|
|
sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all
|
|
directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the
|
|
infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and
|
|
manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has
|
|
thoughts of that eternal Rome) . . . . (298.27-33)
|
|
Here a sphere is imagined whose center is everywhere and
|
|
circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and
|
|
undescribable (though apparently the paradigmic perimeter is
|
|
sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself
|
|
without apparent limit. This is both an embodied and a
|
|
disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentering the image so
|
|
as to impede any closure. The same spherical principle is
|
|
applied more widely to the presentation of the sense of
|
|
hearing. The reception of messages by the hero/ine of the
|
|
_Wake_, "(Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)" (108.23), is
|
|
accomplished by "bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down
|
|
in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a
|
|
melegoturny marygoraumd" (309.22-4), a sphere for it
|
|
requires "a gain control of circumcentric megacycles"
|
|
(310.7-8). It can truly be said of HCE, "Ear! Ear! Weakear!
|
|
An allness eversides!" (568.26),^26^ precisely because he is
|
|
"human, erring and condonable"(58.19), yet "humile,
|
|
commune and ensectuous" (29.30), suffering many deprivations
|
|
his "hardest crux ever" (623.33) [italics mine].
|
|
Though "humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this]
|
|
exposition of failures" (589.17) living with "Heinz cans
|
|
everywhere"(581.5), still protests his fate "making use of
|
|
sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would
|
|
challenge their hemosphores to exterminate them"
|
|
(81.25) by decentering or dislocating any attempts to
|
|
enclose him.
|
|
This discussion of sphere and hearing critically
|
|
anticipates what McLuhan later called "acoustic space"--a
|
|
fundamental cyberspatial conception with its creation of
|
|
multi-dimensional environments, a spherical environment
|
|
within which aural information is received by the CNS--that
|
|
also embodies a transformation of the hermetic poetic
|
|
insight that "the universe (or nature) [or in earlier
|
|
versions, God] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is
|
|
everywhere, the circumference nowhere."^27^ Today, VR, as
|
|
Borges' treatment of Pascal's sphere seems to imply, is
|
|
coming to be our contemporary pre-millennial epitome of this
|
|
symbol, a place where each participant (rather than *the*
|
|
deity), as microcosm, is potentially the enigmatic center.
|
|
People englobed within virtual worlds find themselves
|
|
interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual
|
|
multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through
|
|
complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks.
|
|
All of this must necessarily relate back to the way
|
|
Joyce treats the subject of and produces the artifact that
|
|
is *the book*. While, beginning with Mallarme, the themes
|
|
of the book and the death of literature resound through
|
|
modernism, Joyce's transformation of the book filtered
|
|
through the "mcluhanitic" reaction to "mcluhanism" becomes,
|
|
in the usual interpretation of McLuhan, the annunciation of
|
|
the death of the book, *not* its transformation, as with
|
|
Joyce. Joyce is important, for following Marcel Jousse and
|
|
Vico,^28^ he situates speech and writing as modes of
|
|
communication within a far richer and more complex bodily
|
|
and gestural theory of communication than that represented
|
|
by the reductive dichotomy of the oral and the literate. As
|
|
the predominance of print declines, the _Wake_ explores the
|
|
history of communication by comically assimilating the
|
|
method of Vico's _The New Science_--which, as one of the
|
|
first systematic and empirical studies of the place of
|
|
poetic action in the history of how people develop systems
|
|
of signs and symbols, attributes people's ability for
|
|
constructing their society to the poetic function.
|
|
Joyce avoids that facile over-simplification of the
|
|
complexities of print, arising from the orality/literacy
|
|
dichotomy, which attributes a privileged role to language as
|
|
verbal--a privilege based on theological and metaphysical
|
|
claims. The same dichotomy creates problems in discussing
|
|
technological and other non-verbal forms of mediated
|
|
communication, including VR and TV. At one point in the
|
|
_Wake_ "Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our
|
|
eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!" (52.18-9), for
|
|
TV also comprehends the visual and the kinesthetic. Yet
|
|
most McLuhanites who have opted for the orality/literacy
|
|
split still call it an oral medium in opposition to print.
|
|
The same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on
|
|
gesture and rhythm, is analyzed as an oral medium. As the
|
|
_Wake_ jocularly observes:
|
|
seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the
|
|
cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second
|
|
parents . . . the touching seene. The solence of that
|
|
stilling! Here one might a fin fell. Boomster
|
|
rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape from Wildu
|
|
Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as
|
|
Mum's mutyness, this mimage . . . is odable to os
|
|
across the wineless Ere no dor nor mere eerie nor liss
|
|
potent of suggestion than in the tales of the
|
|
tingmount. (52.34-53.6)
|
|
The mime plays with silence, sight, touch and movement
|
|
seeming like a landscape or a movie.
|
|
Facile over-simplification also overlooks that long
|
|
before the beginnings of the trend towards cyberspace, print
|
|
had not been strictly oriented towards linearity and
|
|
writing, for the print medium was supplemented by its
|
|
encyclopedic, multi-media nature, absorbing other media such
|
|
as illustrations, charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and
|
|
tables, not all aspects of which are precisely linear.
|
|
While writing may have had a predominantly linear tendency,
|
|
its history is far more complex, as Elizabeth Eisenstein has
|
|
established.^29^ The orality/literacy distinction does not
|
|
provide an adequately rich concept for dealing with print,
|
|
any more than it does for the most complex and comprehensive
|
|
images of virtual reality and participatory hyperspace
|
|
(e.g., sophisticated extensions of the datagloves or the
|
|
Aspen map), which, to adapt a Joycean phrase, directly
|
|
transmit "feelful thinkamalinks." Since VR should enable a
|
|
person to feel the bodily set of another person or place,
|
|
while simultaneously receiving multiple intersensory
|
|
messages, understanding the role of the body in
|
|
communication is crucial for understanding VR. When McLuhan
|
|
and Edward Carpenter first spoke about their concept of
|
|
orality (linked to aurality, mouth to ear, as line of print
|
|
to eye scan), it entailed recognizing the priority and
|
|
primacy of tactility and inter-sensory activity in
|
|
communication, for "In the beginning there was the gest."
|
|
As Kenneth Burke realized in the 30s, Joyce's grounding
|
|
communication and language in gesture is distinctly
|
|
different from an approach which privileges language, for it
|
|
involves a complete embodying of communication. While the
|
|
oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire CNS is
|
|
necessarily involved in all communication, including speech.
|
|
As John Bishop has shown in _Joyce's Book of the Dark_, the
|
|
sleeper primarily receives sensations with his ear, but
|
|
these are tranformed within the body into the world of signs
|
|
that permeate the dream and which constitute the _Wake_.^30^
|
|
Joyce views language as "gest," as an imaginary means of
|
|
embodying intellectual-emotional complexes, his "feelful
|
|
thinkamalinks." From this perspective, the semic units of
|
|
the _Wake_ (integrated complexes constructed from the
|
|
interaction of speech and print involving, rhythm,
|
|
orthography as sign and gesture and visual image) assume the
|
|
role of dialogue with other modes of mediated communication,
|
|
exploiting their limitations and differences. Joyce crafts
|
|
a new lingua for a world where the poetic book will deal
|
|
with those aspects of the imaginary that cannot be
|
|
encompassed within technologically mediated communication.
|
|
Simultaneously, he recognizes that a trend towards virtual
|
|
reality is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or
|
|
technologically mediated modes of communication. This
|
|
process posits a continuous dialogue in which _Ulysses_ and
|
|
the _Wake_ were designed to play key roles.
|
|
As Joyce--who quipped that "some of the means I use are
|
|
trivial--and some are quadrivial"^31^--was aware, ancient
|
|
rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the Aeolus
|
|
episode of _Ulysses_ and in the "Triv and Quad" section (II,
|
|
2) of the _Wake_) also included those interactive contexts
|
|
where the body was an intrinsic part of communication.
|
|
Delivery involved controlling the body, and the context
|
|
within which it was presented, as well as the voice. The
|
|
actual rhetorical action (particularly in judicial oratory)
|
|
also frequently involved demonstration and witnesses. This
|
|
analysis, closer to the pre-literate, recognized the way
|
|
actual communication integrated oral, visual, rhythmical,
|
|
gestural and kinesthetic components. Recent research into
|
|
the classical and medieval "arts of memory," inspired by
|
|
Frances Yates,^32^ have demonstrated that memory involves
|
|
the body, a sense of the dramatic and theatrical, visual
|
|
icons and movement, as well as the associative power of the
|
|
oral itself. Joyce playfully invokes this memory system
|
|
familiar to him from his Jesuit education: "After sound,
|
|
light and heat, memory, will and understanding. Here (the
|
|
memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for
|
|
wringwrowdy wready are . . ." (266.18-22). A classical
|
|
world, which recognized such features of the communicative
|
|
process, could readily speak about the poem as a "speaking
|
|
picture" and the painting as "silent poetry." Here, there
|
|
is an inclusiveness of the means available rather than a
|
|
dependency on a single channel of communication.
|
|
Joyce was so intrigued by the potentials of the new
|
|
culture of time and space for reconstructing and
|
|
revolutionizing the book that he claimed himself to be "the
|
|
greatest engineer," as well as a Renaissance man, who was
|
|
also a "musicmaker, a philosophist and heaps of other
|
|
things."^33^ The mosaic of the _Wake_ contributes to
|
|
understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the
|
|
radical constitution of the electronic cosmos that Joyce
|
|
called "the chaosmos of Alle" (118.21). In this "chaosmos,"
|
|
engineered by a sense of interactive mnemotechnics, he
|
|
intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of
|
|
cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic
|
|
organization of a network, "the matrix," which underlies the
|
|
construction of imaginary and virtual worlds. One crucial
|
|
reason for raising the historic image of Joyce in a
|
|
discussion of cyberspace is that he carries out one of the
|
|
most comprehensive contemporary discussions of virtual
|
|
recollection (a concept first articulated by Henri Bergson
|
|
as virtual memory).^34^ In counterpoint to the emerging
|
|
technological capability to create the "virtual reality" of
|
|
cyberspace, Joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the
|
|
creation of virtual worlds within natural language.
|
|
That tactile, gestural-based dreamworld has built-in
|
|
mnemonic systems:
|
|
A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall
|
|
memorise. By her freewritten. Hopely for ear that
|
|
annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. Is it in the
|
|
now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the
|
|
branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and
|
|
yesters outcome . . . . (280.01-07)
|
|
Joyce's virtual worlds began with the recognition of
|
|
"everybody" as a poet (each person is co-producer; he quips,
|
|
"his producers are they not his consumers?"). All culture
|
|
becomes the panorama of his dream; the purpose of poetic
|
|
writing in a post-electric world is the painting of that
|
|
interior (which is not the psychoanalytic, but the social
|
|
unconscious) and the providing of new language appropriate
|
|
to perceiving the complexities of the new world of
|
|
technologically reproducible media:
|
|
What has gone? How it ends?
|
|
Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every
|
|
sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's
|
|
truth, tomorrow's trend. (614.19-21)
|
|
Joyce's text is embodied in gesture, enclosed in words,
|
|
enmeshed in time, and engaged in foretelling "Today's truth.
|
|
Tomorrow's trend." The poet reproducing his producers is
|
|
the divining prophet.
|
|
If speaking of Joyce and cyberspace seems to imply a
|
|
kind of futurology, the whole of McLuhan's project was
|
|
frequently treated as prophesying the emergence of a new
|
|
tribalized global society--the global village, itself
|
|
anticipated by Joyce's "international" language of
|
|
multilingual puns. In fact, in _War and Peace in the Global
|
|
Village_, McLuhan uses Wakese (mostly from Joyce, freely
|
|
associated) as marginalia. McLuhan flourished in his role
|
|
as an international guru by casting himself in the role of
|
|
"*the* prime prophet" announcing the coming of a new era of
|
|
communication^35^ (now talked about as virtual reality or
|
|
cyberspace, though he never actually used that word). The
|
|
prime source of his "prophecies," which he never concealed,
|
|
is to be found in Joyce and Vico.^36^ The entire Joycean
|
|
dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the
|
|
anticipated awakening (Vico's fourth age of ricorso
|
|
following birth, marriage, and death) is "providential
|
|
divining":
|
|
Ere we are! Signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that,
|
|
primeval conditions having gradually receded but
|
|
nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having
|
|
to a great extent persisted through intermittences of
|
|
sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn
|
|
sepulture and providential divining, making possible
|
|
and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves
|
|
and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under
|
|
consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary
|
|
military maritory monetary morphological
|
|
circumformation in a more or less settled state of
|
|
equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium.
|
|
(599.8-18)
|
|
Earlier, it is said of the dreamer that "He caun ne'er be
|
|
bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in
|
|
every past that is present . . ." (496.34-497.1). Joyce,
|
|
from whom McLuhan derived the idea, is playing with the
|
|
medieval concept of natural prophecy, making it a
|
|
fundamental feature of the epistemology of his dream world,
|
|
in which the "give and take" of the "mind factory," an
|
|
"antithesis of ambidual anticipation," generates auspices,
|
|
auguries, and divination--for "DIVINITY NOT DEITY [is] THE
|
|
UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE" (282.R7-R13).
|
|
Natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about
|
|
futurology with which Joyce and McLuhan were naturally
|
|
familiar from scholasticism and Thomism, occurs through a
|
|
reading of history and its relation to that virtual,
|
|
momentary social text (the present), which is dynamic and
|
|
always undergoing change. Joyce appears to blend this
|
|
medieval concept with classical sociological ideas--of
|
|
prophecy as an "intermediation"--quite consistent with his
|
|
concepts of communication as involving aspects of
|
|
participation and communion. It is only through some such
|
|
reading that the future existent in history can be known and
|
|
come to be. McLuhan's reading, adapted from Joyce, of the
|
|
collision of history and the present moment led him to
|
|
foresee a world emerging where communication would be
|
|
tactile, post-verbal, fully participatory and
|
|
pan-sensory.^37^
|
|
Why ought communication history and theory take account
|
|
of Joyce's poetic project? First, because he designed a new
|
|
language (later disseminated by McLuhan, Eco, and Derrida)
|
|
to carry out an in-depth interpretation of complex
|
|
socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic
|
|
production. Two brief examples: Hollywood "wordloosing
|
|
celluloid soundscript over seven seas," or the products of
|
|
the Hollywood dream factory itself as "a rolling away of the
|
|
reel world," reveal media's potential international
|
|
domination as well as the problems film form raises for the
|
|
mutual claims of the imaginary and the real. For example,
|
|
the term "abortisements" (advertisements) suggests the
|
|
manipulation of fetishized femininity with its submerged
|
|
relation of advertisement to butchering--the segmentation of
|
|
the body as object into an assemblage of parts.
|
|
Second, Joyce's work is a critique of communication's
|
|
historical role in the production of culture, and it
|
|
constitutes one of the earliest recognitions of the
|
|
importance of Vico to a contemporary history of
|
|
communication and culture.^38^ Third, his work is itself
|
|
the first "in-depth" contemporary exploration of the
|
|
complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking,
|
|
aurality, and orality. Fourth, developing Vico's earlier
|
|
insights and anticipating Kenneth Burke, he sees the
|
|
importance of the "poetic" as a concept in communication,
|
|
for the poetic is the means of generating new communicative
|
|
potentials between medium and message. This provides the
|
|
poetic, the arts, and other modes of cultural production
|
|
with a crucial role in a semiotic ecology of communication,
|
|
an ecology of sense, and making sense. Fifth, in the
|
|
creative project of this practice, Joyce develops one of the
|
|
most complex discussions of the contemporary transformation
|
|
of our media of communication. And finally, his own work is
|
|
itself an exemplum of the socio-ecological role of the
|
|
poetic in human communication.
|
|
VR or cyberspace, as an assemblage of a multiplicity of
|
|
existing and new media, dramatizes the relativity of our
|
|
classifications of media and their effects. The newly
|
|
evolving global metropolis arising in the age of cyberspace
|
|
is a site where people are intellectual nomads:
|
|
differentiation, difference, and decentering characterize
|
|
its structure. Joyce and the arts of high modernism and
|
|
postmodernism provide a solid appreciation of how people
|
|
constantly reconstruct or remake reality through the
|
|
traversing of the multi-sensory fragments of a "virtual
|
|
world" and of the tremendous powers with which electricity
|
|
and the analysis of mechanization would endow the paramedia
|
|
that would eventually emerge.
|
|
->
|
|
BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY
|
|
**********************************
|
|
|
|
NOTES
|
|
|
|
^1^ William Gibson, _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ (NY: Bantam
|
|
Paperback, 1989), 16.
|
|
|
|
^2^ William Gibson, _Neuromancer_ (NY: Ace, 1984), 51.
|
|
|
|
^3^ This quotation is taken from the posthumously
|
|
published Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, _The Global
|
|
Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st
|
|
Century_, (NY: Oxford UP, 1989). It was edited and
|
|
rewritten from McLuhan's working notes, which had to date
|
|
from the late 70s, since he died in 1981. McLuhan's words
|
|
were written more than a decade before their posthumous
|
|
publication in 1989.
|
|
|
|
^4^ McLuhan (1989), 103.
|
|
|
|
^5^ Stuart Brand, _The Media Lab: Inventing the Future
|
|
at MIT_ (NY: Viking, 1987).
|
|
|
|
^6^ Marshall McLuhan, _The Letters of Marshall
|
|
McLuhan_, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan and William
|
|
Toye (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987), 385.
|
|
|
|
^7^ Craig E. Adcock, _Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the
|
|
Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis_ (Ann Arbor,
|
|
Michigan: UMI, 1983), 28: "The _Large Glass_ is an
|
|
illuminated manuscript consisting of 476 documents; the
|
|
illumination consists of almost every work that Duchamp
|
|
did."
|
|
|
|
^8^ Stuart Brand (1987).
|
|
|
|
^9^ A further paper needs to be written on the way in
|
|
which synaesthesia as well as coenesthesia participate in
|
|
the pre-history of cyberspace. The unfolding history of
|
|
poets and artists confronting electromechanical
|
|
technoculture, which begins in the 1850s, reveals a growing
|
|
interest in synesthesia and coenesthesia and parallels a
|
|
gradually accelerating yearning for artistic works which are
|
|
syntheses or orchestrations of the arts. By 1857 Charles
|
|
Baudelaire intuited the future transformational power of the
|
|
coming of electro-communication when he established his
|
|
concept of synaesthesia and the trend toward a synthesis of
|
|
all the arts as central aspects of symbolisme. The
|
|
transformational matrices involved in synaesthesia and the
|
|
synthesis of the arts unconsciously respond to that
|
|
digitalization implicit in Morse code and telegraphy,
|
|
anticipating how one of the major characteristics of
|
|
cyberspace will be the capability of all modes of expression
|
|
to be transformed into minimal discrete contrastive units--
|
|
bits.
|
|
This assertion concerning Baudelaire's use of
|
|
synesthesia is developed from Benjamin's discussions of
|
|
Baudelaire. The role of shock in Baudelaire's poetry, which
|
|
links the "Correspondances" with "La Vie Anterieur," also
|
|
reflects how the modern fragmentation involved in "Le
|
|
Crepuscle du Soir" and "Le Crepuscle du Matin" is
|
|
reassembled poetically through the verbal transformation of
|
|
sensorial modes. This is the beginning of a period in which
|
|
the strategy of using shock to deal with fragmentation is
|
|
transformed into seeing the multiplicity of codifications of
|
|
municipal (or urban) reality. So when the metamorphic
|
|
sensory effects of nature's temple are applied to the
|
|
splenetic here and now, in the background is the emergence
|
|
of the new codifications of reality, such as the photography
|
|
which so preoccupied Baudelaire, and telegraphy, which had
|
|
an important impact in his lifetime.
|
|
|
|
^10^ See D.F. Theall, "The Hieroglyphs of Engined
|
|
Egypsians: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in
|
|
_Finnegans Wake_," _Joyce Studies Annual 1991_, ed. Thomas
|
|
F. Staley (Austin: Texas UP, 1991), 129-52. This
|
|
publication provides major source material for the present
|
|
article.
|
|
|
|
^11^ "Machinic" is used here very deliberately as
|
|
distinct from mechanical. See Gilles Deleuze, _Dialogues_,
|
|
trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Haberjam (NY: Columbia UP,
|
|
1987), 70-1, where he discusses the difference between the
|
|
machine and the 'machinic' in contradistinction to the
|
|
mechanical.
|
|
|
|
^12^ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_, ed.
|
|
T.G. Bergen and M. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1948).
|
|
|
|
^13^ For fuller discussion of Joyce and these themes
|
|
see Donald Theall, "James Joyce: Literary Engineer," in
|
|
_Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A.E. Malloch_,
|
|
ed. Gary Wihl & David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP,
|
|
1988), 111-27; Donald and Joan Theall, "James Joyce and
|
|
Marshall McLuhan," _Canadian Journal of Communication_,
|
|
14:4/5 (Fall 1989), 60-1; and Donald Theall (1991), 129-152.
|
|
A number of subsequent passages are adapted with minor
|
|
modifications from parts of the last article, which is a
|
|
fairly comprehensive coverage of Joyce and technology.
|
|
|
|
^14^ While in one sense the dreamer is identified as
|
|
the male HCE, the book opens and closes with the feminine
|
|
voice of ALP. It is her dream of his dreaming, or his dream
|
|
of her dreaming? Essentially, it is androgynous, with a
|
|
mingling of male and female voices throughout. For another
|
|
treatment of the male-female theme in the _Wake_, see
|
|
Suzette Henke, _James Joyce and the Politics of Desire_ (NY:
|
|
RKP, 1989).
|
|
|
|
^15^ "Jousstly" refers to Marcel Jousse's important
|
|
work on communication and the semiotics of gesture, with
|
|
which Joyce was familiar. See especially Lorraine Weir,
|
|
"The Choreography of Gesture: Marcel Jousse and _Finnegans
|
|
Wake_," _James Joyce Quarterly_, 14:3 (Spring 1977), 313-25.
|
|
|
|
^16^ This motif will be developed further below. It
|
|
relates to Joyce's interest in Lewis Carroll. Gilles
|
|
Deleuze comments extensively on manducation in _The Logic of
|
|
Sense_, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed.
|
|
Constantin V. Boundas (NY: Columbia UP, 1990).
|
|
|
|
^17^ See Dewey, _Art As Experience_ (NY: G.P. Putnam,
|
|
1958) and Kenneth Burke, _Permanence and Change: An Anatomy
|
|
of Purpose_ (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
|
|
|
|
^18^ Cf. T.S. Eliot, _Selected Essays_ (NY: Harcourt,
|
|
Brace, 1932), 182: "One of the surest of tests is the way in
|
|
which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets
|
|
steal . . . "; see also "Old stone to new building, old
|
|
timber to new fires," ("East Coker," _Four Quartets_, l. 5).
|
|
Joyce's use of "outlex" relates to Jim the Penman, for Joyce
|
|
analyzing Shem in the _Wake_ is aware of how the traditions
|
|
of the artist as liar, counterfeiter, con man, and thief
|
|
could all coalesce about the role of the artist as an
|
|
outlaw.
|
|
|
|
^19^ "Kills" in the sense of "to kill a bottle";
|
|
"kills" also as a stream or channel of water.
|
|
|
|
^20^ See Walter Ong's remarks about Marcel Jousse in
|
|
_The Presence of the Word_ (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967),
|
|
146-7, and Lorraine Weir's more extensive development of the
|
|
theme in (1977), 313-325, and in _Writing Joyce: A Semiotics
|
|
of the Joyce System_ (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
|
|
UP, 1989).
|
|
|
|
^21^ I.J. Gelb, _A Study of Writing_ (Chicago: U of
|
|
Chicago P, 1963).
|
|
|
|
^22^ Cf. McLuhan (1989), 182.
|
|
|
|
^23^ Alexander Marschak, _The Roots of Civilization_
|
|
(NY: McGraw-Hill, 1982); Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher,
|
|
_Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, mathematics and
|
|
Culture_ (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1981); Claude
|
|
Levi-Strauss, _The Elementary Structures of Kinship_, trans.
|
|
James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney
|
|
Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
|
|
|
|
^24^ The usual way to indicate sections of the _Wake_
|
|
is by part and episode. Hence I,v is Part I episode 5.
|
|
There are four parts, the first consisting of eight
|
|
episodes, the second and the third of four episodes each and
|
|
the fourth of a single episode.
|
|
|
|
^25^ Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, _Understanding
|
|
Finnegans Wake_ (NY: Garland Publishing, 1982), 308-09.
|
|
|
|
^26^ For detailed discussion of the treatment of the
|
|
ear and hearing in _Finnegans Wake_, see John Bishop,
|
|
_Joyce's book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake_ (Madison, WI: U
|
|
of Wisconsin P, 1986), Chapter 9 "Earwickerwork," 264-304.
|
|
|
|
^27^ Jorge Luis Borges, _Other Inquisitions:
|
|
1937-1952_, trans. Ruth R. Sims (NY: Simon and Schuster,
|
|
1968), 6-9.
|
|
|
|
^28^ Lorraine Weir (1989).
|
|
|
|
^29^ Elizabeth Eisenstein, _The Printing Revolution in
|
|
Early Modern Europe_ (NY: Cambridge UP, 1983).
|
|
|
|
^30^ Bishop (1986), 264-304.
|
|
|
|
^31^ Eugene Jolas, "My Friend James Joyce," in _James
|
|
Joyce: two decades of criticism_, ed. Seon Givens (NY:
|
|
Vanguard, 1948), 24.
|
|
|
|
^32^ E.g., in Frances Yates, _The Art of Memory_
|
|
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966).
|
|
|
|
^33^ James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, _Letters_,
|
|
ed. Stuart Gilbert (NY: Viking, 1957), 251 [Postcard, 16
|
|
April 1927].
|
|
|
|
^34^ For a discussion of this see Gilles Deleuze,
|
|
_Bergsonism_ (NY: Zone, 1988), Chapter 3, "Memory as Virtual
|
|
Co-existence," 51-72.
|
|
|
|
^35^ Speaking of the all-embracing aspects of VR and
|
|
cyberspace, the work which Baudrillard has made of
|
|
"simulation" and "the ecstasy of communication" should be
|
|
noted. This issue is too complex to engage within an essay
|
|
specifically focused on Joyce. In approaching it, however,
|
|
it is important to realize the degree of similarity that
|
|
Baudrillard's treatment of communication shares with
|
|
McLuhan's. In many ways, I believe it could be established
|
|
that what Baudrillard critiques as the "ecstasy of
|
|
communication" is his understanding of McLuhan's vision of
|
|
communication divorced from its historical roots in the
|
|
literature and arts of symbolisme, high modernism, and
|
|
particularly James Joyce.
|
|
|
|
^36^ This is a major theme of McLuhan and McLuhan's
|
|
_The Laws of Media_ (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1988).
|
|
|
|
^37^ See Donald F. Theall, _The Medium is the Rear
|
|
View Mirror; Understanding McLuhan_ (Montreal:
|
|
McGill-Queen's UP, 1971).
|
|
|
|
^38^ John O'Neill credits Vico with a "wild sociology"
|
|
in which the philologist is a wild sociologist in _Making
|
|
Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology_ (NY:
|
|
Harper & Row, 1974), 28-38. The significance of Vico's
|
|
emphasis on the body is developed in John O'Neill, _Five
|
|
Bodies: The Human Sense of Society_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
|
|
1985).
|
|
|
|
The Movers
|
|
by
|
|
E. Russell Smith
|
|
|
|
Daphne awakens at grey dawn, and lies fretting through the early
|
|
hours. The house around her clutches at its wholeness even as its inner
|
|
structure falls apart, sighs as its viscera shrivel into boxes and barrels.
|
|
Its furniture convokes in emergency caucus; its carpets roll against the
|
|
bare baseboards. After eleven years of searching for a poised style, an
|
|
effective artifice for coping, Daphne feels that she has failed.
|
|
|
|
But when the men arrive the sun is high; it filters through the
|
|
tracery of elms and litters the tiny lawn with fragments of light. It
|
|
wavers through imperfect window panes and rides dust motes onto her
|
|
rumpled sheets. The trees have grown and now there is too much shade,
|
|
but nothing else has changed. The Globe and Mail thumps against the
|
|
door. New cars gleam in the driveways, and someone else's children play
|
|
hopscotch on the footpath by the Rideau Canal.
|
|
|
|
She is sitting at her vanity, letting down her braids when the
|
|
door bell rings. Brushing her long auburn hair is a daily act of
|
|
devotion, not to be interrupted.
|
|
"Theo," she calls, "will you let them in?" He is in the utility
|
|
room, reading the meters. She locks herself in her dressing room, and
|
|
picks up her brush again.
|
|
They have been packing for days, together, a degree of communion
|
|
that has been rare in recent years. All the delicate treasures of their travels are wrapped in tissue, nested in tea cases. Porcelain from
|
|
France, and Belgian silver. Transparent souvenirs of Venice. Haida
|
|
drums still redolent of animals that died to make them. A soapstone
|
|
carving of an Inuit madonna.
|
|
They cannot take the conservatory that they added to the breakfast
|
|
room, nor the Delft tiles on the fireplace. Theo's silver maple has to
|
|
stay. Daphne smiles. He fell out of it once, and broke his arm, while
|
|
hanging a feeder for the hummingbirds.
|
|
The drapes in the dining room remain behind, and the panelling in
|
|
Theo's study -- a room which Daphne had once furnished as a nursery.
|
|
They can take their bed, and their nights of compromise and
|
|
reconciliation. And a framed water-colour of Queen's University,
|
|
painted by a lost friend of twenty years ago.
|
|
|
|
Dougal, an artist with a studio on Wolfe Island, was still a
|
|
bachelor at thirty-five.
|
|
"Why not?" said Theo, when Daphne proposed that she go with
|
|
Dougal to the opening of the Morrice exhibition in Montreal.
|
|
"We thought we might take in the ballet as well," she said. "The
|
|
National is at the Place des Arts. Why don't you come too? We'll get
|
|
a B&B on Crescent Street."
|
|
"No, no, you two go ahead. Your gay friend won't be a problem,
|
|
will he?" Theo maintained a handy mental file of stereotypes and firm
|
|
consistencies. Bachelor artists who liked ballet were ipso facto
|
|
homosexual.
|
|
So Daphne and Dougal went to Montreal, and stayed two nights.
|
|
Theo was left free to spend long uninterrupted hours at the laboratory,
|
|
building computer models of "recombinant chromosomes for prokaryotic
|
|
cloning."
|
|
(Daphne didn't know what he was talking about either.)
|
|
|
|
Theo was surprised by Daphne's pregnancy, but he was also very
|
|
absent-minded about their sex life. He was only sure that he did not
|
|
want to be a father. A child would destroy their domestic equilibrium. Daphne agreed that it was too soon to start a family -- they were both
|
|
under thirty -- and she sought an abortion. Intellectually she created
|
|
between herself and the life in her womb a distance which sustained her
|
|
as far as the door of the clinic, but in the end the emotional trauma was
|
|
sharper and more persistent than the physical pain. Theo was
|
|
appropriately solicitous.
|
|
But Dougal was devastated. He went away to live in the Yukon, and
|
|
Daphne never saw him again.
|
|
Theo published papers based on his doctoral thesis and attracted
|
|
many offers. He took a post in Ottawa at the National Research Council.
|
|
Daphne's classmate Glenda had preceded her to the capital and a job at
|
|
the Archives. She introduced Daphne to the director, and soon thereafter
|
|
Daphne was working in Restoration and Binding, with special
|
|
responsibility to the curator of manuscripts.
|
|
She and Theo bought a post-modern town house by the canal.
|
|
|
|
Theo opens the door to the movers. Daphne braids her hair and
|
|
comes down to find the men still discussing the order of the day's
|
|
events. Theo has prepared a speech in bad French, but he is answered
|
|
firmly in superior English, and he gladly surrenders. This is the first
|
|
of the day's cultural surprises.
|
|
Elzear and Armand are large men, black and white respectively.
|
|
Either one could break her in his great fist. Which of them is the more
|
|
threatening, padding silently about in soft-soled shoes? Daphne
|
|
trembles when Elzear, the Haitian, appears carrying the television
|
|
console on his back, as easily as if it were a carton of styrofoam.
|
|
He is probably the older of the two, completely bald, with dark deep-set
|
|
eyes. His blackness gleams beneath his plain white T-shirt.
|
|
Armand, who seems to be in charge, wears the motto 'Meanest
|
|
Flower' across his massive chest. Daphne is startled at his reaction
|
|
when he discovers her looking at it.
|
|
"'To me'," he declaims, "'the meanest flower that blows can give
|
|
thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'"
|
|
Daphne gathers territorial courage, for this gentle giant is
|
|
treading on her ground. "Wordsworth!" she announces, triumphantly.
|
|
"Armand, how did you make the acquaintance of Wordsworth?... Oh,
|
|
pleasebe careful with the cases. They are filled with the only intimations
|
|
of my immortality."
|
|
|
|
Her friend Glenda took a leave from the Archives to have her first
|
|
child when she was thirty-two. She and Morty were soon expecting
|
|
another. Daphne and Theo visited them at home only once. The house
|
|
smelled of spilt milk and unwashed diapers; it was a chaos of laundry,
|
|
stuffed animals and sticky surfaces. The air of happy complacency
|
|
was too much for Theo.
|
|
"I had to accomplish something of my own," Glenda said to Daphne.
|
|
Theo and Morty had gone out into the garden where the disorder was at
|
|
least natural. "I was bogged down in the affairs of other people, mostly
|
|
dead. Think about it."
|
|
A year later the government changed, and Daphne lost her job.
|
|
"I'm going off the pill," she announced.
|
|
"Right," said Theo. "I'll have a vasectomy."
|
|
They might have been discussing who would wash and who would
|
|
wipe.
|
|
|
|
They lunch at noon on the patch of grass, and watch the birds. A
|
|
hummingbird dances for his mate, swinging deep parabolas through the
|
|
neighbour's yard. Song sparrows feed their chicks in the juniper and
|
|
take no time to sing. Grackles drive the finches from the feeder and
|
|
then scatter as much seed as they eat, for the squirrels to gather.
|
|
Daphne and Theo eat brown rolls stuffed with Spanish onion and
|
|
mustard. Elzear and Armand unwrap pate and wheat thins, cottage
|
|
cheese and tinned Virginia ham. They accept Granny Smiths from Daphne,
|
|
and tea. Her second best set is used for picnics.
|
|
"Let me pour," says Armand, so genteelly that she can't refuse.
|
|
She marvels at his delicacy. She should have let them pack the china.
|
|
"Is it Earl Grey?" he asks.
|
|
Elzear examines a saucer. "No," he says. "It's Royal Doulton.
|
|
Early '50's."
|
|
"Le the, mon vieux !" Armand covers his own face in shame for his
|
|
colleague's ignorance. "Je l'excuse, madame. Is it Earl Grey tea ?"
|
|
Daphne sighs. "Only an orange pekoe, I'm afraid."
|
|
The huge load does not leave the empty house till after two.
|
|
Armand drives. The new house is in fact an older one in Rockcliffe
|
|
Village, worth half a military helicopter, Theo says. Last in the van,
|
|
and first to be unloaded are the round stone planters from the patio,
|
|
containing geraniums, begonias, lobelias and coleus.
|
|
"Set them around the front door," Daphne says.
|
|
The lock resists the key, and the new paint holds the door to its
|
|
frame. When the house has finally yielded, Daphne possesses it entirely,
|
|
immediately, passing through to the back. The rooms are bare and
|
|
perfect. For a moment she regrets the necessity of bringing anything
|
|
into them. The benches lining the window bays are already upholstered
|
|
in blue striped corduroy that she has chosen.
|
|
She sits on one of them and gazes. On the terrace a mason is
|
|
mixing mortar to repair the falling wall. Theo has sent for him, no
|
|
doubt. Last week the gardener mowed the huge unkempt lawn, and now
|
|
a yellow galaxy of dandelions -- the meanest flowers that blow --
|
|
flourishes beneath the birches.
|
|
He will have to mow it again, right away, Daphne decides. She
|
|
starts sorting some mail, surprised that their presence has been
|
|
recognized so promptly -- mostly flyers and bills, nothing personal.
|
|
A light breeze moves a branch against a shutter and enters the
|
|
open house. It swings a squeaky cupboard door. Somewhere a floor
|
|
board creaks for no apparent reason. The house has its own habits;
|
|
it has already begun to ignore her.
|
|
|
|
The ghosts of the other house drove her out.
|
|
"Morning has come!" said the blade slicing the ice on the canal,
|
|
here clear, there shattered like frozen lightning laid on the black
|
|
water. Daphne stood in the oriel of the master bedroom.
|
|
Where the white banks slid motionless over the old walls, she
|
|
heard the laughter of their unborn children. An old sorrow glided across
|
|
her cold life -- a dark figure in the brightness, silent but for the cut of
|
|
steel, a little mourning to be scraped together and cast aside.
|
|
|
|
They used to walk to and from work, she and Theo, along the canal.
|
|
February was the worst month, on a broken pavement, wet, and the red
|
|
flag waving over the rotting ice, a north wind off the river. It was
|
|
winter still and they huddled together as though the end would never
|
|
come. February thaw -- a persistent misery rolled into one smooth ball
|
|
together with the remnants of a calculated Christmas, to be tossed at
|
|
a passing bureaucrat.
|
|
They would have been content in softer snow. They walked with fear;
|
|
only a white mist told where the way was, where the water was. The
|
|
coercive towers of the city rose and swallowed them, tucked them into
|
|
offices, told them to be good. Keep quiet, they said, about the darkness
|
|
rising on the shores, now slipping up the river and the canal, while the
|
|
carnival was raging. Only the children laughed.
|
|
And about the time they slid beneath the night, the pale sun rose
|
|
again, and the skater returned.
|
|
"We have to move," said Daphne. Theo shrugged.
|
|
|
|
Much later Elzear appears in the living room, where Daphne has
|
|
dropped exhausted on a roll of carpet.
|
|
"Good-bye, Madame," he says. "You have a beautiful home."
|
|
"Thank you, Elzear." She gets up wearily and follows him to the
|
|
open door. The night is clear. A full moon silvers the house and the
|
|
drive across the front.
|
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"Oh, no!" she cries, when she sees what they have done. Where is
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Theo?
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Four of the heavy planters form an untidy rank on one side of the
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door, and the two containing geraniums stand on the other.
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"It's all lop-sided," she says.
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"You don't want them evenly spaced," says Armand.
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"Why not? This house is balanced. Rectangular front, central
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door, windows equally spaced -- very tight, very Georgian."
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Armand frowns. "This isn't 1800, or even 1950. It's the turn of
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the millennium. They must be irregular, for the tension, for the
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|
movement. Every pot is unique. Each one makes its statement to the
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|
world. A home rises out of natural disorder. How else can there be a
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place in it for each of us?"
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Elzear circles about to take in the effect. Armand moves one pot
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a few centimeters, the last touch of his brush.
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Daphne sits down on the step and weeps.
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________________________
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Contributors to this issue:
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Colin Morton
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The first poem, "At a nameless bend in the river," has just
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been published in _The Malahat Review_.
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His interview with poet John Barton, "Masks that Reveal,"
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in a recent Poetry Canada was accepted on sight.
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He has published 4 books: In Transit (1981), Printed Matter
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(1982), This Won't Last Forever (1985), The Merzbook (1987),
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How to Be Born Again (1992).
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|
Various other works include; performance poetry in an
|
|
audio-cassette, First Draft: Wordmusic (1986); a film,
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|
Primiti Too Taa (1987); an art book, The Scream (1984);
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a book of scores, North/South (1987); a chapbook, Two
|
|
Decades (1987); and a piece for theatre, The Cabbage of
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|
Paradise (1988).
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--------------------------
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G. L. Eikenberry
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He is a 43 year old feelance writer/freelance micro-
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computer/communications consultant, martial arts
|
|
instructor living and working in the National Capital
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Region.
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His poetry and fiction has appeared (over a span of
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|
roughly twenty years) in a wide range of literary and
|
|
small press publications including _Matrix_,
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|
_Antigonish Review_, _Quarry_, _Pottersfield
|
|
Portfolio_, etc.
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---------
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Donald F. Theall
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A professor at Trent University.
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---------
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E. Russell Smith
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His story, The Movers, took third prize in the 1993
|
|
Nepean PL short story competition.
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