Life goes Bi

Life goes bi

For centuries, spoken words were unidirectional, evaporating into space. Ritual pursued preservation, and writing technology was formed to capture stories and manage lists. Recorded sound changed communication as profoundly as writing, but in subtle ways. Words and music of people long dead can haunt us. Is it an illusion of bidirectionality? We hear them, but they can’t hear us. The Recording Angel by Evan Eisenberg deals with sound in a unique way:

But if a record is a time capsule and a phonograph is a time machine, they are so in an unaccustomed sense. A record is a sculpted block of time, repeatable at an owner’s whim. The block may have been carved from another time and place (though only live recordings are carved in one piece) and may be a document or record of its quarry. But a record of music does not record historical time. It records musical time which, though it exists in historical time, is not of it. A violoncello is already a time machine, taking its listener to a place outside time. The phonograph is a time machine of this sort, but with the difference that the listener operates it himself and can take a spin as often as he pleases.

Records, I said, shattered the public architecture of time. The have replaced it with a kind of modular interior design. The individual supplies himself with sculpted blocks of time and proceeds to pave his day with them. Each block is infinitely repeatable. Each is different from, but formally interchangeable with each other.

One of the major problems in semantics is determining the effective limit of a meaning unit. The meaning of words is shaped by their context, and not contained in the words themselves. We can isolate them by function, subject, verb, preposition, etc., but we cannot safely say that a word means anything outside of context. Perhaps words are also like paving stones. How many of them does it take to form a road? Is it a one way trip?

I think writing a blog is different than conventional writing not only because it’s electrified and public, but because of the shape of the path. Software offers the option to display entries in conventional chronological order, but no one I read uses that. Why? Because it would be redundant and confusing to surf in to the beginning of a story each day, scrolling down to where you left off. It’s best to start in the now. Because it’s recorded, it’s always possible to go back to the beginning if a writer interests you. Our experience of a blog can be bidirectional. This makes me ponder its presence in historical time, but more than that, it makes me wonder at the problematic nature of conventional writing methods in this context. With every additional entry, the context subtly shifts, as entries disappear into the archives.

With every use, our words grow deeper in meaning built on associations established before. Random access dilutes carefully crafted meanings built using linear approaches to writing. Blog writing is different because though the window into it is always random, a reader can stroll back down the path and see how the stones are placed; we can trace the sculpted blocks of discourse back deep into the quarry and get a greater sense of the person behind the words. Blog entries are also like modular decorating blocks, interchangeable with any other. Without the conceit that an audience has followed the story, each day I reinvent the wheel driven to make each block self-contained. I’m not sure it’s better than a linear approach or more flexible, but it’s certainly more coherent than a random one.

Most readers don’t prowl the archives of a blog, but the possibility always exists.