Monday 7/29/2002 5:38 PM

Clean mind, clean body, take your pick.
Attributed to Elvis

Never put Descartes before dehors.
Cannot possibly be attributed

Lousy as I am at a reasonable facsimile of reasonable argument, I find myself once again embroiled, like a chop blazing on a charcoal grill in the universe of discourse that concerns itself with hypertext, Dub Dub Dub and our burgeoning technological marvels. Scratching my head and other perhaps less appropriate nether portions of my body, I contemplate the spirit filled electronic void that passes itself off as cyberspace. And come up all doe eyes and blank.

I decided that I would single handedly embark on the creation of a hyper novel. Wouldn’t it be neat, I thought, if all my parenthetic expression could be placed in some sort of text box available at the click or passing over of a mouse on some underlined or gaily colored text? That was all that was on my mind, really! But as I started to write I realized that in hypertext chronology or whatever organization that I could manage to design control is more in the hands of the receiver, (in this case you) than the sender (in also the same case me). You would not, for example, necessarily read this sentence because you could choose to drift off to some other portion of my hyperuniverse before I could hyperventilate. It gave me pause which has turned to full stop.

I thought I would take a look at the literature of hypertext and see what was going on. Off to WWW (Dub Dub Dub. It has been pointed out that it is actually faster to say World Wide Web than Double U Double U Double U, certainly ironic and more pointedly indicative of the state of cyberhyperspace.) And I found a welter of confusion. Robert Coover is writing, among others, a hyper novel. There are even such works electronically published. (Don’t want to sound too cheap here, but the $25 fee was too much for my poor, and I do mean poor, mind and its physical manifestation the bank account to pay).

Then I looked for hypertext editors or writing systems figuring that method would become evident in the use of the software and essentially came up with web page editors. Since I already use both Dream Weaver and Front Page to develop (isn’t that a pretension way to put it) my company intranet and parts of the Lackzoom Web, I decided to look at the proffered demo software and was to a program disappointed.

Then I looked at books. Printed pages of materials. Hamlet on the Holodeck is one, The Unfinished Revolution another, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace a third. The arguments of all lead back to that old French guy Descartes and the Mind Body split. Tired and gloomy I plotted it in four extended Cartesian dimensions and out popped the devil. Seems that many people look on Cyberspace as a place where spirit, long left ignored in our scientific objective glance at the cosmos, shines. I’m not so sure that they are all wrong.

Pearly Gates points out that we, in cyberspace, have and become avatars that guide, like angels, like Dante’s long bearded Virgil, out beyond our midpoint residence in the Great Chain of Being, physically midway between heavenly and animal out to where the stars hang in spirit filled luminescence.

Lost lost lost am I. In a maze of CAT 5 Cables and DNS Info. Unable to bridge my network at home with my network at work with the network of the world. Crashing whole systems of bits bytes words writ in XML C++ HTML ActiveX Perl Unix Linux XP CGI PDQ LSMFT. It all seems like it should be easier. I just, I cry, want to write! Or Do I?