- The Digital Writer  
 
 


The Digital Writer  

 

The writer, digital or not, always sought out the good, fertile ground that had been abandoned. If mass culture had taken over the entertainment mind and official philosophy had given up the old search for wisdom, even love for it, then the writer knew a wonderful old but eternally ground to till in....

To compete with the ignorant who have money is an impossible task. The ignorant who have money always win. One moves, then, where he can not be harmed by them.

What the online world needs to do is to produce work that can't be reproduced in print; create publications that use the Net as well as it can be used and deliver what the print world can't afford to deliver. Links come to mind but so do audio/visual media. The online world faces the same problem of existing in a very fragmented world where people can get on one channel and stay there. We know most people migrate to two or three channels in their lifetime.

I've always viewed the Net as a personalist medium. It may present the opportunity to speak with millions but, the desire is really to speak to one. If anything will change the nature of writing it's that fact. Writing can return to discovering the purely human rather than continually rationalizing the inhuman. And now it has a medium built to do that very thing!

I always say, writers, you must be a part of this! Self- publishing is one way. I know of subscribers who put their writings on writing sites. There has to be more. As a small publisher, I've tried to get as expansive an audience for those who write essays, poems, or stories. I've tried to deliver as much resource to those interested in careers and jobs in the media. I've published my own material. Things are becoming more sophisticated now as new forms of distribution are coming into play.

Yes, we don't want to belabor the point: The digital publishing system will replace the print publishing system through time. This is more likely now that there are dedicated efforts to improve reading on the computer screen. In the long run, the same sort of organization of efficiency will simply shift from one area to another. However, we are in the twilight period where all kinds of things are possible.

It will work for those who want it to work. I would rather be a story-teller on a brand new medium than one trying to penetrate a built-up medium.

The writer, in the end, simply wants to tell his story. This is sufficient. When the story passes through the living age, then great insight can be reached. When the writer says, "on the otherside of the machine culture is wisdom and I will get there and make my wisdom...." then a significant era is upon us.

The problem with being a writer in America is to find the structure. It is a speech, a tension between the inspiration and the environment; an environment that seems to change only for the worst and provides a unilateral view of history in its appearance and continually confused by its growth. A nation that is short on history but whose great energies are always plunging into the short past and exploiting them until they are used up and become parodies.

The Digital writer thought to himself, "Not quite the present but not quite the past either."

And the future then became a hollow sentiment filled with the tinkling laugh of ghosts.

The great breadth of the land; a relatively short history on the land. Nature always provided more variety than the culture on and around it.

There was a rift between intelligence and feeling since intelligence is always trying to inform feeling of the myth its living out and feeling is unable to purge itself of the identity the myth gives him or her. It was both a problem and an opportunity.

The Digital Writer looked at himself. "Do I belong to a community? I don't know. Don't they see the irony of that answer? I have come from a family, have various friends in various pursuits, live in a city that is surrounded and connected to other cities. There are various gestures and speeches that I understand and, in fact, give myself to. There is a form of government that I recognize and I participate in it one way or the other. There are life-styles flourishing all around me but I don't understand 3/4 of them and don't really sympathize with most of them. And yet, paradoxically, I don't feel alienated from any particular endeavor. I am only alienated from the general."

When he talked to his father about history a thousand years came alive. Byblos, Balbec, 'the road to Damascus;' the geography, people, history. The crusades. The foot soldier in the armies of Richard the LionHearted and Saladin; physical travail.

With his father it was not simply the vagaries but the great "blow through" which came when he was talking about history. The great deeds and men of old. How it is all sucked up and transformed by the nature of time.

The soul that is being born destroys something, just as the birth of a child is a violent and wild affair. Perhaps what is destroyed is a fake sort of innocence. That sort of innocence that does not understand that, already, it has many adversary's. The soul understands adversary's. It strives toward conciliation, toward "wholeness" but not at its birth. At its birth it understands there are forces that would destroy it and so takes on the face of a grotesque mask. Of course, if it stops here then it it hypnotized and petrified by its adversary.

David



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