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Years ago, I started to write an illustrated novel. "Write" is a rather broad description of how I was constructing the story. I was doing a series of loosely related sketches and was hoping that a narrative line would emerge that stitched them all together. Of course, it never emerged (although the notion of writing fiction in this manner still tugs at me). But a few of the images remain in my head.
One of the more compelling sketches (at least in my self-delusional world) involved a forest with a slightly dominant tree into which was placed, rather incongruously, an arched-top plank door and a tiny viewing window protected (in the manner of a catcher's mask) with bent iron bars. Beside the tree was parked a beat up pickup truck.
The reason I thought the image was compelling was thus: the door signaled an activity within, the pickup truck that it was indeed occupied and that any usable square footage within had to be found by either going up or down into the tree's branches or root system. I did not yet know what activities lie beyond that door, but in my novel, I KNEW it would be good.
My plank door to the Internet was an odd piece of software called, descriptively enough, World for which I paid a monthly fee plus phone charges by the minute. I would open the software and it would automatically dial the modem.
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For reasons best known to musicologists and electronic psychologists, the plaintive cry of the primitive modem, reminiscent of the whale, is in a minor key. Minor keys are sad, soulful sounds. So it was always with that mournful ritual that I began each foray into the online world on the other side of Zero.
It was, in fact, a siren's call, beckoning me to the craggy rocks on the dark shorelines, easily able to wreak havoc on my ship. My quest online was to discern human nature, both good and evil, of others and of myself. Craggy rocks, indeed.
In a lawless society, you can learn much both about law and about society.
Before Firefox, before Netscape, before BROWSERS altogether, there was the verbal interface. Verbal meaning you had to type WORDS to get around the internet. Later, they developed the Graphical Interface which we still use today, but in those first years, you had to navigate with syntax. Tough guys don't need no graphical interface.
So the very act of searching for signs of life in the internet was blind, a kind of groping in the dark, calling out but afraid, actually, of being heard. I will have to go back (online, of course) to try to remember how I actually went online. I can't remember, but I certainly DID go.
I have no recall who taught me all this, all the language like "login", what to type, when to type it, what might happen.... Perhaps I read it in a book... but can you imagine the LURE, however clumsy, of this secret process to unlock a secret world? A lure for a generation who grew up with hobbits and fortresses of solitude and hyperspace warps and parallel universes and x- ray vision and bionics and mind melds and computer dating and underground comix and love-ins ..... all dangled tantalizingly before our faces our entire lives? So the moment we heard that plaintive modem cry, that siren's call, we were ready to utter our incantations, put on our swords and shields and go in.
Because instinctively we knew it was ALL THERE, waiting for us either to discover or to INVENT.
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I wrote the previous text while sitting on an airplane: you know, those sealed tubes which incubate various strains of influenza virus... while thinking of you and what you might make of all this. Is it an allegorical tale, like I suspect even the Bible is? For the life of me I cannot make out any other reason for the likes of Noah or Daniel in with the lions. Why else would you write down those rather banal events from the universe of other interesting events except to instruct by metaphor?
I think of you in your own private Quest, thrust into your own parallel universe with perhaps less of a roadmap than I had to your medical world which is similarly evolving its abilities as you explore your choices there. The analogy is thin, to be sure, with what you have at stake, but compared to me, having spent half a lifetime with one foot in this Netherworld, the personal expenditure of time in a quest of.... what.... Understanding?.... Enlightenment?..... an Honest Man?......might not be so far fetched.
End of Part 3
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