The Dark Age

Last week I read two short stories that got me thinking about the internet. One was the New Quarterly's great "Gay Dwarves of America," about the unlikely connections a prank website fosters between a reader and its
two creators -- and between the creators themselves.

The other was Literary Devices. printed in Zoetrope All Story and reprinted (for a limited time only) in Salon. I won't try to reduce "Literary Devices" to a line or two --

--but it got me thinking about what I love and hate about the internet.

What I love: the strange connections it fosters. Found objects, especially notes and photographs, have an immediacy and an intimacy rare in an age of advertising and presentation. (An age, god help us, of Powerpoint.) But sometimes the internet has that quality, the feeling of a glimpse from a train window, the people on the dirt road level crossing raising their hands against the glare, in a way that seems a salute.

Yesterday, someone found James's website by looking up "how do I bulk up my 11-year-old daughter." And I wanted to reach out to them (though I can't, I don't know who they are) and tell them that when I was eleven and skinny and at the soccer team skating party I had to sit with the coaches because no one would talk to me-- my Mom bought me the Thriller album that day because she thought it would help, but it didn't -- but in a few years I did find a place to stand, if a lonely one, still a happy one -- that I was a happy debater and a happy math-geek, reading Stevie Smith, reading The Aenied in Latin, listening to the Velvet Underground, a smart girl with bad hair. I wanted to reach out to them and tell them -- wait.

And the other day, someone found my website by looking up "erin bow -- ontario arts council application" and I had a moment's sense of a face at the window, a chill. My work name. Someone checking up? A moment's sense of hostile scrutiny.

What I hate: the speed. I hate that noise the mail makes when I trying to write, its worse than the phone, and it goes off constantly. And I hate how time shrinks together, the sense of time coming at us like big waves. And I hate the distinction that's lost between information and knowledge, between thing and representation. Why should I bother to tell you it's a cold day, fresh snow heaping the birdhouse like a pagoda, that the grackles on the roof opposite are huddled around the steaming attic vents. You can look up the weather here in three seconds.

The internet is a great tool. This morning, I spent two minutes learning what time of year to prune apple trees, and how to go about it. It's for a poem. But I don't think I could have written the poem without spending six months in a strange intimacy with someone who spent half his life with apple trees. But how wonderful that the details of his life are here at my fingertips.

And yet, how fragile those details are. Sweet Sappho, lady of fragments, save us.

What things remember?

Sweet Sappho, lady of fragments,
there's so little left. A few lines
saved by early plagiarists.
A few scraps of papyrus balled up
to bulk the scraped hearts
of lesser mummies. Your breath
pulled from the mouths
of crocodiles.

It's a mistake to think of digital technology as lasting. There is the complication of reading digits: they are by nature in code, and codes are easily lost. You need a special machine, running a special protocol to extract meaning from the code. For books and papers, the only code we must know is the unavoidable one: the language and the alphabet itself.

Listen: Palamedes made the alphabet from lines of cranes against the sky at evening. It's that fragile.

Scraps of papyrus and bits of clay tablets are more readable fragments of computer tape, written in an obsolete language, to be read on an outdated computer, with an unknown operating system. We have technical working notes -- ink on paper -- from Galileo and Newton, but not Sanger and Feynman, who worked on computers. I heard recently of a major digital archiving project, less than twenty years old, which had to be abandoned because no one could read it -- whereas much of the original scraps-and-pigeonholes archive of the OED has survived.

And apart from a changing reading system, the medium is fragile. Digital storage doesn't decay gracefully, as, say, tape does. For technical reasons having to do with sampling, it's much harder to reconstruct. And even tape is far more fragile than paper.

The internet is a burning library. History may look back on this as a dark age -- not because of its character, but because so little of it survives.

What things are lost?

Many. Most. And those that make it,
spared by chance. Consider the rune poem,
only copy of a pagan text bound between
Lucy the martyr and the date of Easter.
What brought it there? Or brought the book
to the burning library?

We think we are creating the great archive of our age, that nothing will be lost. We are wrong: we are putting books in a burning library. But there are other libraries. Let us keep writing.