Blogging and the mirror world

Blogging and the mirror world

In William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, the protagonist Cayce Pollard finds herself in London, where many of the smaller things are different enough that she begins to talk of the mirrorworld object: mirrorworld coins (bigger and heavier than American coins), mirrorworld fashion (rumpled is in), etc. The novel does a nice job of spinkling these mirrorworld details throughout, lending London an Alice through the looking Glass difference that is all the more effective for being mostly mundane.

I had a thought about blogging and blogging’s mirror world today as I was reading the paper about Japan’s crisis after the devastating earthquake and tsunami. For the last three days has been relentless, covering the unfolding nightmare in Soma and elsewhere: workers using chain saws and hand picks to dig bodies out; millions without water food heat in near freezing temperatures; the second explosion of a nuclear power containment building; a massive plunge of the stock market. Besides food, officials from the hardest hit prefectures on the northeast coast are asking for body bags and coffins.

I am sitting in my warm home with the heat at a comfortable 70 degrees because the rains came yesterday and it’s chilly out. My computer for some reason is looking especially homey right now, its aluminum ‘brick’ exterior showing the signs of long and contented use. Next to it are arrayed its technofriends: the Sony linear PCM recorder on its round silver stand; the new speakers that have been bumping Shpongle and Random Rab and the Moby remix of Michael Jackson as I worked through the last couple days; headphones and ear buds, cables, the cell phone on vibrate so I can make sure the three travelers from Miami make it all the way to the ski condo we’re hooking them up with.

These two realities – these mirrorworlds – compete with a third: the writing work I’ve been doing. If you were to read my blog, you’d see that I’m writing on cyborgs and cyborg theory: watching and analyzing Star Trek’s Borg episodes (what is that uncanny square coming toward us in 1991?); rereading the Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep novel for its cyborg technologies like the Penfield Mood organ and the black “empathy” box that enables a Christ-like religious experience; using Bruce Stering to reimagine the genealogy of cyborg images into shapers and mechanists, and linking the genetic engineering elements of postwar cyborgs to an emerging ‘biopunk’ genre; being excited by the link here between Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing (The Windup Girl; Pump Six) and the cyborg history I’m trying to trace.

In all this, none of the Japanese catastrophe inserted itself into the writing. If you were to come upon this sequence of writing years from now, you’d have no idea that an unimaginably horrific event was unfolding, or how that might feel, or how it might affect the writer. It’s a little like the mirrorworld of Shakespeare’s essays: you read about Mortality, but never anything about the actual black plague that was terrifying everyone during those years of theatre closure and bodies in the street and an end of the world sky hanging over every day.

There is what we blog, and what we do not blog; what we present as ready for reading and thought, and the many things we do not present for whatever reason. I’m reading Montaigne, and the turns of his wonderful mind, and all the while knowing that this proto-blogger never shows us his wife, his meetings with Inquisition officials, his close male friendships. Not once do we sit down with him at a meal, unless the meal be all the wide array of fruitful thought and meaty discussions he serves up in his writing.

And the moral of the story is? That writing is only part of our story, always; that we focus our writing on one theme or thread in order to provide depth, or critical understanding, but that there is always another move, to breadth, to horizontality. To linking. To connection. “Only connect,” writes Forster, that consummate novelist of the sound byte. “Only connect the passion and the prose.” He meant: writing helps build connection between mirrorworlds. It helps him show women trying to connect the disparate parts of their lives and make a whole that is, in all the ways that matter, an artistic whole. Or rather a series of wholes that inevitably crumble or are altered by events, so that one must continue to shape, to make, to create.

And so dear reader you know nothing of the anger I’ve felt at the nuclear power promoters in the United States, which is always there but which now feels white hot. Nor do you know of the reflection I’ve had on this anger and rage, which I used to feel more of, and which parenting and age have either mellowed or dulled. The cyborg theme is partly important to me because I spent ten years of my life fighting nuclear power and weapons, raising awareness of how toxic both are not simply for environments but for economies and sustainable energy options. Nor do you know the bizarre feeling of reading about horror, death, despair, the detail of a small pink child's bike horribly mangled and sitting on a pile of rubble in a city of rubble. How can one simply read? And yet the words somehow give you "information" and you process them all the while knowing you are keeping feeling at bay, for now.

And in fact writing brings me around, yet again, to continue to try linking what appears on the page (or its shiny electronic sister page on the web) with what does not, for whatver reason, find its way in. And when I do make these connections, just as when we connect a circuit, I can feel the added energy as parts of my life merge, mesh, diffract. I feel the uncanny pleasure and pragmatic necessity of writing as a way of living, of fighting back against the discontenting disconnections of middle age and against life in the belly of this stupid stupefying beast that is my home nation.

I’ll get up now and move on to the other mundane things that don’t make it onto the page, but which, examined, most likely contain valuable ore. And so we live, from moments of wholeness and integration, to the whirl and fragmentation of daily life as a multiplicity of lives for most of us.