25.8.05

furthering ... ?

Let me just say how much I detest dial-up. It’s not just the slowness of everything, it's that ticking clock up in the right hand corner of the screen, logging the seconds passing into minutes passing … whereas with broadband, or ADSL as my soon-to-be-restored (tomorrow!) service is called, you never have to think about time, on or off-line, because you’re always on. Plugged into the grid, as it were. Any stray thought or query or reference, hit a key and it will either be answered or else you lead you on to some place you’d never otherwise go. Ditto, if you want to find out what other bloggers are doing – just go there. Plus, I’ve got entirely out of the habit of composing offline then posting later and I don’t like it. It reminds me of when I used to write on spec and then seek, usually in vain, for publication. Of earlier incarnations as if I’d segued inadvertently in the recent past and got trapped there; when I want to go to the future … now!

Which leads on to another thought, that I don’t know what to write next. Not so much the next word but the next obsession. The next overtaking of self by world I guess. Unpacking my books, doing a rapid cleansing of the filing cabinet (half a wheelie-bin’s worth of recycling …) made me painfully aware of how little of what used to fascinate me, holds much or any interest for me now. Marquesan tattoo … archaeoastronomy … the avant poetry of the 1970s … gone in the dark backward and abysm. All my books have been retrospectives of one kind or another. I’ve never written a future. Not even a present. It seems somehow typical that I should be thinking about this, right about the time the future is becoming more unlikely by the minute. That damn clock again. There’s got to be some way of furthering …

1 comment:

Martin Edmond said...

hmm ... got my connection back ... I think ...