Now, I of all people ought to be comfortable with this: if it sounds like the fresh approach to each new day of Leonard in Memento, or like the scroll forgotten-in-writing by Latro in Soldier of the Mist (remember the post A History of Blogging in Ancient Greece?), it's because the similarities are both stark and fitting. At the same time, the older posts that I thought dormant and forgotten begin a second life in the great word jumble in the sky, popping up in searches that range from the pertinent ( plato worried about writing oral) to the bizarre ( homer go to the floss store). This instrument of the devil tells me that every week I pick up some new readers, thanks in the main to the kind people who link to these endeavours, and that, if I'm lucky, along with the current offering they'll sample a previous post or two, rarely more than that. I speak as somebody who is bewitched by Google Analytics. For a blog too is a text without memory, its phantom premises tucked away in a hypothetical and non-existent 'page 1', its approach always starting from the last, the latest page. And I've come to realise that what I was actually meaning to write, before I even knew what one was, was a blog. But now that the bastard has been knocked off - and don't get me wrong, I'm happy with it and, yes, proud of the achievement, thankful for the help - I'm drawn again to that embryonic plan. And ultimately perhaps they, too, did it with my best interest at heart: for a long and laborious and expensive training had gone into teaching me how to construct forensic-type arguments full of persuasive and clearly-drawn conclusions was I so sure that I could turn my back on all those years of ingrained habits and hard-earned skills just as I was about to approach the longest project of my twenty-year school career? Stick to what you know, son. Not the least of the similarities between parenthood and running a complex institution, if you ask me. I've since heard myself many times over say "yes, darling, you can do that" to each of my children whilst also adding such crippling preconditions. But the university, in its august wisdom, had different ideas: you could submit a hypertextual thesis, they explained, so long as the examination copy and the library deposit were still readable from page 1 to n, in traditional linear fashion. That was the embryonic plan anyhow, and both my supervisors were keen for me to pursue it. I wasn't enthusiastic about having to write an introduction - marking a starting point - much less about reaching a conclusion where all would be revealed. There was something about the linearity of a book or a bound thesis that didn't lend itself to my eventual argument, I thought. I wanted to talk about a culture that is terrified of remembering too much, and nothing at all. I wanted to talk about memory and forgetting not as discrete things that precede or supersede one another, but as complementary by necessity, one always subsuming the other and then yielding in turn. When I first got the idea for my dissertation, I planned to write it as a hypertext.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |