Introduction

Some Time. Some Life.

p e r f o r a t i o n s 22

"Perfect Cattle-Bears Which Occur in Large Lakes"*

(*see next page)

"The easy possibility of letter-writing must -- seen merely
theoretically -- have brought into the world a terrible
disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts,
and not only with the ghost of the recipient, but also with one's
own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is
writing and even more so in a series of letters where one
corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How on
earth did anyone get the idea that people could communicate by
letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is
near one can catch hold -- all else goes beyond human strength.
Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the
ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses
don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way
by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply
so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it in
order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element
between people and create a natural communication, the peace
of souls, it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the
aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently
inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing
side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it
has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The
ghosts won't starve, but we will perish."

Franz Kafka, from Letters To Milena
-------------------------------

In a way, I began to regret conceiving this issue almost as soon as I sent out the call and I`m still thinking about that regret. In my own journal afterward I wrote this:

11.16

I'm feeling a little regretful--and ill at ease--at having announced this journal issue.

For one thing, it makes me realize how opaque my own emotional state has been throughout my own journal keeping. I've gone though many journals and i have found very few men's journals that explore their `feelings' (I hear groans from certain people at this very instant) with any alacrity or depth. (..not saying they aren't out there...). And for another thing, there just aren't that many journals being KEPT by men. (O.K., .if it makes you guys feel better, let's say diffculty in exploring certain `phenomenological boundary states'.)

There's also a kind of `mass demographic' thinking that rides along with this thing. But I'm not trying to encyclopedize `journals on the web'. I have to keep in mind that I'm searching for a very particular style, approach, continuity.

The unease I feel comes from a sort of fractal depth it feels like I'm falling into with this, an infinite regress of sorts, Robert-through-the-Looking-Glass. I feel like I'm falling into myself in some odd way with some of these writings. For sure, it's the recombinant power of language itself to mirror us back, even from the most distant shore--comforting and frightening at the same. But...also something else, which I just can't quite put my finger on...a most odd feeling of ..of..deja vu maybe, a `remembrance' sculpted from the pure associational power of words maybe, something very human and melanchoic but which also occupies a very brittle border with something else, something more adamantine, inhuman.

o.k., well, i have to think about this some more...

so maybe this was a good thing after all...


so, yeah, ok, maybe I'm still not sure again...at a certain point with all this, EVERYTHING on the net seemed to become a personal journal---and weirdly enough at the same time, it also all just became more `stuff' out there, no connection to anything, no `personal' anywhere, much less life. But then `vertigo' is one of the main factors of any sort of technology these days, and most especially where it subtends the personal; that's the challenge we have in the twenty first century isn't it, to know that there is a human face on the other side of the machine?

But all those not-entirely-theoretical caveats aside: I like these journals, I seem to resonate on a personal level with many of the authors (hard to know how I can say that since I don't REALLY `know' them--but then..what IS it to know someone now?). Perhaps you, the casual visitor to this site, won't find them appealing at all, or you wish for a different kind of `fix' in your cyber-travels -- nothing I can do about that except to wish you well as you pass on by. And as I speculate in the original call below, there ARE hundreds, if not thousands of diaries and journals on-line, so you can no doubt find something to your own taste.

But for those who choose to linger with these folks who have real lives at the end of these very long and convoluted copper and glass strings -- I think you will be drawn in, perhaps even seduced. And while, for me at any rate, it sometimes feels like an almost unbearable breach of privacy in reading through these days, weeks, months; though there is as well something delirious, delicious and sweet, something more intimate than many of us are ever granted ... and sometimes just banal. Or funny or clever or wise...

So...enjoy -- for what can be better than to accompany someone along the way for awhile, even in as mediated a fashion as the screen you're now staring through? Those who wish for the further mediation of some `theory', further meditations on authenticity, identity formation in the age of the web, truth vs fiction, inside vs outside, private vs public, to cope with all this, will also have to go elsewhere for now. Perhaps the Kafka quote is a start. (Although, assuredly all this should cause us to ponder many things...just do it on your own time for now, ok? Maybe in your own journal?)

For now let's be content to rest in the phenomena and not the phenomenology.

(A side note: so that those involved -- other than me -- can't be accused of overweening narcissism, I contacted all the participants, not the other way around. I just like to write these damn calls.)

Original Call:

    'YOUR LIFE'

    PERFORATIONS 22

    As I was making an entry in my on-line journal recently, it occurred to me that there must be hundreds of on-line journals and diaries in this pre-millennial year. Perhaps most of them not using any flashy graphics, javascript, CGI, CCS, dhtml, but patiently recording the ebb and flow of their daily, weekly, or monthly life, perhaps only the minutiae, which seems to clog most of lives but also gives it feet and shoes to walk in., the stories of our small pleasures as well as occasional defeats. And perhaps also that occasional glimmer that seems to give us some sense of where and who we are, where we've been and where we think we should be going, a passing but necessary illumination for not only those of us who write them but maybe even for those who might happen to come across them.

    Maybe it is the case that the journal is the arena where privation and levitation meet, as Clalvino so elegantly expresses it in `Six Memos For The Next Millennium', an ethnographic, primal ground where "words [are] are a perpetual pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety". There, risks may be taken, hazards broached, without fear of judgement or ridicule, since the journey--a big part of the very word `journal'--is an internal one and the risks, private -- and no less so even when they are exposed to a net public. And what better place for such on-going immediacy of an existential grounding in a journal than on the internet, a fabulous beast constructed of unconscious yearnings and deposits and the fantastic capers of pure commodity, where privation and levitation again become hopelessly confused.

    This node of PERFORATIONS will feature your journal or diary (after all--you put it on-line so you must want folks to read it, right?) Whether only the daily emotional weather, dream diary, your occasional unformed theoretical musings, sophisticated or homespun, we would like to feature them. Rather than storing them on the Public Domain server, we would like to link to your URL since the expectation is that these are on-going efforts (with the exception perhaps of archived or discontinued journals.). The only other wish on our part (other than that they be on-going efforts) is that you send a small graphic which can be used as a thumbnail on the index page and perhaps a brief description.

    For more information contact Robert Cheatham at zeug@pd.org