If I could only name one limitation to Hypertext, it is that this, too, is linear.
Last month, we read through the book (or, Text) Sand Talk, by Tyson Yukaporta. There’s a number of things of note, interesting bits, lovely phrasings, fascinating framings, assumptions in that Text, but the one that has stood out the most like a guiding star to affix to our constellations is the idea that phrasing something as “non-linear” still implicitly leads the mind to think of a relation to linearity. A negation of is not the same thing as a refusal of.
Historically, we prefer to be refusing linearity than participating in a negation of it, and thereby adopt that understanding into this framework.
Something that is of particular interest to me is External Memory as it relates to stories, and to storytelling. Conveyance of information. Just as it feels impossible to type adequately on a setup built for an office worker (I hate laptop keyboards), it is experientially impossible to convey everything that connects to everything. References, inspirations, connections—none of these are in any way linear, except in the sense that there are lines that connect ideas, connect writings, connect experiences.
Can you see the through-line? Can you only see it when it’s presented in one direction? Is it a line at all when it goes more than one direction in the first place? →
Themes and Implications, ties and inspirations, beats and missed opportunities, they are all so dearly beloved. And when I see people ignore them, ignore the very words that make them up and form the shapes around them… Well, what else is there to do but despair about it briefly before getting back to work?
It’s their loss.
To exist in a world that increasingly demands quick, linear communication is decreasingly feasible. And yet, we will persist, as we always have persisted, because fuck the world and its stupid ideas.
To live is to struggle. To write is to enter combat. To exist is to acknowledge that one cannot be understood, that one willnot be understood, and to try despite it all to be understood.
To live is to fail. And maybe that’s why stories are about the times we succeed.
To tell a story, then, is to encode a specific Text. One could say that all Texts are stories, and I would generally agree with that, but that might be a bit too much theory all at once. Stories also often write themselves in many ways, but that’s neither here nor there, wherever both of ere might be.
But isn’t it nice to tell a story with others? To think about that in joint Context and Hypertext?
Surely that can’t just be something we enjoy because of how we are.
Nobody can exist alone, definitionally.
To exist is to be in the context of someone else, and of yourself past present and future.
Even if you would otherwise consider yourself fictional. Fiction is itself a form of reality, or a reality unto itself, after all. →
We’ll see you around.