My fist through the glass

I just created a new blog called Of the Gloaming. I wanted to make a site to post a novel, then write it out piece by piece. I typed for the last hour, making up an entirely new story than anything I've written or worked on before. Then I tried to post it, got an error page, lost the entire thing. It was good too. I know it's my fault for not taking the time to save it or cut-and-paste it into Word, at least. But I also feel like punching my fist through the smirking glass screen of the computer.

The reason I hate email, the reason I hate cyberspace, is that nothing is real. It's all ones and zeros floating around in a universe of wires and hardware. The philosophical implications of that are enormous. The same can be said about reality itself, or the human mind. The Devil's Advocate would of course reply: 'What is the mind but a bunch of electronic ones and zeros flitting around in a soup of chemicals and neural wiring?' No doubt, this has been the basis of a number of movies.

I have no qualms with that. Thoughts are not permanent either--which was why writing was such a monumental invention. Writing meant permanence. Writing meant immortality. Writing meant the passage of knowledge. In fact, nothing has credibility unless it has written proof...ask any English teacher. 'Written in stone' the saying goes, possibly alluding to Moses and the Ten Commandments. And even God, the Old Man, owes his longevity to the Hebrew alphabet.

Humankind has always sought immortality through permanence: writing, art, sculpture, architecture. We have sought to overcome the fourth dimension by manipulating the third one. Cyberspace, however, is without permanence. It is without substance. It has no reality but that which is created within it, and we create that reality.

I can, with the click of a button, create a new identity for myself, an alias, even post pictures of another person. I can be anyone I want...leave behind the shy or insignificant person I really am, or the overweight teenager, or the pimply girl...whoever...and become a new person. Because who hasn't wished for that, at some time, in their real life? But we become lost in that world. We believe that reality. We feel that it's truth--that we really are those people and that our online friends and online lovers are real. But they're not. At the other end of that wire they're a person, just like me, with flesh and blood and insecurities.