On the beach

Once upon a time there was a world with a race of people who had souls, and the souls shone with a great light, such that they were visible for anyone who cared to look.

The souls shone with stories, love, anger, tragedy, bemusement, contemplation, laughter, bewilderment, tedium, peculiarity, and all the things that make people people, and also with who it was that the people hoped they were. In good times, the souls glowed with appreciation and clarity as they stored up all the happiness and wonder and triumphs large and small. In bad times, in the very worst times, sometimes the people would look out from their own awful darkness over to their souls, and to the whole great constellation of souls around theirs, and out of their terrible depths they would speak the darkness and pain out into the beacons that their souls were, and they could know themselves seen and understood, and in this, sometimes, they would find a way to go on.

These people, and all the scores of little sub-people that each person themselves went through year to year, were not helpless secrets, and they were not defenselessly naked to the savage entropies and final mortality of memory, their own memory and other people’s. The people lived in the great marvel of the constellation of souls, and they knew that, whatever else was true, their souls were there, blazing in the firmament. In those souls, all their fragile depths, and their cries of the untellable truths of how things were, and their very selves, were safe, and simply there, and were their treasure.

This world was a wonder.

And then there came a day when God spoke to the people, and God said that, unfortunately, for unavoidable financial reasons, the server that held and sustained all the souls was going to be turned off forever.

And God said that He was very sorry, and surely this was true.

It’s a bit like that.

***

I don’t find in the story a ground for great raging at God personally. Certainly I don’t know how to manage keeping a desperately important bunch of servers going forever. (There may be an interesting argument here for nationalizing the spirit world, though.)

But.

It is as if an old worry has come home. Has come right to my house. Early in my time on the Internet, I would marvel at all the stuff that was going up on Web pages everywhere, and I would worry a little… because old books hang around on shelves for decades and centuries, but what if the Web pages should disappear; what if they were no longer stored, what if electric current was no longer devoted to this website or that? Surely something was being arranged by the Responsible Planners to save everything on the Web. Well, over the years since then, I have found that there has been no such arrangement, and that many important things have indeed disappeared when the Web has changed and when domains have gone defunct.

(I can think of one particular topic, which I still think of as being important, very urgently so when I think about it, which I found went suddenly from very easy to explain to appallingly difficult to get across in useful form or interest anyone in, simply because a Web page vanished, so I can no longer link to the particular truly amazing and brilliant exercise in simple explanation that the page contained, and I cannot remember the explanation clearly enough to duplicate it; it’s just gone – a disappearance that might have invisible consequences for the odds on – well, on how whole societies will develop in future, if I want to take it that far. The absence of a simple explanation is far from nothing.)

And now that lossing – is that a word, lossing? – has worked its way down to this thing called Open Diary.

… And I notice that I am working very, very hard to keep this impersonal, aren’t I?

The story I wrote, that I had to write, about Gwen’s dying will be taken down. I stare at that. I stare at it. I stare at it. I stare at it.

(And, God, Gwen’s diary coming down too!)

Little things. That chuckling evil little poem “Solidarity” won’t be posted anywhere any more. In a little way I’m proud of that thing – could stand to be remembered as the guy who wrote it. “Old Agril” too.

And all manner of hard thinking – some of it actually clearly written – will go away… Do I care about that less? Probably. In a way. How often did I read back through it, let alone anyone else? But the whole mass of it, of Alex trying to be clear-headed (the battle of my life), and now and then it working… that’s different, and all that will now be just a little text file on a laptop hard disk that will eventually break down, or on a CD that no one else will even put in a drive ever again. Suddenly it’s no different than all of the scribbled lines in the neglected notebooks I have around here. Very little different than mutterings out loud to myself.

I liked… the occasional proofs, do you understand?… hanging there. I liked knowing my diary was up. It’s different with that stuff – I should be writing forward, not remembering writings past… but should I feel that Flugendorf is disappearing? Do I think that? Do I not?

In my confusion and pain I have of late been distant from OD, on a long cometary orbit, on the leg of the ellipse out away from it, curving slowly round. But this is always the place I remember living, and this was always the place I wanted to be. And this was always, since I came here, always the place I was coming back to.

And… I should hurry to run around to say goodbye to lots of my friends before I don’t know them anymore. I should make myself do that. There isn’t much time. I should hurry. I should. There’s nothing stopping me except that I feel sluggish and shocked at the very thought of it. “I should hurry to run around to stay goodbye to lots of my friends before I don’t know them anymore.” Oh.

Will I go to Prosebox? I can’t quite think of that either. It’s the next thing – it makes sense – especially if I want to keep some of the friends – but I am stunned at the end of Open Diary. It’s like becoming spiritually homeless.

We will live on. Some in Prosebox, some just in the desert of the real. But in this moment mostly all I can feel is that here we are, all of us… waiting.

On the beach.

***

Guys: We were great here, weren’t we?

Yes we were.