I can't connect to my service provider because there is a biblical thunderstorm outside and I'm afraid of frying my computer. The battery on this laptop is about dead, too. Weird how everything comes to a screeching halt without the juice. I wonder if a power outage qualifies as part of the reading experience? What happens if the word will not turn on?
Another click started the engine again ...
I laugh at a line, and try quick-copying from Netscape to paste it
into Eudora so I can e-mail it to John, who's writing his side in St.
Louis, 8:50 for him, 9:50 for me in Atlanta (the night sky is beautiful
this spring night, all quiet breeze and half-truths--I'm listening to the
Cowboy Junkies; he's got some RealAudio broadcast going).
Only, the page turns as I'm copying. Watch it; there it goes.
I end up with junk.
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The temporal link in hypertext is a strange beast. The links in Hegirascope that send the reader to a new page after a default interval (usually three seconds) occupy no space, unlike textual links. Though the bodilessness of the temporal link may seem to preclude the "interactivity" of a spatial link -- after all, where is the time-based link? -- it is no less out of the reader's control than the more traditional textual link. With a link like "click me," the interactivity (if it may be called that) derives from the option the reader has either to select it or not. Not much interactivity, really. In Hegirascope the reader has control over the temporal link to the extent that he or she may prevent its activation by choosing a spatial link (if there is one present). In this way, the temporal link may only be considered interactive if used in conjunction with a spatial link. (One can easily imagine a spatio-temporal link, one that is text- or image-based, but whose functionality is contingent on a temporal variable. Perhaps the link would be "hot" only for a defined interval.)
There has been discussion of late about how one would create a non-lexia-centric hypertext, a hypertext whose main theme, narrative, whatever occurs in the interstices of the links rather than in the text-blocks. Hegirascope may be it. Or it may be the first step towards it. The autobiographical flavor of Moulthrop's fiction, the wisp of nostalgia, the on-the-verge-ness (SDI, terrorist plots, "feeding your fears since 1945", etc.) all suggest the importance of time in Hegirascope. Time passes inexorably just as the narrative does -- indeed the former drives the latter, literally. We can no more halt time, arrest memory, than we can freeze the narrative. Thus time is thematically as well as technically central to this story.
Can the temporal links of Hegirascope be anything less than the hegira itself, the journey who-knows-where? Moulthrop calls his work "An art of
replacement, a life outside the lines, this fugue, this pilgrimage, this
bodiless hegira..." Is the "bodiless hegira" the relentless (not to mention linear) push forward of the non-physical time-based link?
Only time will tell.
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