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031: The Death of Manuscript

"Since the computer became a ubiquitous part of our existence, the manuscript has been dead." He waved his hand about his head, the cigarette clenched between two fingers looking like a shard of bone jutting up from his hand. "The Idea of manuscript is disappearing. Four hundred years ago, everything was done by hand, painstakingly written out on paper with nib and ink. If you wanted a copy of a work, it had to be done page by page. Gutenberg was an agent of the Devil; IBM, Motorola, and the other chip makers -- they are the Legion of the Beast. They helped destroy the Word."

His companion -- the tall one with the tatoos running down either side of his long neck -- nodded. "Word," he said with a reverent blush to his voice.

"There was only the Word in the beginning and, after the Fall, the Word became many, split and torn by the greedy hand of Man. It is the writer who puts the Word back together, the writer who has seen the shape of Word in his head and struggles to grasp its luminous complexity. The artist gives Word flesh by setting it down -- the Manuscript is the physical manifestation of Word.

"But, as we let computers do everything, we stopped using the Word. Everything became communication -- narrow, flat, data streams -- everything became binary operations. There is no room in the one/zero for tint and texture. The writer creates; he does not replicate."

The tall, tattooed man spat on the ground at the phrase.

"E-mail," the first one continued, "progress reports, ad copy, web design, marketing terminology, government obfuscation: the computer has multiplied all these things to a point of meaninglessness. The Word is empty, a pale shell which has been replicated too many times. We don't write any longer; we type.

"The computer saves everything into a digital file -- a cold one/zero line -- and nothing ever gets thrown away. Thousands of network devices hold every piece of email every transmitted and fleets of fast processors comb these storage units looking for combinations and key words. Nobody reads for content. They want bullet points, tracts distilled to one paragraph summaries. The artifice is gone."

He picked up his glass and took a long pull before continuing. "Before the computer, the manuscript was important. It was the author's creation -- his sole copy of his effort to redraft Word. If the manuscript was lost, then the Word was lost again. Eliot gave his only copy of 'The Wasteland' to a friend and, once the poet died, no one knew where the manuscript had gone and, for forty-odd years, the power of the work was diminished. The manuscript is the link between the sacred and the mundane, our world and the other. The Word is the Key. Do you understand what I am saying?"

I made the shattering sound and watched the glass come apart, cascading the alcohol and ice through his fingers. "I'm familiar with the Word," I said.

Posted by Teppo at March 16, 2003 03:35 AM

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