RAT Word

[nick <nick@nickspix.com>]

We have had this long history in our interface with the Word.  A kind of
Silicon and Fiber metaphysics.

Paper, Papyrus was an Egypt thing, but only the priests could write and
their medium was more like that of the Rosetta stone. The hieroglyph of
their writing was a sacred art and evocation. 

One glyph known as the Eye of Horus, god of the sun, 
was similar to another glyph     <*> 

 <>    is the glyph that represents mouth 

 *      is the glyph that represents sun 

<*>   means sun-in-the-mouth, Logos, meld of image and voice

Wandering without a written Word, Moses leads his people out of the silicon
desert.  He stares into a Burning Bush of fiber, but he returns from the
mountain with a carved stone tablet. 

The Word as ten commandments.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and other paper scrolls tell a story of the Word as
Flesh crucified on a wooden fiber cross.  A story fetishized into a
religion, then into a book hand scribed by monks until Gutenberg presses
our fiber interface with pulp fiction into reality, into our Bible.  

Fiber is the most plentiful substance on earth, or is it silicon.

I go to Amazon.com not to buy books, but to check out their hourly update
of their Best Seller list.  Awhile back the Starr Report was the Number One
book despite the fact it wasn't yet published in hardcopy, but had already
been "published" thoroughly on the Internet.  The Number Two "book" was the
videotape of Bill Clinton's Testimony to the Grand Jury despite the fact it
wasn't yet produced, but it had already been broadcast simultaneously by
all the network and news channels.

A few months earlier, right after some literary critics announced their Top
100 works of literature for the century, Ulysses by James Joyce was briefly
Amazon.com's Number One.  I got a graduate degree in literature a couple
decades ago. Ulysses is on my bookshelf, but I'm still following the
instruction of an undergrad professor of mine who said that no one should
read that book until one has had twenty or more years of study in
literature.  Now that the Web is here, I'm afraid I'll never make it.

There's that Star Trek episode where Spock does a mind meld with a
silicon-based life form.  I think at one point McCoy tries to make a patch
for a wound that the rock beast has.  I forget how he finishes the line,
but I think it's very important  "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not …a… "

http://izan.simplenet.com/horta.htm

We've come full circle.  Amazon.com et al. is like that Burning Book of
light that spoke to Moses on the mountain.  We're about to receive the New
Maundy of our interface with the Word.  It's not yet written in stone, but
it will be.

--nick