March 23, 2014 (Tokyo)

March 23, 2014

Writing tools mean so much to a writer, and yet, is anything better than pen and paper?   The digital world is wide open for so many choices. Yet I suspect preservation is not part of the bigger points in digital life.  The fact is one can own a paper and a pen, but who owns the digital world?   When I put my blog up, do I own that blog?   What happens if Google disappears tomorrow or something in the natural world knocks the power off the Internet.  Is keeping the documents and your writings that secure?   Or is it a false security?

I’ve purchased Pages app when I bought my computer last year.  Usually in the past, all of that will come with the latest computer, but now we have an app store, and we are required to purchase the basics just to have a functioning writing machine.  But when that app fails to operate or refuses me to get to my work, is that a good thing at all?   In the nutshell, when you have that pen and paper it can be devastated by numerous means.  But a great percentage, is that if you lose that document or pen, it is because of you.  Now, technology is selling itself as the end-all of everything, and that everything will be guaranteed for you.  But that ladies and gentlemen, is a total lie.

Right now I feel like a character in a Michael Haneke film - perhaps “Funny Games” where my home is not being invaded by thugs, but my writing instruments on my computer are for sure under attack.  The feeling is that I have nothing but my writings, and once that is gone, I really don’t exist.  But perhaps that is the bigger sense of nature at work.  We’re only here for a series of moments, and then one disappears.  I think its human to try to leave something on this planet before one fades away.  Either a family, a son, a daughter, a painting, and in my case, it would be my words on either a screen or in a book.  But alas, there is no guarantees that will happen.

My vision is just one of pure hell if I can’t express myself.  Facebook to me is a device to expose my work to some sort of public.  And one does not know who or what that public is.  But even Facebook, can disappear, and with that, all the work that was carried out on one’s page.  It’s interesting that there are so many pages still open, even though that individual has passed away.   It’s a sad memorial, but a false one as well, because we don’t own those pages, they are only there for a brief time, and nothing will last forever.

With that in mind, I put my headphones on and listen to Michael Nyman’s fantastic score to “A Zed & Two Noughts” which is a film by Peter Greenaway.  I’m now praying for a world that resembles a Greenway film, but that fantastic score as well.