My digitised methods of ‘writing’ are challenged by this machine. Analogue composition requires a deeper state of concentration and connectedness with the text as it moves from your snytactical locus through your body – spinal column to arms to fingers to depress the keys of tiny hammers which instantaneously solidify things you may wish you hadn’t said. The faster you type the more smoothly the action is rendered, and in one of those rare situations the writing body tows the writing mind, which follows inchoate behind those patterns of strangely familiar motion. There is no turning round at the dead end of incomplete thought, and so your well-intentioned lines of prose smash head-on into the wall and shatter into fragments of ‘poetry’.
I find that the language my body speaks takes a more arcane tone than the one I am used to having spoken by this modern mind. I am blown away by the (inter)locutionary gap which must exist between us writing now and them writing then. The relationship between the body and the text is directly addressed: who’s in charge here?
xo bs 