... isn't it what always happens when you're with other people? that's when things get complicated... - "Buzz-Daze"

I live these days on the banks of a river that was once called water flowing two ways. Or at least, favored lore claims that Native Americans named it so. At any moment the Hudson contains some proportion of both salt water and fresh, mingled north then south then north again by the ebb and flood of Atlantic tides. Right here is where I am. On these gentle, ancient banks, extravagant swag of hills still called mountains for what they were, I know this to be a heart's place, because I have known others. One of those - a different estuary - is the Potomac, just where it touches the Chesapeake before breathing ocean. But I have also lived for a vast horizonal time on a Kansas prairie, where sky and earth mirror each other in a delirium of opposition.

It is easy to see that I measure things, the earth itself, with my body. Insisting on a swag and a delirium, turning geography to my own physical style, making landscape intimate, its presence more present. I anthropomorphize because when it comes to what we really know, our bodies are what we have to understand being alive. The present is a place as much as it is a moment, and all things cross here, at my body, at yours. It is where I consider the past, and worry about the future. Indeed, this present place is where I actually create the past and the future. Not alone, of course. Which is always the snag. There is no way to know who I am, without also some way to understand where it is not me anymore. There must be an Other in order for there to be a Me. Bodies bump, both in the night and in the street, colliding across the impasses, rivers, oceans, and continents. The proximity of yours and mine is the situation of difference and influence. It is how history is versioned, parceled and joined, invented as much as lived. And just the same in the other direction. We dream our future by incremental passes, carom into the unknown by tangent and gap.

As a girl on the Potomac, my concerns were rarely so high-flown and abstract. I didn't even know that my river was an estuary, or that not all rivers have tides. Instead, I was interested in learning to feel heavy so I could swim underwater. How to place a too bouyant self into that other world of seaweed tendrils, jellyfish, and fractured green light. Good practice, I think now. How better to understand a tidal mix than to swim in it? Under the water not far from the pier in front of my aunt's house, I knew something, and can easily recall some forty years later the pleasure of moving through - or trying to move through - a not entirely welcoming milieu. (Oh, milieu. The perfect word for underwater. A word without end, open and softly waving like the seaweed itself holding hidden dangers.)

or sometimes... the tallgrass which billows along her flanks, viridian swell of skirt in the wind - Quibbling

Specific attractions drew me to the use of computers. The first and easiest, and indeed, the seduction for most people, was mutable text. Just the words themselves become fluid, more on a beam (motes on a beam) with the way language is in me. Word processing is a dry distance of a label for what is, more accurately, writing with light. But once that became possible, once I found I could think better when the words reforming on the screen in front of my eyes began to approach the speed of the ones behind them, I found myself wanting the synchrony to increase. My growing ease with electronic text catalyzed a desire to be able to write in dimensions that reflect a more complicated human experience. Nothing new in that really. The truth is that people have always had this same wish about language, needing more than past and future tenses to indicate how we actually know and create such abstractions of time. We have all sorts of literary and storytelling devices to try to achieve the effect of simultaneity. But what I wanted was to be able to spatialize text; I wanted a changing, changeable form. Not the animated march of Holzer marquee aphorisms, though I like those very much. No, something further, a way to instantiate the temporal leaps and slides we make just getting through a day. I wanted hypertext. An electronic medium which theoretically can include and allow everything, and so finally allows only that we find our own perspective. Hypertext works tend to be so multiple, they reveal what is individual, ourselves, writers of our own story. When I discovered that this possibility existed, I hoped I had found the perfect medium for the creative process I had always known, the yielding, waving, pushing taction of form and formlessness. The way we can know that holding the paradox of existence is to be the cathexis, be the synapse. Human creativity is the dynamic of change, where difference is meaning, and where Self and Other are in tensional momentum. Beyond survival, and perhaps even as part of survival, this may be the most primal human impulse.

Mother and Father. Earth and Sky. Like children, we try to make bridges between them, bind them together, never understanding the inextricable bond of difference. We sigh with relief and pleasure when they hold hands. We sigh. The comfort of rain, joy of glinting pond. - Quibbling

During my first decade of living in the wide spaces of prairie, I was still young and didn't notice what happens there. When I finally awakened, it was to the breathtaking swoop and curve of grass hills, called Flint Hills, continuing forever, rhythm on rhyme, matched in scope only by the sky itself. Matched and opposed, this was the first way - dramatic and clear as bones - that I began to understand the importance of difference. Recently, a friend told me the story of young nieces and nephews from the Midwest visiting his home here in the Catskills. They complained that they couldn't see anything here because "the hills and trees are in the way." And just so, the tidewater child of the Potomac, swimmer under water, foreigner to the Midwest till she married, began finally in her late twenties to look up and out, to see that it wasn't empty there, and to see that horizon was not just dividing line but also connection. A kind of fitting marriage, if you will. I began to observe how extremes turn into their opposites, and so beginnings and endings, firsts and lasts, the things we believe so specific and significant, are always refusing to be just themselves. Instead, in changing, they point to the real significance, the shoreless variety of mixtures of difference.

Power ceases in the instant of repose.... - Emerson

The great cultural question of our time is how to accommodate our growing recognition of multiplicity. It is easy enough for any of us to make weary, snide remarks about "being P.C.," but the weariness is really due to the frustration of being expected to provide equal significance and respect for a seemingly infinite number of segments of society. It is a frustration resulting from our self-induced illusion of standing still. We may long for the simplicity of generalized core values, of a mainstream more important than its streams and creeks, but the reality is clearly not that way, never so singular as the perspective of a rationalized hegemony. We think we believe in the individual. The solitary soul, self-reliant, removed from pedestrian life, a singular voice rising above the rabble. Yet we know that even our beloved Thoreau could not escape persistent visitors by the pond. It's a strange vision, this heroic separateness. For there is no human momentum which is purely self-generated; we are and must be connected to others. Which does not mean there is no such thing as a distinctly identifiable individual. Great personalities will continue, and perhaps this is what we have meant all along. Every person is a conglomerate of influences, aspects, and conflicting notions, the coherence of which is personality. This kind of individual, a teeming culture unto herself, should actually be quite prepared for the leap to a vast multiplicity in the larger society, where a constant shifting among perspectives is necessary and enforces the need for a strong, flexible psyche, an individual who retains identity while recognizing that the sources of her own development are never singular or completely separate from herself. This is not easy to do, or even to say. The energy required to stay actively engaged, heart and mind creating without cease, makes the temptation of simplicity great. But the truth is as ordinary as a river metaphor and, because of that, as needful of reminder. We so easily forget that the only real simplicity is some ultimate balance among all things, a "quietude" that comes, not when directly sought, but of its own accord when we experience the most profound creative instant, everything at once and in equilibrium. The only way to keep my balance is to keep moving.

murmuring along the ridge a lip a line a brink of marriage
soft spoken meet and heard our edge - Izme Pass

It turns out that the boundaries between people, between groups of people, are permeable. There is no completely solitary individual and no homogeneous group. Each opposition is made of the other. The way we generally accommodate this wholly ungraspable reality, I believe, is the very essence of human creativity. We do it by the largely unexamined means of interiorizing disjuncture. That is, we gather the scraps and shards of interrupted conversations, overheard gossip, sound bytes, photo ops, advertisements flowing by right through everything else, and we manage to arrive at a coherence of some sort. Yesterday was this way, last week was so, and then, spring and creek, a river of days, changeful and cyclic, but eventually a life, all made of mixtures that "don't belong" together. This nearly invisible and indecipherable meshing of differences may be the most creative thing humans do. And we do it all the time. Might it be useful to become more aware of such a pervasive process? What if we were to turn an inundation of multiplicity deliberately to the grace of tides, to the waltz of a fitting marriage? By multiplicity, of course, I don't mean something like an ethnic street fair. But I do mean all the kinds of human dimensions and factors, all the most difficult, personal things. How to assess the quality of someone's work when everything can be considered valuable from some perspective or other. How to collaborate with someone with whom I simply cannot agree. How to live morally and ethically, really believing in my own principles, and still not assume they are also the best principles for everyone else. This is the hard stuff. But if we can imagine a way of doing these things, we can do them. Indeed, we have already in our electronic realm a medium where we can rehearse the leap and slide, where we can begin to work out the perverse problems of creating ourselves in a necessary paradox.

When I first began using hypertext almost ten years ago, I believed it was "natural," designed to work associatively, as the human brain does. I still believe something like that, but amplified, and with the plentiful hitches of a young technology thrown in. From those first days till now, I have continued to see this medium as very life-like. I see it in the form of a quotidian stream. The gossip, family discussions, letters, passing fancies, and daydreams that we tell ourselves every day in order to make sense of things. The unconscious rhythms we incorporate - literally embody - as a reliable backbeat to our self-narratives provide familiar comfort as well as essential contrast for the changing turns of disjuncture. We live and make our stories in a line of time that wraps and loops on itself, trying to contend with the geometries of space we also inhabit. Affected by nearby hues we cannot or will not understand, we follow our influences, oppose, match, and continue, even in an electronic milieu, to measure with our bodies.

Some people have done things with hypertext that cause me to ache. The best have been the worst writers, the ones who have joined collaborative ventures with undeveloped skills and plunked what they felt right in the middle of someone else's sinuous prose. These I am grateful to for revealing to me my own biases, and for showing me the perspectival quickstep. Value is a contextual element, and contexts overlap. The worst, however, have probably been the best logicians in some world. They can take a living web of ideas and press it firmly into notched hierarchies, clearly linking exactly the path one is to follow. No straying, no trouble, this way to the castle. Let go the leash, I want to yelp. It is very hard for me to find the angle of vision by which I can see the value of this authoritarian approach. In the effort to get to such a perspective, I can, perhaps, grant that there may be times when guides are useful, and indeed, that most of us are so accustomed to being herded about that there is often a high preference for direction over finding one's own way. But oh, doesn't our best future swirl about somewhere beyond this scrim? I keep hoping that we may look up, or out.

Dual channels give way to something more like the permeable flow of meaning between sometimes veering, sometimes nearing, banks of a single river. - Michael Joyce

The tiny river hamlet where I live is situated right at the place where a creek enters the Hudson. At this juncture, Wappinger's Creek appears to be misnamed, for it is as broad as a small river itself, and there at its wide mouth, it too is an estuary where the local citizenry sometimes fish for Atlantic blue crab, dropping baited lines straight down from the short curve of a bridge. In the autumn, white swans enter here from the Hudson, I suppose to live in the more protected reaches of water they know, swimming in a mile or more to dot themselves picturesquely about on a slender lake formed by the creek. This tributary extends for miles inland, gradually becoming more like its name. Away from the river, where it meanders steeply, people have built homes near it, and their lives inevitably take on something of the creek's character. Something more of sudden delight, or intimate celebration, dappled and quick. Whether trickling between high banks and dense trees, or fanning broadly to meet the flux of the Hudson, it is a beautiful body in all its parts and changing nature. For all its complexity, it has a particularity I crave. Each of the creeks and streams along the river has this effect on me. Like personalities to learn or invent, each its own neighborhood, arrangement and trajectory. Where does it go by the time it moves into the larger stream? No longer traceable as it flows south and north, then south again, day by day the tidal promenade to the sea.

You can't tell me this isn't significant. You can't tell me anything. Ask the people who know me. It's true. This was all under water once. - Izme Pass

When I walk down the slope of my backyard, past the black walnut trees, and the old tool shed, down to the rocky garden now blooming in the late season of asters and mums, down to where I can see the river best, there I stand with my hills and stream in the same green tradition as anyone. They are for me a way of directly understanding my soul, gleam on water, blue of distance. From that same yard I can look back up at the house and see the window of the room where I use my computer, the site of a similar kind of exploration of existence. There is a difference between these two ways, but there is no reason for them to be anything other than an integrated process. Nature is what we are, and so cannot be opposed to, or separate from, humans and their technologies, even when we push our inventions to the point of self-destruction. Our newest and possibly most powerful technology, this electronic, known mostly as Computer, a word both comforting and spitting in its sound, promising the ease of things we do together (collaborate, cooperate, congregate, collect), and at the same time sharply forcing the challenge of individuality to find its center, this newest great invention is not yet at the point of self-destruct and still holds the potential for encouraging and supporting full human multiplicity and creativity. Of course there is no certainty, nor even a strong likelihood, that computer technology will fulfill that potential. Because of cultural realities surrounding its use, a patriarchal, white hegemony, and an economic system that has come to represent greed far better than social connection and responsibility, these and other factors will probably have their predictable influence. It takes little to realize for instance, that those of us who are already subordinated - women, people of color, developing countries - are the ones less likely to be participating in technology, and that as computers influence human society more and more powerfully, those same groups will be even more reduced in status than they are now. It is quite possible that all the inroads made in recent decades for social justice could be simply wiped away. Knowing that to be true is precisely the reason for more of us, concerned with the human condition, to become involved. I believe that this is indeed the most powerful and affecting technology we have ever contrived, and that there is no denying its hold on our lives and consciousness. As we form it, we are being formed. This is true for all of us, whether we use a computer or not. In the largest and most genuine sense, this is our future. Right here is where we are.