Icarus at home # 8



Watching the webcam



Living in a different time zone from my daughter and catching her on skype and via webcams as she plays tennis has a strange effect. In the past I have been writing with an Australian and that was strange, she would write in my night and I in hers, 10,000 miles apart. And sometimes we would cross simultaneously, with me at porridge for breakfast and her drinking champagne, or even the other way around. And then I wondered if its 'time' or whether its just writers. My good friend Neil and I worked on a project where he was writing a novel and he wrote at night and I read it during the morning. Maybe he's really an Australian - got any roo in yah, mate? But I only began musing on this because the Australasian/UK paper was about narrative crossing centuries, how an Icarus idea met what we now call 9/11 and how story narrative travels, which fascinates me. Baudrillard once wrote:

Time itself, lived time, no longer has taken place. The historical time of events, the psychological time of affects and passion, the subjective time of judgement and will, are all simultaneously called into question by virtual time, which is called, no doubt derisevely, 'real time'... Nothing and no one is absolutely present to itself, herself or himself (or, a fortiori, to others)... real time does not exist.

And you know, I am coming to know what he means by this and I might, if I can link in Benjamin to this - just as a musing on sequences of cause and effect and reflecting on narrative, like Phillip Gross, reflecting on some petroglyphs:

Five thousand years from now

    will we have left one sign

        as plain as brave as these...

Its a brave new world, this internet one, and I don't even know what half of these new tricks will do - the same clown: