Writing Electronically: The Ravens by Jim Erkiletian

All the ravens used to be white. Downright snooty about it too. You know ravens. Now they're snooty because they're black. Not as snooty, though. But they don't like humans because of what happened.

Back when the world had just been made the people were sitting around remarking on the genius of the creator, all the wonders and how they fit together so beautifully. The world was perfect, except for one thing. Death. They decided to bring this little matter to the creator's attention. But no one wanted to take the message personally. For obvious reasons. (Hey, creator! You made a mistake, ya big dummy. Yeah sure.)

So they looked around for a messenger. And over at the edge of the village was the dog. So they pet the dog and fed him with a big medium-rare caribou steak and asked him to take a message to the creator for them. 'Please correct your one mistake and make humans immortal.'

The dog set off up the trail. On the way he met the raven who, besides being white was at that time the most erudite of the animals. Or thought he was. He asked the dog 'Where you going?' And the dog told him. "I'm going to ask the creator to please make humans immortal."

The raven thought about that. Then he told the dog about some deer he'd seen in the next valley. He knew the dog liked chasing deer, and why, but that's another story. Anyway, the raven agreed to take the message to the creator as a favour for his good old doggie friend. And the dog agreed he'd much rather be chasing those deer.

The raven flew directly to the creator and said 'Creator, you have made a nearly perfect world. There is only one thing more that you could do to make it truly perfect. You can make ravens immortal.

The creator replied something to the effect that there are indeed some improvements he should probably make and, Zap! he turned the raven black. The raven was for the first time in his life speechless, which prompted the creator to his next move. Zap! again, and the raven couldn't talk anymore, just swalk and whistle and crow like...a raven.

And that's the way it is today, according to the Tlingit elders of AlaskaYukon. Why is this story important to writers of the cyber stage? It's survived for a long time. At least 10,000 years, probably over 100,000, and is found in over 800 separate cultures.

Ibo writer Ngugi wa Thiongo calls it a warning from the time when spoken language was first invented, and humans were sitting around trying to figure out the possible dangers of becoming dependent on this amazing new tool. Days when ESP may have been the more common communication form.

A message sent across the ages from the dawn of word is too important to ignore. Spoken language must harmonize with how the world is. Our ability to make stories must serve truth. If we use it to hide truth or mislead, "dire things happen".

Writing Electronically: Part 2

As the Tlingit elders recognized, and expressed so well in the tale of what happened to the raven when he decided to tempt fate by rearranging the world in such a way as to be the only impossible creature, as we experiment with alternate realities we need to keep a tight hold on some method of getting back to what is "real." Einstein noted that the further we get into the world of math, the farther we get from reality. His critique of Schrodinger's thought experiment with black box radiation suggests the entire field of quantum physics may be based on a mistaken understanding of what is. Schroedinger's universe may be consistent mathematically, but his cat probably can't be both dead and alive at the same time. Word should in some sense be corespondent with reality. Even in fiction. Perhaps especially in fiction.

Bush's "memex" seems to be a term derived from his need for a memory extender. Some way to deal with large quantities of data in short time periods. In linguistics, a meme is a theoretical concept for the smallest unit of meaning in a language.

Smallest units of sound, phones, are easy to describe with machines. Units of meaning are a less precise concept.

Sometimes the same number of phones in the same order will have different meanings (ie: to, too, two, tu). Flammable and inflamable have the same meaning, but the latter has an extra couple of phones.

Julian Jaynes inThe Birth of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind, suggests EEK! might be an appropriate response to a sabre-tooth cat, but did not become a word until people were sitting around talking about the Eek! they saw yesterday. One is a simple response. The other is an actual word in a language. But both sounds carry meaning.

Jerry Mander, who wrote In the Absence of the Sacred, asks students at his lectures on the problems of a society that is becoming addicted to computers, what will come after computers? My nerd friends have no hesitations. Drugs? VR direct interfaces with the brain? Or with a fannypack AI with a photographic memory.

The question is like trying to understand a future paradigm from inside this one. Like contemplating death half-way down a skydive. It may be psychologically rewarding, but the resulting assumptions may not be very accurate.

We thought at one time that computers would save forests because paper would become less important. Yet the opposite has happened as any turkey with $2000 can start his own newspaper. In 1889, Scientific American published an article about how the motor car would be much cleaner than horses. In the 1940s scientists thought nuclear power would be even cleaner. The technological solution to every problem of the past has always brought far worse problems. Yet people still persist in thinking that this time will be different.

Virtual reality has been explored and mapped by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. With a very simple technology, but a very complex relationship to each other and to the land, Australians have participated in the dreamtime, Tarahumara have communicated with aliens all over the Milky Way. Yet for all our pretty toys and complicated gadgetry, we can't eat virtual bananas. Or describe our world with virtual words.

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