Arkady Dragomoshchenko. Throw soap at me

Throw soap at me
Arkady Dragomoshchenko

Date of publication: September 28, 2000

One of the unnoticed things - more precisely, one of the things that most imperceptibly entered into everyday life thanks to the Internet and just as imperceptibly changed it, everyday life - turned out to be e-mail. The sluggish but persistent lamentations of the zealots of the pen and admirers of Gutenberg - I remember, just in case, some summer conference not of birds, but of writers in Moscow - regarding the fact that we are recklessly leaving his galaxy, that the good old world of lined pages, neurasthenic drafts and postal horses are becoming a thing of the past, giving way to the world of the visual image, the dotted swarming of letters, a different sensuality of the perception of a sign, they remain rather a kind of rudimentary frame for the independent course of things.

The picture that can sometimes be discerned in this ornament is monotonous in content and filled with slight melancholy. Clerks who own an impeccable "rondo", candles, inkwells, nightly thoughts, "March 2034" - in a word, everything that is gradually mourned by a special kind of poetry - is melting before our eyes. Instead, such malicious figures of virtual monsters in gloves and helmets appear on the proscenium, whose jargon frightens with unknown vocabulary and whose intentions obviously include destroying what “is so dear to us.”

Meanwhile, the logic of changes in textures and modes of writing indicates something else. Each successor appears, as a rule, richer than the previous one, and at the same time, the new one not only does not repress the former, but adds new opportunities to the existing ones. Silent films gave way to sound films. Then came the color. After which a different format arose. Then non-stop television, watching silent black-and-white films on which, sometimes manages to get a simple dose of pleasure. Again, how new forms of writing influenced the “writers” in turn is a story of a different kind.

Meanwhile, the Internet revolution, which gradually changed the world over the course of ten years, in addition to the creation of the World Web, the “World Wide Web”, which in turn transformed the perception of time and space, and therefore the possibilities of expression - this revolution, oddly enough, was noted another significant circumstance of returning to, albeit virtual, but still the same writing . It turned out that we unconsciously described a circle and returned to “paper”, despite passionate speeches in defense of the new, digital order of things.

Because in fact, the Internet has turned us back to the past, since, as Adam Gopnik writes, the Internet is writing, since it is literally written “from beginning to end.”

Of course, an objection is also possible: what, in this case, is the “carrier” of this letter ? You can touch the paper. A book can be touched and, moreover, smelled: printing ink, the smell of manufacturing, etc. And what is the value of special notepaper, its special, unique smell, color, to which so much attention is paid in literature! What finally separates the excision of the original sign on the stone from the monitor screen? Answering an imaginary question, I think that first of all it is necessary to take into account changes in ideas about materiality that have occurred, albeit only over the last century, and entailed other possibilities for describing a material object, which previously operated with the coordinates of an “end and a beginning” (every thing has both other), and now - a kind of floating point of a constant “now”, counting from which is difficult, and, probably, impossible.

Moreover, it is naive to claim that we can touch the sign, even if it is made of painted reinforced concrete and raised to the 44th floor.

In general, “being on-line” means, on the one hand, the constant now - real time; but, on the other hand, this also means reading words written by others, and, among other things, being on-line also means writing your own words addressed to another. Even gaming sites do not suffer from their lack. Not to mention the pornographic ones, covered up and down with explanations and various kinds of dubious stories. If we talk about e-mail, there is no doubt that it is a verbal phenomenon. Of course, with an instant connection. But only connection, nothing more.

Until about five years ago, all relationships were due to the telephone, not counting perhaps a dozen or two letters sent during the year. Of course, there is reason to think that in recent times there were exceptions, there were true champions of the epistolary genre, but the motives of their passion are seen differently - in their enterprise, the boundary of the personal diary and the outside world was initially erased, and the functions of the interlocutor were transferred not to one’s own self ", not an imaginary future reader, but a real one, who acts, to some extent, as the publisher of the notes sent to him.

Meanwhile, neither the telephone nor the videophone provide the same capabilities as e-mail. For the simple reason that writing , the written language, after all, is a kind of saving barrier, some other skin, a distance that allows you to disappear from anyone’s sight at any moment. A space in which no one will be able to deprive you of a moment of loneliness on such an overpopulated desert island.

Opposite the door to my office is the office of Professor Marek Skalski. It seems to me that he is the only person within a radius of 50 kilometers who, with malicious triumph, literally in holy intoxication, rumbles on his not at all electric IBM machine. It is possible that the typewriter is some mysterious part of his life project. And therefore, probably, his colleagues from various departments stealthily approach his door and with an expression of mystical horror and - who knows - perhaps delight, listen in fascination and for a long time to the rumble of keys, as if they were listening to a choir of heavenly bodies.

It is possible to contact the professor only by catching him in the elevator or in the corridor. He doesn't hear the knock on the door for obvious reasons. His fax machine broke down in the twentieth century. His phone sends him into a fit of rage because the first words he hears are a question about his email address.

I nod to Eliot, a professor from the department of Slavic studies, a great expert on Marinina, and return to the table to write the last sentence: if I’m wrong, throw soap at me .

New York, 726 Broadway, September 19