Notes on the Perpetual Deferral of Being

This scrawl here that preserves in its (literary) texture what it loses being prettified in the neo-modernist conventions of universal design and in the san-serif font so distant from what I scratched illegibly on paper with a pen. I have stopped writing—writing is too full of temptation: to nostalgia (for the inkpot and quil), to self-love (I had tender feelings for the brutal gestures of my own hand), to self-loathing (the pen's ink is too much like blood and draws sickly, confessional prose).

Still, this is a sort of writing. This is typing. Typing also is perhaps too antique a term for what I do here. I am entering. That must be it. I am at my computer entering data into an electronic database for storage and distribution.

This activity is structured and at the same time it is improvisational—it is not Jazz, but a jazz. The computer has laid bare the productive emptiness of structure (as did, Jazz, and Derrida, and so many other people and things, but those are other stories, maybe I'll tell some …) by dividing existence into data and algorithm. As I understand it anyway, these are really the same things just arrayed each on a different virtual axis: space for data, and time for algorithm. They enact a division which makes a place (a structure) for a content (an instruction, information).

This thing that you read is an uncomplicated row of boxes, places for notes, indexed to words, and linked in order, chronologically. Pick a word, write a note, repeat—simple. Data and algorithm.