You might call this website a repository of stuff from several aspects of my life. Or a collage, a montage, a palimpsest: layers of bits and pieces reflecting overlapping activities and interests that I want to consolidate in one place. Maybe it is a cabinet of curiosities, which men of learning and letters of the past assembled to show off their enlightened outlook and scholarly credentials. Whatever it is it is a useful way of organising and archiving my affairs, past and present, inactive and active, literary, artistic, professional and personal. Long ago people kept records of their lives, family affairs, accounts and memories in trunks, chests and boxes, stored in muniment rooms, lofts and cellars; latterly in albums, ring folders, box files or Ikea containers. Now we collect and store so much on hard discs, on-line, on in the Cloud. The beauty of the internet (like the web of neurones in the brain) is its multiple, infinite connections that lead all over the place, often unexpectedly, to different media, sometimes circuitous and back to the point of departure and other times to dead ends. A website is a simple model of the way the brain is constructed and the mind works - labyrinthine and capable of making numerous links. The power of the internet to locate, record and display stuff depends on turning information into digital forms, which can be transformed back into words, images and sounds. Physical objects remain resistant to such transformation, including books, which can exist in the material and digital worlds, but are a pleasure to hold, behold and own. Books have an independent life, each one retaining its uniqueness. Words and letters are infinitely reproducible, and their forms may be changed instantly on line. But they too can have unique, three dimensional shapes, cut in stone or carved in wood, where form and meaning combine to please the eye as much as express the idea. |