Wednesday 7 June 2000

Pic of the day: Summer forest in southern Norway.

Fleeting

Got a phone call from my brother (the farmer) today. He was happy to tell me that my mother is back on the farm. I guess that's a good thing. Certainly that is where she belongs. That's where she has lived almost all her life, and even when she was still capable of travelling, she rarely did. Her father was like that too, you rarely found him far from the farm unless life depended on it. Then again, he built that farm from wilderness with his own hands and his horses, which he had a particular fondness and talent for. It is certainly a place to get connected to. There is something almost supernatural about that area, an ambience, a magic that subtly permeates those who live there and makes the world beyond the mountains seem almost unreal. People on those farms tend to grow deep roots that are hard to pull out, unless done in early years.

Even I, who had a rather strained relationship to many of my generation in the village, I felt the pull when I was back visiting. It was so easy to just climb the mountains above the farm, look out over the incredible landscape, and forget the rest of the world. Time flowed differently there, and there was a peace and quiet that even the roar of the tractors and harvest machines did not break. Rather, these sounds just blended in with the unceasing thunder of the waterfalls, the sigh of winds in the trees, the bleating of animals. In the shadow of those mountains that had just survived the scouring of an ice age, all human activity seemed insignificant, antlike, a mere sufferance by forces larger than us, immeasurably old. Fields were plowed, fields were laid fallow. Forest was cleared, and forest grew in old foundations. When we and all our works were gone from the Earth, those mountains would stand there, their emotionless faces hardly changed from today.

***

All things flow, all things are fleeting. Hardly anything more so than the Internet. When I go through my diary from a year ago, I am likely to find that many links are now dead ends, or at best a message that "this page has moved, please update your bookmarks". The works we build seem like the large sculpture I passed in the center of Kristiansand city this week ... made entirely of sand. It celebrated the local Water Festival. How ironic, I thought, since water was the very thing that would make that work of art become a memory only. And yet, isn't this very close to what I do myself?

The permanence I hope for is in the memories of people. If we want to be known in a distant future, stone tablets would be preferable.

Now I'm not myself innocent of causing "link rot", as we call those dead ends. When I created my personal site, I did not know what it would become. I did not know that I would need to store my old entries elsewhere. Now I have the latest entries here in Norway and the archive in the USA. And of course the poor search engines, in so far as they bother with me at all, will point to the Norwegian server for months if not years after those entries have moved. If anyone else is nice enough to link to such an entry, their link will also rot. Thoughtless of me, but what to do about it now? People are conservative creatures. I can't just move it all. There are still a decent number of hits on my Daggerfall page, a year after I moved it and then moved it again...

When I die, my account will be closed and pretty soon the site will disappear. The archives may or may not last longer. But like those small, overgrown foundations in the forest, the wilderness will soon reclaim the space. And the Chaos Node will be lost in the ... chaos.

***

The mountains will stay long after the farms are gone. And when the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall of China are ground to dust and blown away on the winds of time, the footsteps on the moon will still remain for some million years before the solar wind or stray meteors erase them. Perhaps visitors from a faraway star stops by, long-lived creatures exploring their galaxy. They may see these strange markings and wonder how this came to be. They may find the few instruments left behind there and wonder from where they came, these fellow travellers, who walked briefly on a world of stone and left for a destination unknown...

But as of today we are here. And it may be that all our works will be like those sand castles we built when we were small, and which the tide took away. Yet we did enjoy the play, a day of innocent fun in the sand ... in the sands of time. And if it is true that flesh is temporary but spirit is eternal, then it is anybodys guess which work will be remembered with most fondness in eternity: The pyramid, the webpage or the sand castle on the beach.