Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 19:31:30 +0200
From: John Perry Barlow
Subject: Barlow in Rockspace
Miracle and wonder. Dig the range of the Possible at the end of the 20th
Century, Folks! Consider that I am now in the Business Class cabin of
Swissair Flight 122 plunging toward Europe when only yesterday morning I
was creeping up a talus slope in southern Utah at pace that took me 7 miles
in the same time I will require tonight for the arc from Cincinnati to
Zurich. We take these things too much for granted, I think.
There is a nearly full, though waning, moon off the starboard wing and we
have just left what would be Maine were we not 35,000 feet above it. Where
there is no place at all. "Here" in the stratosphere it is as uniform as
Cyberspace and, as in Cyberspace, the only detail is within. I'm crossing a
wide sweep of times zones, so time doesn't matter. And that irrelevance of
such brief time is about the only present similarity to where I've been for
the last week.
At first sunlight yesterday morning, I was in Another Time. I felt
Neolithic as Og, living in a cave in the bottom of Utah's Dark Canyon, a
fissure that forks like geological lightning through the cedar-speckled
slickrock around Lake Powell. The bottom of Dark Canyon is almost three
thousand feet below that deck. It is deeper than it is wide. A mile back
from its plunge, one might look across to buttes on the other side and
never guess it was there.
If you are among the roughly 600 people who e-mailed me last week and to
whom I've yet to respond, this is the reason for my digital silence. I was
as profoundly off-line as I've been in a decade. Not only were there no
volts or bits where I was, there was no time but Deep Time. No time but Now.
They stripped me of my wrist-watch before I went down there. I was prepared
to be relieved of this albatross, my Powerbook. Indeed, that was part of
the reason I went. To see how I would feel unwired. Terminally
unterminated.
And I was prepared not to know what was going on in the larger world, as
it's been awhile since anything that CNN would consider newsworthy has
dropped my jaw. I was even prepared to have my fistfone blink to "no svc."
(Though I did take it along as a totem and exposed it to various ritual
humiliations in cairn-shrines over the course of the week.)
But I was not prepared to be relieved of the strange luxury of knowing that
this particular moment was, say, 6:32:23 on June 29, 1996. Or whatever. I
had no idea I had developed such a bad jones for named time.
So it was like so many of my other journeys. The real discovery was an
unintended consequence of other research objectives. I set out, as I often
do, trying to learn something about communications technology. Looking, in
this case, to understand it better by its absence. And looking to
understand myself, of course. Looking to see how resourceless I'd been
rendered by Business Class and my other staple amenities.
I also went there to take a kind of ritual leave of my eldest daughter,
Leah. She's just turned 14, and has recently acquired what is now, in the
strictest physical sense, her adult self. I took her down there, spent a
week with her, and left her there in the care and company of a
wolfman-godfather, a poetic goddess, a Spanish girl, a skate-boarder, a
rebel without a cause, and a would have been Deadhead doctor's boy. There
was an additional complement of women who descended and emerged with me: a
couple of wild 40-ish redheads from Tennessee, an the cat-woman wife of the
wolfman.
This pair, the wolfman/cat-woman are Creighton and Annie King. I met them
when he came to teach English in Pinedale a few years ago, having made a
legend of himself in Utah and elsewhere as the kind of freak of nature who
could literally *run* up things like the Grand Teton, bashing previous
top-to-bottom records by multiple hours. A Harvard drop-out turned Alta ski
patrolman, who turned himself at 40 to the time-honored and genuinely holy
occupation of corrupting the youth with the truth. He got himself a
teaching certificate and landed his first job at Pinedale High School.
Where, in the course of two years, he managed to change so many young lives
for the better that the community had no choice but to expel him.
During their short tenure in Pinedale I developed a history with the Kings
that is another tale, but they were certainly the right people rip me from
my bath of jet-fuel and IP packets and take me down into the heat and
stone.
I was plenty ready. There's been a lot of velocity around me lately, and
while I've often genuinely felt myself at peace in the eye of my own
hurricane, while I've truly felt that Business Class could be my zendo,
others have observed that living a life where the average 24 hour a day
speed almost never falls below 50 mph might violates the laws of both
physics and biology. Not to mention common sense.
And all these tools of mine! I been feeling impaired by my enhancements.
Weird as Edward Scissorhands, though not as visibly so. There is a cartoon
in the current Utne Reader in which a laptop and cell phone are dashing
down the street shouting "Which way did he go?" while their desperate owner
cowers behind a corner. I can relate. (Though you, Cliff Stoll, should take
no comfort from this admission.)
Anyway. After they were ejected from Pinedale, the Kings went to teach at a
prep school in central Mormonia called Wasatch Academy. This school runs a
summer program called Nature Writers that takes kids down into Edward Abby
Country with a notepad, a minimal amount of adult supervision, and plenty
of trail mix. It's Outward Bound for the aspiring young writer.
The daughters and I became genuinely familial with the Kings during their
low pass through Pinedale, and they with us, so there was no presumption in
their setting their own agenda for me and Leah.
They wanted to get me off time and her off me and, in only a week, they
took us a long way toward that goal. The hook was a scholarship to the
program for Leah on the condition that I would come speak at Wasatch.
Having done that, I drove to a place in the desert, parked my Corrado,
shouldered a back-pack for the first time in my life, and headed toward the
lip of Dark Canyon. Annie stopped me. "Let's have that wrist-watch, Big
Boy." she said.
Unless I'm mistaken, this is the first time I've taken off my watch for
more than 10 hours in the last 30 years. While I've been fancying myself to
be asynchratic, it may just be that I'm only chronically tardy and am
actually as time-dominated as the next white guy.
>From that moment forward, we plunged into a past where the sort of time one
might measure on one's wrist is just silly. The Navajo sandstone formations
that lie at the roof of Dark Canyon were blown into dunes there many tens
of millions of years ago and the shales that lies along much of its bottom
were cracking mudflats back when brachiopods, mosses, and scallops were
about the most interesting thing Life could come up with, hundreds of
millions of years before that.
Almost immediately, time opened up to me like sound to the blind. In the
absence of my measuring device, the entire time spectrum became palpable.
My first thoughts regarded the brief temporal gap between myself and Leah,
as she strode out before me on her long, capable doe-legs. Her fresh youth
and my lumbering age. As I wallowed along beneath my pack, my hip sockets
immediately filled with fire, my knees bloody rubber at once. The Kings,
the other kids, the giddy boys, the girl from Madrid, the doctor's son from
Virginia, surged along beside her. And I hobbled over the slick rock,
wondering if I hadn't for once bitten off more than I could chew.
But I didn't. I survived it. Not only did I descend into that paradise for
lizards, but I spent a week in continuous motion along the Z-axis under a
biblical sun, living in a world made not merely of atoms, but of *hard*
atoms. Rockspace. And yesterday morning I hauled my fat old self back up
those 3000 feet in temperatures that hit a hundred degrees F. and did not
sustain a massive coronary thrombosis.
In the meantime, I had ridden a flashflood to the Colorado River, civilized
and made my own a cave previously inhabited by bats and moths bigger than
bats with eyes that glowed red in my headlamp, built a sweatlodge of
willows and tamarisk, watched the hallucinogenic Datura plant unfurl its
wicked flowers in the light of a Blue Moon. And, more than anything else,
learned about kinds of time that are both entirely local and entirely
general. At the same "time." Now and forever.
But the first gap remained. I'm back out of there, but my legs look like
I've been trying to yo-yo with a circular grinder while Leah's, last seen,
were unmarked. Spared damage by the invisible shield of her grace.
Such a human eternity there is between the father and the daughter who's
still down there as I blast toward another yet European opportunity for
paternal windbaggery. Leah was born on Father's Day, 1982 and taught me
unconditional love. She has always been a secret child of depths unplumbed
by either of us, but especially bonded to me by her being my first-born.
And by her genuinely terrifying beauty.
Even though she has never found much voice for her feelings, they would
rise up in the way she felt when I hugged her, and since I am such a
physically communicative person, that was sufficient. Then, a couple of
months ago, as she thundered into formal adolescence, she froze in my
embrace. As one might expect. Suddenly, my touch was fearsome to her and
the main channel of our emotional communication was severed. A long awaited
time had come.
Years ago, when she was about 5 I think, we spent the day in a mall in LA.
When we returned to where we were staying, she appeared to be in a
meditative, even dismal, frame of mind.
"What is it?" I wanted to know?
"I can't tell you."
"Oh, come on now, Leah. Surely you can tell me."
"No. I 'specially can't tell you."
"Then you'd *better* tell me," I said.
After much negotiation, she revealed her trouble.
"Daddy," she confessed, eyes misting, "I watched the teenagers with their
parents n that mall today and I realized that someday I would be a teenager
and I wouldn't like you anymore."
I'm not quite saying we've reached such a point as that, but it's close
enough that I knew it was time I backed well away and left her to probe her
own destiny with less direction from me.
In other words, it was time for me to take her out into the wilderness and
leave her there. I know that if we lived in a more complete society than
this patchwork we suffer now, if we were Quakiutl or K!ung or even
practicing Mormon, we might have some more generally accepted ritual for
such things. But the best contemporary Generica can offer in this
department is a version of the Mickey Mouse Club that increasingly
resembles MTV, so I know better than to look to my own culture for guidance.
Better it seemed to turn to that ultimate tabula rasa, the Desert. Better
to go to a place where most of the tools upon which my culture bases itself
would be useless. So we returned to the baseline of civilization to see
what might naturally gin itself up from there.
The first night in the bottom of the Canyon we all camped together, but
when I moved half a mile downstream on the second day and Leah elected to
stay behind under the overhang she'd picked out - rattlesnakes
notwithstanding - I knew the process was underway. And I knew it all the
more the next morning when she ghosted into my cave, with all but her wide,
white eyes covered in black river mud. A wild pagan girl, entirely her own.
A little later the thunderstorm we'd earlier heard thrashing around
up-canyon yielded its consequences. Within a few minutes, the clear water
that fell gently into the pool below my cave had turned chocolate and cubed
its volume. It roared brown froth and stank. We jumped into it and rode it
through falls and slides and rock-flesh sculptures of time without
measurement until, some eons downstream, it emptied into irrefutable level
that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had decreed with Glen Canyon Dam. Lake
Powell.
We walked back in the moonlight, Leah catting along barefoot over the
rubble. She was, at moments that day, the most beautiful sight of any sort
that I have ever seen. I don't know how she feels about me now and I
probably won't know for a few years. She'll have to find a new voice for
her new heart and that will take time. In the meantime, I know how I feel
about her. And that will have to do.
What else? My cave. I lived in a cave for a week. When I found it, I was
puzzled that there were no signs of previous occupation since it seemed
like such a perfect habitat, shelter from both thunderstorm and blasting
mid-day furnace. Once I'd cleared some rubble, it even had a perfectly
level berth along one side made of cool shale.
I busied myself tidying it up like some character from Wind in the Willows.
I was surprised to find such a nesting instinct in myself. For what seems a
long time, "settling in" hasn't amounted to more than figuring out the
phone jacks and room service menu. Suddenly I felt like a vector of
civilization, sweeping out silt with willow boughs, making rock granaries
for food storage. I even asked the Tennessean redheads, who had almost
immediately developed a superior aesthetic culture upstream, to come down
and decorate the entrance, which they did.
What did I learn in my week away from measured time and electricity? I
learned that the technological impulse is so strong in me that it doesn't
matter how far I ratchet myself back, I will immediately set about to build
what would end me up here in the 20th Century eventually.
I never completely quit jones-ing for time, though as the group of us moved
into the simple present, time became more a philosophical than practical
matter. We separated into five camps along a couple of miles of river and
each camp rose at different times depending on how the sun hit them. Being
sheltered most coolly, I generally rose last and proceeded forth languidly,
counting on moonlight for the biggest part of my day.
But the thrust to build was insistent. By the third day, I found myself
weaving together a sweat lodge like a giant basket, trying out various
materials - cat-tails, willow shoots, tall grass - as binding twine. I felt
like Robinson Crusoe or a member of the Swiss Family Robinson, an early
moment in the thrust of Manifest Destiny.
I'm glad to be back in my usual jet-fuel burning, electricity sucking, data
bathing plunge. I'm glad to back on-line and I'm even digging digging out
from underneath my accumulated messages. I'm even glad to be in Dusseldorf
tonight, if you can believe that.
But I think I also need to make a more regular journey to where time is
measured by geological periods rather than megahertz. I recommend
Rockspace.
Dusseldorf, Germany
Wednesday, July 3, 1996
****************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation
168 South Franklin, Pinedale, Wyoming 82941-1009
307/367-2466 Fax:307/367-4502
259 West 12th Street, #5B, New York, New York 10014
212/627-8928 Fax: 212/627-8945
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow
Message Service: 800/634-3542
Barlow in Meatspace Today: Dusseldorf, Germany
Coming soon to: Geneva 7/5-6, Sophia Antipolis, France 7/6-7, New York City
7/8-10, Pinedale, Wyoming 7/10-14, Mallorca 7/15-16, Barcelona 7/17, New
York City...
In Memoriam, Dr. Cynthia Horner, Jerry Garcia, and Timothy Leary
*****************************************************************
We do not take a trip. A trip takes us.
--John Steinbeck
