In Search of Adele H

Adele wishes to extend a deep curtsey for all who journeyed with her in cyberspace, either wholly or in part.  In many ways she was already part of her future, our present, much more so than she belonged in her present, our past.  She appreciated this chance to reanimate, to reexamine, and to reenact, as painful as it was at almost every step. He’s Just Not That Into You was less a comedy than a tragedy, in her century; in that, at least, we have made considerable progress.  But how to journey from gravity to light?  Portals are often shimmeringly transparent, and virtually inaccessible.  Last time, she paused indefinitely on the threshold. But this time, she has taken the first few tentative steps into new territory.  True, it was as a virtual character, a fictional overlay, a cyber-entity; but we’re all out here together, in some very virtual sense—and you know that by that I mean, very real.

Now that this particular experiment is over I will be documenting her journey, which has been #slowtwitter and chronological, in a manner more simultaneous and lateral. In other words, out of time and into space.  When that transfer is complete I will let you know.  Feel free to follow me, if you are not already, at @otolythe; and I, as well as Adele, thank you most graciously for following me here.

— Peggy Nelson, the author

In fairy tales, didn’t you wish to be the virtuous prince, slaying dragons and discovering treasure?  Or the beautiful princess, living happily ever after?  But in the real fairy tale, the one you write every day called life, you’re not a prince, or a princess. Or even the comic relief. 

You are … the author.

DOOR #2.  The exit.  You’re immediately out, locked out.  The street is empty, the lights are blown.  The winds howl, then dissipate: the ones that were tearing you apart but also holding you up.

The only problem with code is that you get caught. I lived a secret life with ink, and paper. You use pixels, and patterns described by numbers. It is fascinating, the endless associations of algorithms, the paisleys of probability. But then the patterns don’t fit and—well, you realize that elegance and simplicity, quantifiable complexity, are aesthetic concerns, that quantity itself is a quality of imagination. It seems like life. But it’s really just managing multiple threads.

DOOR #1.  The entrance.  But you’re already inside.  You go in again.  To find yourself back at the entrance.  You go in again.  Space has folded.  You whirl around, a furious atom, faster and faster and smaller and faster until your mind short-circuits and collapses in on itself, still searching, always searching, for patterns that will never match.

Wrong choice.  You lose.