Notebook

The Technician in the Box

Writers Discuss an Odd Encounter with Technology
by Marilyn Bowering with Merna Summers, Audrey Thomas, Jo Ellen Bogart, Candas Jane Dorsey and Karleen Bradford

1. If anyone knows Audrey Thomas' email address could you please send it to me? A computer fatality meant the loss of my addresses. Oddly, a technician, who signed himself Dante, enclosed in the box, when my computer was returned to me, a print out of a revised version of one of my unpublished poems, taken from the hard disk. Not an improvement, in my opinion.
Thanks
Marilyn

2. Subject: Re: invasion of privacy
Well, is that a nightmare, or not!? The technician did a rewrite of something on your hard drive? Don't they have the ethics not to read stuff on a computer they are repairing? What a chilling story
Jo Ellen

3. Subject: Re: invasion of privacy
Was it a revised version, or all he could rescue from the ruins? if the former, it's a bit spooky, sure...but a reader can't help reading. I don't know about you folks, but if I glance at a piece of paper by accident my reading speed is such that my brain has processed words from it before I can turn my eyes away. and the tech was after all supposed to be fixing a problem, which means s/he has to look at the integrity of (in other words, the survival of the order of) the data on the disc. that tech may have felt quite warm toward you after being in that position of rescue of creative work. the rewrite idea is misguided, but remember that a lot of these folks are 20 yrs old and spent a lot of time in their rooms alone when the rest of us were developing boundaries. and I do wonder, having had experiences of data retrieval, if something about the way the poem was munched up in the computer crash caused the changes? tell us more, Marilyn - this is an astonishing little event...!
Candas

4. Years ago I was visiting Kenya, and while down on the coast my camera (inexpensive but still, mine own) was stolen from my hotel room while I was out exploring. I reported it, but thought I would never get it back. Several months later the camera arrived, sent by the friends who were my hosts in Nairobi. (I had given their address to the hotel) The thieves had been caught in another room, stealing another camera. When I went to develop the film I discovered five pictures the thieves had taken of themselves, first one, then another, grinning on my balcony! Have tried to use this in a story, but it hasn't worked so far.
Audrey Thomas

5. *Subject: Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A farewell from a literary giant
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has retired from public life because of health reasons: cancer of the lymph nodes. It seems that it is getting worse. He has sent this farewell letter to his friends, which has been translated and posted on the Internet. Please read and forward to any who might enjoy it. This is possibly, sadly, one of the last gifts to humanity from a true master.

If for an instant God were to forget that I am a rag doll and gifted me with a piece of life, possibly I wouldn't say all that I think, but rather I would think of all that I say. I would value things, not for their worth but for what they mean. I would sleep little, dream more, understanding that for each minute we close our eyes we lose sixty second of light. I would walk when others hold back, I would wake when others sleep. I would listen when others talk, and how I would enjoy a good chocolate ice cream! If God were to give me a piece of life, I would dress simply, throw myself face first into the sun, baring not only my body but also my soul. My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show. Over the stars I would paint with a Van Gogh dream a Benedetti poem, and a Serrat song would be the serenade I'd offer to the moon. With my tears I would water roses, to feel the pain of their thorns, and the red kiss of their petals . . .GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

6. I could not 'boot' my computer so had no way to access my data (and protect my privacy) before sending the machine off. When I found the print-out of the poem (the only piece of paper in the returned box) I felt queasy; but I also had conflicting feelings—a flash of joy that there was somebody out there who read poetry and cared enough to attempt a revision (!), and more rationally, maybe, horror at the thought of someone trawling through my files. The poem was in the middle of a longish file of a poem series—not the sort of thing to be brought up quickly or accidentally by a tech. And then there was the second go-round with repairs and the "Dante" signature. While writing this, and thinking about the message on the list-serve re: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I remembered that the Argentinean woman who cleans my house, was a friend of Borges' widow and immediately felt as if I were in the midst of a Borges story. I'll now consider the possibility (as was suggested) of the technician being in the box, and retire from the list-serve.
Marilyn

7. Dear Marilyn
I have been thinking of the story more in terms of Garcia Marquez, the Garcia Marquez of Love in Times of Cholera. I imagine the technician as a lonely romantic who lives in his fantasies. He comes across something in your writing (trolling through your hard drive casually) that makes him think that here is a soul mate. But how to communicate with her? Choose one of her own poems, "improve" it, and sign it Dante. He imagines the lady of his dreams coming across this poem, imagines her saying: "How perfectly beautiful! Why didn't I think of that?" Imagines her contacting him to thank him. They meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after. Of course the same beginning could lead (and probably would in our day) to a different ending: stalking or some such. (I would also be distressed to realize that somebody had been rooting through my files.) I'm not sure if it's possible to commit violations without knowing that you are doing it, but I think it may be. This could also be a way of committing hostile acts against all and sundry... I wonder what other people find in their boxes. (But I still rather like my lonely romantic scenario.)
All best,
Merna

8. Dear Merna,
I can see the Garcia Marquez, and it is an alternative. But let me show you the poem that would have had him think he' d found a 'soul mate'. It is, as I said, part of a series—poems for each month—and in several cases the 'month' poems have addenda and notes. He, Dante, has selected this (a little odd anyway, but very strange out of context) "February Note"

Now, his isn't bad, but it is more about love than trickery (as mine is.) Mine also follows a February poem about a ghost who had killed her children and herself after her husband had murdered her lover, and an addenda about grief. These poems do have something to do with love. I feel like he's attempting to organise the 'danger' the "Note" poem is about (and ignoring the tone of the part-rhymes, to make his view 'settled' .) And that feels like a violation of my mind. Peculiar, all these feelings. Does he find the lover with a red condom, and forgetting that I'm married, provocative? Is there no freedom, even in dreams, even in poetry? How does he know or guess my affinity for Dante—something that would be difficult for me to explain briefly. Can he 'read' that I think Dante understood the writers' secret—that what one needs to create a great (or even good) work is a Muse (like his Beatrice), a store of memory that crosses national/racial/cultural boundaries, and a literary guide or friend (like his Virgil)? I really do think this is the 'formula' if you can call it that. Does 'Dante' want to be my 'Beatrice'? As in a Borges story, for me, boundaries have blurred. When I wrote about this last night and sent it to the list-serve, it struck me as being very funny. I 'had' to stop the train of thought that was developing because the more facts that seeped in (like the Argentinean cleaner and our conversations about Borges' wife, Maria) the more misty the borders grew. Maybe that's the point—the level of 'interactivity' that occurs when a tech invades one's hard-drive *and let's you know* resembles a psychic experience. The hard drive is my mind, and he's in it and making changes. In any case, I kept waking up in the night, laughing.
Cheers,
Marilyn

9. Dear Marilyn,
Thanks for sharing the poem(s) with me. It is a little disturbing that he chose this particular poem to revise (and to cheapen, make obvious, in my opinion.) I am thinking of the second stanza when I say that his choice is disturbing, of course. It does look as if he seriously thinks that he is a poet worth listening to, so probably my love-fantasy scenario won't wash. Maybe he is just a smart ass. (Although the fact that he seems to be seriously trying to "improve" the poem would tend to argue against this.)I suppose if this were a certain kind of story, the "ghost" would stay in the machine, and every time you typed in something subtle, it would "kill" it and replace it with a platitude. God forbid. That is very interesting—about your affinity to Dante. I was particularly interested in what you had to say about the three things you feel are necessary to write a great, or even good, book: a muse, a store of memory, and a literary guide or friend. That may well be true... although I have certainly gone for great periods of my life without a muse... unless one interprets the term very broadly. But I do think a literary guide or friend is a great asset. And yes, having another voice crop up in one of your own poems must be something like a psychic experience, although not a pleasant one. I saw part of an interview with Andre Dubus's son on the tv yesterday while I was trying to program it to record the Jazz series. He said that he had resisted becoming a writer, partly because his father was one, but that he found that the time he feels most himself is when he is writing. Looked at that way, revising someone else's poem (unasked) is a real act of trespass. Any way you look at it, there's an awfully good story in here somewhere.
All best,
Merna

10. Dear Merna,
I'm sure he doesn't think of himself as a smart ass. Haven't you had a similar experience giving a reading, when there's someone in the front row staring at you, a little angry that you're there and he's not? Now that I think of it, it seems to only happen with poetry. Is that my "Dante"? I think, maybe, the implied romance or even eroticism is a red herring (that sounds unpleasant!), but it seems to me it's either aggression and trespass or a heartfelt attempt to touch something 'real' in the midst of tech slavery. How can it be rewarding to re-install Windows ten times a day? Is he the equivalent of an assembly line worker who yearns for more, has probably already published in a few small magazines, who certainly knows who Dorothy Livesay is and is trapped in (non-unionised) wage slavery? Now, I think of Neruda. In the Borges story the 'library' is the computer's hard drive and Dante is lost, looking for exit clues: what does he have to do to get out of there? (He uses the snuff in Dorothy Livesay's snuff box: I know, weird overtones.) But Neruda would just write a love poem back—which was one of my impulses: imagine if you really could write to Dante and Dante would write back? That's the trouble for poets, everybody, including the poet, sometimes gets confused about the parameters Poets want blurred boundaries, messages from Muses, but after about the age of thirty (unless they're Robert Graves) they understand better the 'real' world they have to protect. I think the filtering system gets better. I have no doubt that the revision was done by a young man, not a woman and not anyone nearly my age. Yes, the muse is more subtle, but I do think it's there. A subject for a long conversation, sometime. Was Andre Dubus's son's resistance, then, to feeling most himself? Or having to be aware that writing is when he feels most himself? "Dante" may simply be trying to feel like himself (the same observation as above) when he invades my hard drive. I don't particularly want to write the story, at least not now. Like Audrey said about her story of her stolen camera and the photographs she found on it, it's the kind of thing that' s very hard to incorporate. Borges would record the letters between us and publish them.
All best wishes,
Marilyn

11. Dear Marilyn,
I can't seem to stop thinking about this. Just after I wrote my last missive, I went downstairs to see that my cleaning lady, as usual, had rearranged my ornaments, etc., which is a thing that cleaning ladies always seem to do. And I wondered if there is some universal human need to rearrange things. I feel it myself. I was going through a story for a friend one time at her request, and stroking out things that I didn't think needed to be there. She said: "You're enjoying this, aren't you?" And I realized I was. Yes, he sounds literate to me, and young. I'm not sure I agree with the people who think you should report him to the manager. Even if you think of this as something like an anonymous phone call, isn't the advice always to ignore it, to start up no relationship? Let him think you sent the box out to the recycle without looking in it. And if he did it out of high spirits and the desire to communicate with a more interesting world, all the more reason not to come down too hard on him. About Andre Dubus's son: He was talking about resisting becoming a writer before he started writing, I think. And then discovered when he did it that it was like coming home to himself. (My phrase, not his, but let it stand.)The idea of muses: It has always seemed odd to me that sometimes I am writing "for" someone who is not even particularly close to me, and may, in fact, never read the thing I am writing. Just why I think these people need to hear what I have to say, I don't know. But the same person often keeps rising to my mind. One person for one piece and another for another. It's not quite Beatrice, but it will have to do.
Merna

12. Marilyn - I hope you didn't mean that about going off the listserve and I hope you weren't offended about my dumb joke. Sometimes things get misunderstood on e-mail. I just had this sudden vision of a handy computer technician in a box, sitting in my office, and available at all times. Boy, could I use that. I've found the discussion interesting because I've just had my computer in to be overhauled and was wondering about the same thing. I, too, backed up everything on floppy disks in case of catastrophe, but never thought of deleting any files. If I had had anything personal, like a journal, I think I would have, however. I can't imagine even vaguely hoping that stuff on my computer might not be read, accidentally or otherwise, while it's in being repaired. I suppose it could be that "Dante" accidentally accessed your poem and either a) couldn't resist rewriting it because he considers himself a better writer, or b) was a frustrated poet himself and was hoping to get your attention. The poor guy is probably sitting by the telephone at the computer shop waiting for it to ring and hoping that it would be you asking who the marvellous, undiscovered poet in the shop is. If he's very young—very likely—the idea of invasion of privacy probably never even entered his mind. I think I'd go along with the suggestion of quietly getting in touch with the manager of the shop, though, and letting him know that someone there changed something on one of your files. If the person didn't know how inappropriate, not to mention probably illegal, that was, he should be made aware of it.
Cheers and apologies-
Karleen

13. A number of writers have contacted me off list as well as on, and the comments have been fascinating. To those on list—I'm sorry about any confusion over my 'retire from the list' comment. I didn't mean 'quit', just stand back. I wasn't the least bit offended by anyone, in fact the whole thing including the technician in the box and the Garcia Marquez./Borges connection made what was for me, at least, an extremely funny story—with connections that could keep going. I do think there are some serious things to think about. The most interesting to me is the relationship between my hard drive and brain, and how it feels to have somebody tinkering there without my permission. It's also intriguing how strong an urge to communicate through poetry "Dante" felt—he must have known his job was at risk. Or maybe guessed that poet to poet different rules might
apply?
Cheers,
Marilyn

14. Dear Merna,
As I was driving this evening to pick up my daughter I began thinking about why the message from "Dante" seemed even more personal than it might be. It's because (I'd forgotten this, until I checked) the poem was hidden behind a Windows Test Page, but flagged with a piece of masking tape with my name printed—"Marilyn"—in red on it. So it was *to* me and for my attention—which does make a difference. I wrote a long piece some years ago in the 'voice' of Marilyn Monroe—partly because a BBC producer who wanted to work with me was also named Marilyn and in the end it seemed the obvious subject; but really because having that for a name invites (or invited, anyway) people to treat you in a certain way. I hadn't thought about how it could work the other way around: that because my name is Marilyn, "Dante" felt he wasn't risking his job by intruding on my work and privacy in the way he might be if my name were, say, Patricia or Gail. I know you're right about not responding in any way. Any acknowledgment—even negative—will have an effect you can't predict, except that a relationship will have been 'cemented.'
A Muse, for me, is no longer usually a specific person, but the voice I am speaking both to and out of (this is the same fusion as in love, which is why lovers often become—for a while—Muses): sometimes I'm enough aware of it for her/him to have a form and face; more often not.
But it's there.
Best wishes,
Marilyn
P.S.*The "farewell" from Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a hoax.