Peter M Howard ::

The Author and The Logos

11Jun2006 [myth]

I've just uploaded a piece I wrote for uni to ?myth=author_logos. I wasn't sure I even wanted to title the piece; in the end I called it The Author and The Logos because those things kept coming up. I wrote it for Genre Study, a sort of reading-for-writers class. We'd been reading lots of fiction, debating whether there was such a thing as fiction, and discussing how it even worked in our post-modern present... So I wrote a strange little meta-fictional piece exploring those ideas. It's very broken up; the sections are styled very differently; they refer back and forth; the idea in all that was to mimic online writing... Anyway, I explain all that a little better in the introduction.

Of course, the piece was trying to mimic online writing, while being constructed for print. I go on about that in the introduction too; but now that I've actually put it online I'm keeping the print-like elements. It's all still inline instead of being broken and hyperlinked up, and I've kept footnotes instead of external hyperlinks... So now it's an online piece mimicking an offline attempt to mimic online writing...

Towards the end of writing this piece, while struggling to come up with another bit of fiction, I got a visit from my future-Author-self, who crops up a couple of times in the piece. He gave me the whole end bit, and there are some interesting ideas in it. I've been playing around with ideas of The Logos for some time now, and it came together nicely when I wrote this. There are all sorts of ideas floating around about AIs, about the development of self-aware networks, &c; some of which I referred to back when I wrote about the Turing's Cathedral article (which I mention, but without a lot of detail, in this piece). Anyway, what I came up with formed a nice balance: an image of this network we're building being constructed as a resting place for The Logos (sort of like the Ark of the Covenant being an actual resting place for God way-back-when).

There's more I want to go into on the Logos, particularly in relation to liturgical ritual and Communion (in short: Christ is the Logos (Word Made Flesh), His Sacrifice is the gift of the Logos to humanity, His Sacrifice occurs outside of time, Communion is partaking in that sacrifice, and actually Consuming the Logos, which is remarkably powerful and kind of daunting if you think about it too much). I just didn't want to go into it in this piece as it was more about authorship, fiction, &c, and I've still gotta work out my thinking on this one...

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