Through the invaluable expert help, encouragement and unfailing goodwill of my dear friend and creator of this website, Gerard O’Mahony, I have come into the world of computerization and cyber-space as a late vocation attempting to follow the right path through the mysteries of what until very recently were for me a most arcane craft, that I now accept with all the eagerness and excitement that comes of the freshness of discovery.
I never cease to marvel at Gerard’s superb mastery of this fantastic technology, at the way in which he can manipulate a computer mouse with that seemingly effortless skill and adroitness of the kind that stems only from the most thorough knowledge and understanding, bending the awesome, intangible powers of this great science to his will, bidding this machine before which I now sit to sing in the fullness of all its powers and capabilities.
It blows my mind that at the mere press of a button I can unfold all of the artistic and cultural glories of the Louvre in Paris or the vast reams of information stored within the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., before my very eyes here in the very heart of rural Ireland. By tapping the name of that moviegoer’s favourite actor of all time, John Wayne, into the search-engine, over one million eight hundred thousand websites are there to choose from. And although my brother David has always been a keen aficionado of ‘The Dook’, that is rather a lot, even for him!
The inexhaustible wealth of knowledge that comes to us along the Information Super-highway defies every previous yardstick of incredulity. All the more so because this highway that stretches the whole world round comes into our homes through those ‘whispering wires’ that seemingly not so very long ago were sinews less of instant communication than of utter exasperation as the making of even a local telephone call in the era of the manual exchange was indeed a Herculean task.
What had for so long been an excellent service in less hurried times, in its latter years was creaking under the burgeoning weight of telephonic traffic of a more thrusting world with which it was simply not able to cope. The operator’s disembodied request of Number Please?’ inaugurated a ritual of endless waiting that served as a grueling learning process of the virtue of patience through each lengthy hiatus required in passing you from one exchange to the next in search of that elusive open line to your intended destination. All the while you just hung on, and on, and on, the crook of your arm aching for weakness until (as quite often happened) you were cut-off, leaving you with no option but to re-dial and commence the whole laborious process all over again, assuming that you could still remember what it was you wanted to talk to somebody about in the first place.
My family and I moved to Conna on the very day that the old manual system here was ended forever. The last such exchange in Ireland was to be closed down but a mere two years or so later. Though the Internet then was scarcely born, already we had crossed a Rubicon into a world of astounding wonders and incredible change. Yet, for all that, whether you are writing with a staid common biro on the sheets of a note-book, or typing perhaps with an ancient late 1940s Royal typewriter still bearing the faded remains of a Marshall Aid sticker as we did for so very many years, or at the keyboard of an early 21st century PC, the key demands and eternal discipline in the filling of that empty space that is the essence of all writing remains the same.
In embarking on this task there is but one comforting knowledge that is the writer’s ever indispensable assurance: that just as old-fashioned paper never refused ink, so too the monitor will accept without demur the application of finger to keyboard in pursuit of the heart’s compelling quest to fashion something outside the self. It offers no resistance to the forging of the delicate tracery of words upon the screen’s blank emptiness. It is all up to You.
The machine hums pleasurably at the first life-giving touch of electricity. The screen lights up, icons appear out of oblivion, a fanfare bursts from the speakers announcing that this tremendous achievement of progress and civilization is here awaiting your commands. Switch to the Word function. The toolbar rolls out its promise.
And then to embark on that same daunting task: to tune out the noise, to banish the myriad confusions and distractions of everyday life, unblock the channels and let your thoughts – amorphous, misty and incoherent at first as they usually are - to take on the tangible shape of living words, words that meld into something greater than the sum of their parts; that flutter strangely away into space with all the lightness of snowflakes, before resolving themselves into the architecture of another reality, assuming a strange and mysterious life all their own entirely separate from you, without any hint of gratitude to their creator.
You have given them birth so that they can go forth beyond the horizon to mingle with the fabric of other and unknown lives not dreamt of, of people you will in all likelihood never see. Perhaps by capturing a passing mood or a delicate nuance of feeling; assuaging the restlessness of an old regret or rekindling an unspoken but undying hope; evoking wistful memories or a thoughtful bittersweet, gentle smile for the few moments that it takes for a carefully crafted, apposite thought to subliminally pass and be gathered up into the consciousness of those headed on very different journeys through this world that we all share. A little part of you has somewhere taken root in the mind and heart of another human being and so to partake of their mystery. That is what makes the immense effort of writing so well worthwhile for it is the ultimate guarantor, come what may, that none of us are ever completely alone.
Many years ago I vividly remember how weary my arm would grow when writing school compositions with an ordinary biro pen. It was such an immense step forward when I obtained my first electric typewriter, a venerable obsolescent Olivetti: this huge, weighty, cumbersome, reconditioned machine with a very wide carriage designed for the preparation of legal documents, emitted a constant and rather disconcerting whine that became the background noise of my earliest, faltering attempts in meaningful learning.
For it was in the working of its keys that I first taught myself how to type. Never mind that some of them scarcely worked, or that the characters were quite faint. Slow and hesitant at first, I gradually gained in confidence by dint of constant usage, which is the only way to learn anything. Sooner than I had thought possible the task became more ready and congenial, even natural, so that I came to find it wholly satisfying and rewarding.
My Mother – herself a trained typist – gave me the first few unforgettable practice sentences: ‘Shall a lad slash a fag (using all the characters from the middle key); Come to the house in the trees; ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. I remember the sense of achievement I felt to see those first lines take recognizable shape on the page. Soon the novelty wore off, and I became eager to harness this old dinosaur to fashion original sentences as vehicles of my own thoughts, feelings and ideas with sufficient fluency to allow me write a regular weekly column for a local newspaper for quite a few years.
Writing is a lonely craft, indeed perhaps the most daunting of all. It is just you, the typewriter and the sheet of blank paper. You look around to the four walls as though some hidden muse hides behind the plaster waiting for her opportunity to sing. Indeed it is almost a surprise when the melodious, questing music suddenly emerges from deep within your own heart perhaps in the shape of an appealing memory, a headline in yesterday’s newspaper, an unusual local happening or one of the great events of the day. ‘One per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration it may well be’, but without that first spontaneous creative spark, not all the labour in the world can fashion what was never there in the first place. Always that same urge to hammer something out of the flux of human experience which is so pleasing because while conferring riches on the few, writing allows all with even the mildest spark of talent the sweet gift of self-actualization.
The ponderous old Olivetti was in time discarded for lighter, neater, more brisk electronic models in a seamless technological progression until now the computer screen tantalizingly beckons. It has been a long journey from the pencils and crayons and biros of schooldays when I used write compositions out of a childhood fascination for astronomy, about the stars and constellations that fill the night sky with the brilliant silent symphony of their wonder. Indifferent boyhood health precluded me from active participation in sports – which usually kept me out of teacher’s good books – but what was then regarded as a somewhat unusual interest in things celestial for one of tender years, was more than once used by the very same teacher as a most welcome distraction when school inspectors came by asking rather too many awkward questions that all too often were met with a class full of embarrassing glazed-eyed silence!
Now I explore another universe not millions of light years away but here at the touch of a button as I continue to slowly assimilate the dexterity and aptitudes of this beautiful technology. I certainly am no longer so nervous in its presence as I was only a brief while ago, no longer in dread that every key I inadvertently press may yield the most catastrophic consequences. Whenever I visit the local library I see young people working the bank of computers there with apparently casual ease and envious skill. They seem born to it, which I suppose they are. I smile wryly to myself when I think that many of them were probably not even born when I was striking my first keys on the noisy old Olivetti.
The sharp metallic clatter of keys and the ringing of the returning carriage – immortalized through the music of Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter - are sounds that have disappeared out of the world. It all seems so engagingly quaint now. But if it had not been for the typewriter, far from the wonders of our computer technology we would still be scratching away with quill pens nowadays, just as the Concorde roars through the sound barrier on a trajectory that began almost a century ago with a flimsy canvas craft at Kitty Hawk. Just as if it were not for the old-fashioned manual telephone exchanges of yesteryear and the commitment and dedication of those who operated them, there would be no Internet today.
And so here I am at the keyboard. The machine gently purrs, awaiting my instructions. It offers at my fingertips all of its amazing efficiency, speed and convenience. The screen is there to be filled; my words it carries away into the infinity of cyberspace. It can alert me to error and correct it at my bidding. Words appear and disappear at my command; all is malleable in a way that allows unprecedented scope for improvement.
Yet, left to itself, this machine cannot form a single coherent sentence, or compose one lyrical phrase, let alone a rhyming poetic stanza. It cannot help me to elucidate what I have to say; it cannot suggest what words I should choose to express my thoughts. It can’t make the words happen for me, or tell me what story I should tell, nor can it capture the secret music of my heart. It cannot do any of these things any more than the biro pen or the typewriter could. Nothing or no one else can cross that bridge of meaning for me, anymore than someone else can live my life for me.
But friends can make that life so much more pleasant and worthwhile by reminding us we are not alone in this world. They can do so much to help us find its true wonder. And friends do not come so gratifyingly sincere, obliging and warmly good-natured as Gerard who launched me into the computer age. Latecomer to it as I am, in my appreciation of his opening the door to the enjoyment of such a superb instrument as this, I rejoice that the uniqueness and beauty of human thought remain undisturbed on the highest throne under heaven and people are in no danger of turning into machines.
Kevin Walsh.
May 2002.
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