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By Root 746 0

found in the machine a kind of LSD and ran his fingers over the keyboard as if inventing variations on “The Happy Farmer” on the old piano at home, without fear of being judged. Not that he thought he was being creative: terrified as he was by writing, he knew that this was not writing but only the testing of an electronic skill. A gymnastic exercise. But, forgetting die usual ghosts that haunted him, he discovered that playing with the word processor was a way of giving vent to a fifty-year-old’s second adolescence. His natural pessimism, his reluctant acceptance of his own past were somehow dissolved in this dialog with a memory that was inorganic, objective, obedient, nonmoral, transistorized, and so humanly inhuman that it enabled him to forget his chronic nervousness about life.

FILENAME: Abu

O what a beautiful morning at the end of November, in the beginning was the word, sing to me, goddess, the son of Peleus, Achilles, now is the winter of our discontent. Period, new paragraph. Testing testing parakalo, parakalo, with the right program you can even make anagrams, if you’ve written a novel with a Confederate hero named Rhett Butler and a fickle girl named Scarlett and then change your mind, all you have to do is punch a key and Abu will global replace the Rhett Butlers to Prince Andreis, the Scarletts to Natashas, Atlanta to Moscow, and lo! you’ve written war and peace.

Abu, do another thing now: Belbo orders Abu to change all words, make each “a” become “akka” and each “o” become “ulla,” for a paragraph to look almost Finnish.

Akkabu, dulla akkanullather thing nullaw: Belbulla ullarders Ak-kabu tulla chakkange akkall wullards, makkake eakkach “akka” be-cullame “akkakkakka” akkand eakkach “ulla” becullame “ullakka,” fullar akka pakkarakkagrakkaph tulla lullaullak akkalmullast Finnish.

O joy, O new vertigo of difference, O my platonic reader-writer racked by a most platonic insomnia, O wake of finnegan, O animal charming and benign. He doesn’t help you think but he helps you because you have to think for him. A totally spiritual machine. If you write with a goose quill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip for ink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type, the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the poky pace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapses. But with him (it? her?) your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, you are borne on golden pinions, at last you confront the light of critical reason with the happiness of a first encounter.

An loo what I doo now, I tak this pac of speling monnstrosties an I orderr the macchin to coppy them an file them in temrary memry an then brring them bak from tha limbo onto the scren, folowing itsel.

There, I was typing blindly, but now I have taken that pack of spelling monstrosities and ordered the machine to copy the mess, and on the copy I made all the corrections, so it comes out perfect on the page. From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola. Repenting, I could have deleted the first draft. I left it to show how the “is” and the “ought,” accident and necessity, can co-exist on this screen. If I wanted, I could remove the offending passage from the screen but not from the memory, thereby creating an archive of my repressions while denying omnivorous Freudians and virtuosi of variant texts the pleasure of conjecture, the exercise of their occupation, their academic glory.

This is better than real memory, because real memory, at the cost of much effort, learns to remember but not to forget. Diotallevi goes Sephardically mad over those palaces with grand staircases, that statue of a warrior doing something unspeakable to a defenseless woman, the corridors with hundreds of rooms, each with the depiction of a portent, and the sudden apparitions, disturbing incidents, walking mummies. To each memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of hysteron proteron, apophantic