MachineMachine /stream

by Daniel Rourke

This article is an edifice, a mockery of the freedom needed to create it. It is rigid, it is linear. Its sentences end only to lead onwards to the next, pulling the reader's eye through a series of limited, and limiting pathways. And yet, reading does not have to be this way. In the process of writing this article little time was spent laying out the path of words you now follow to their conclusion. The process of writing is non-linear, perhaps more like a network of ideas spanning out from nodes of texts, cultural accumulations and historical anecdotes. Why can't reading be more like writing? Why can't the eye of the reader tend its own route through the web of the article?

Pathways are everywhere, but very rarely do they delimit without offering the promise of exploration. Victor Hugo asked us to consider the rope as not hanging, but as being pulled by the Earth, a logical turn which will aid our understanding of the path and the path maker, the written and the read. For is not the truest path one that scars into space, or…