The Solid Melts Away
The real melts away like summer snow to be replaced by the insubstancial, that which we can not grasp.
From a very young age my grandfather and others bought me spoken word cassettes. These ranged from Stevenson’s Treasure Island to Brontae’s Wuthering Heights. I still possess most of them. They stand neatly stacked on a bookcase in my living room.
As a child I remember marvelling at the fact that a strip of thin magnetic tape could contain famous actors reading the classics of English literature. Later I wondered how CDs could hold on their round plastic surfaces the classics of world literature.
In retrospect both cassettes and CDs can be seen as a move from the substancial to the virtual. Granted the words of readers where contained on tape or disk, however language remained encased within plastic, one could take down from one’s CD rack Oliver Twist, look at the picture on the box, remove the disks, place them in a CD player and watch the small round disk move as words poured forth from the speakers. Now this is being replaced by virtual readings provided by companies such as audible.com which can be listened to on a variety of devices ranging from PCs to I-pods. Language is still contained within a flat cigarette lighter shaped I-pod but it somehow seems less real than holding a cassette tape or a CD.
I’ve recently started to record some of my poetry on Youtube which means that it is potentially available to people anywhere in the world unless you are unlucky enough to live in North Korea where access to the internet is confined to the security services and other top officials in the regime. Gone are the days when one had to pop into W H Smiths to buy a cassette or CD. Now all that is needed is a connection to the internet and bob’s your uncle, you can hear me reading (or attempting to read)! My work.
Everything that is solid melts and vanishes to be replaced by the virtual. Perhaps we are going full circle by returning to an earlier pre-print age where people told each other stories while huddled around the camp fire. The most important thing is that literature survives whether virtually or encased within the pages of books. In fact I hope (and I believe) that the virtual will never wholly replace the real, but it is, in the final analysis the survival of literature and art which matters rather than how that manifests itself.
For my Youtube channel please visit https://www.youtube.com/user/101drewdog
