The "cognitive dissonance buzzing in my ear" to which I referred at the conclusion of the lexiae "Is this the end?" has not yet fallen silent. My first trip to LinguaMOO took place (at the time of this writing) just over three years ago-- in one of the first classes I enrolled in on my part-time journey to a graduate degree. And now as I near the conclusion of my Master's Professional Writing program (my portfolio due in a few days and orals coming in two short weeks), I still find my MOO experiences to be some of the most exciting of my graduate education.
I also find it ironic that as I revise this work for inclusion in my Master's portfolio, I have returned to the very article that inadvertently spawned this entire project: "Songs of Thy Selves: Persistence, Momentariness, Recurrence and the MOO" by Michael Joyce.
His article begins:
Until recently when its host MOO, Brown's Hypertext Hotel, went down for renovations and redesign, you could find the following in the High-Pitched Voices wing of that space:
Anne's Work Room
You see a large sun-lit room looking out over a rambling English garden. The windows are open and the smell of honeysuckle wafts in on the warm spring air. There are three large wooden desks. Two are covered with half-finished bits of code, books, papers, jottings of stories and poems, pictures. One is kept clear and here, neatly stacked, is the current work-in-progress. The desk has a green leather top and several deep wooden drawers. It magically keeps track of everything written on it. (311)
The class discussion of this article began innocently enough. But as the discussion continued, the question finally surfaced:
"Is she real?"
Whether it was the direct result of cramming reading in just before class, a minor mental lapse or the will of the gods, somehow someone had missed it. At this point I don't remember who it was. It could even have been me-- selective memory being what it is. But the question changed everything. Several class members spoke out: Anne was real. They pointed to the paragraph following the description of the space:
The poet, hypertext writer, literary feminist, activist, teacher, and computer scientist Anne Johnstone, whose room this is, and who indeed from the objective claim of the language of the space still stands here midst her scribbles and the smell of honeysuckles, and who once I hugged...died in her riverside cottage in Orono, Maine, in the company of her women friends, strangers, hospice healers, and her Scots mother at a very young age, not yet forty-five, of a rapid and rapacious cancer on February 28, 1995. (311-312)
The clarification of the mistake took less than five minutes. But it changed everything. The emotional response to Anne and the vehemence of my classmate's belief in her reality struck a cord. And I had to ask:
"What if she real?"
Would it make a difference to those of us not intimately connected to her? I meant no disrespect to the writer Anne Johnstone or the poignant feelings of Michael Joyce. But the reaction was electrifying. Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to say, but, as a poet and hypertext writer, I am inclined to think that Anne Johnstone would approve of where the question was headed: Could the MOO support an emotionally-moving fiction? Could a text-driven space with no active character other than the visitor(s) work? Fortunately for me, two of my classmates were as intrigued as I with these questions. Our culminating project for the course became an exploration of this hypothesis: Could a plot be driven by setting alone in the MOO?
The answer to that question is the province of the other lexia in this analysis. The purpose of the epilogue is to explore some of the practical issues made clear by the passage of time and to touch tangentially on other issues raised by Joyce-- persistence, momentariness and recurrence on the MOO. Now, three years later, The Loft (like its inspiration Anne Johnstone) experiences a curious duality. It is "dead"...and yet it persists.