Incorporeality Renewed

In case you hadn't noticed - it's the 4th anniversary of this website. Happy birthday maetl! Well maetl has really been around for much longer than that - it's just that it wasn't until 2004 when I finally got around to implementing this web presence. It actually <a href=/incorporeal-transformations">started out</a> as a single plain HTML page, and gradually grew cruft and features strung together from various web services and a simple database. I never wanted it to be a blog originally, after a formative discussion with Phillip, where we both ended up agreeing that a blog wasn't a blog unless it had comments. So it wasn't. At the time, I chose to make it more like a journal or wiki-sketch-pad, a format that has actually worked rather well over the years.

While I'm not entirely sure that having this website has improved my writing, it has definitely improved my thinking, giving me a direction and constraint for trying to turn numinous and vague rivulets of social and technical thought into tractable, comprehensive summaries. Sometimes. I'll admit that it doesn't always work, and I am a little bit gutted that the most consistently popular articles here are all technical ones, and in actual fact rather boring, compared to some of the <a href=/the-three-swans">more experimental</a> and <a href=/multimathematical-immaterialities">interesting things</a> sprouting from this presence. Nowdays, I don't think of my work in quite such mystical terms as I did when I started out, but I'm still inspired by the same theme of building a bridge between <a href=/art">art</a> and <a href=/science">science</a>, <a href=/poetry">poetry</a> and <a href=/mathematics">mathematics</a>, and applying the insights of <a href=/history">history</a> to the problems of the now.

Recently, I've been working on an overhaul of the ageing codebase, and setting up some new features, including one in particular which will turn it into a bona-fide blog. Yeah, that's right, comments are on their way, riding on a new application framework. Why aren't they there already? Everything can be explained by Hofstadter's Law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
- Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach

So true. It'll be done when it's done, is all I can add to that.

Usually, I try not to get too meta on it, but since I've already broken through that wall here, new readers may be interested to note that every year on September 1st, I <a href=/beginnings">publish a quote</a> of a favorite poem, bearing some element of correspondence or meaning to the phase of my life or my turn of creativity of the time. This year, the poem is by Dylan Thomas. It plainly distills the passion and purpose of a certain kind of approach to writing. I know that not all poets agree on this - many are interested in images and syntax for its own sake, like painters exploring a new technique on canvas. But to me, the best poetry is that which is written not purposefully, but because through the experiences of pain, suffering, trouvaille and ecstasy, there is simply no possible way that it could not be written, despite one's best attempts to stop it from happening. Baxter put it best in a letter to Sam Hunt (1968):

The answer is that poets live
By a refusal to forgive
That mighty Bog of social shit
That has no use for sex or wit
Or art or hope, but simply is
Internally its own abyss;

A lot has happened in this past four years, and I know that the next four years are going to be even more eventful. Thanks for reading and supporting what I do. Even if it doesn't always make sense.