On the Very Idea of Permanence

There is nothing like going through your old Internet stuff to trigger some contemplation about impermanence.

In my case, I was going through all my poetry published online, looking to see what was still accessible, and doing some nostalgia surfing in the process. Some of these publications are still pumping out issues (Punk Noir, Sky Island Journal, Heron Tree, Whale Road Review — much respect). Others announced their retirement or slipped quietly into silence, but are still gamely hosting my poems (thanks Bodega Magazine, Liminality, West Texas Literary Review). Many others have totally collapsed into 404 errors, or their domains have been purchased by weird foreign scam companies. I honor their memory.

An activity like this is oddly blissful and melancholy, especially when it involves re-reading old poetry. You get to think about the impossible abundance of content, and you are reminded, with the gentle repetition of a jackhammer, that things on the Internet are both permanent (as parents keep telling their kids) and ephemeral, ready to vanish the moment someone shakes up or buys out those bits and bytes.

So our stuff on the Internet isn’t permanent. It all tumbles to the same void as our thoughts and memories, as the rituals and desires of all the people who have slipped into history… that is fine! It has to be fine, because it’s always been fine, and the idea that we should exist forever, in some kind of informational way, is absurd, a fiction brought about by our species-wide addiction to representations of ourselves.

At the risk of comically contradicting my last paragraph, I still harbor a consoling thought that maybe, in a certain sense, all this stuff actually is permanent (bear with me here). Not just the poems or the Facebook posts, but even the gestures of everyday life, the thoughts in our heads, the oddities we only appreciate in private. If there is anything to the philosophy of determinism and necessity, this is it, isn’t it? It’s that there is nothing outside reality’s matrix of cause and effect, and with a powerful enough computer, you could reproduce every detail of the history of the universe from any complete cross-section.

As a 20-year veteran of posting shit online and having it vanish — or remain perpetually invisible and anonymous — I have gathered my hopes and aspirations around this idea, a residue left over from philosophy and speculation. Everything that happens in my life touches the rest of history — the universe is itself an artifact, existing in four dimensions, and some intelligence, full of infinite curiosity and grace, will reconstruct it some day to study it, or simply to stare at it in wonder.

With this thought, I let go of everything temporary, because the very idea of “temporary” ceases to exist — all is permanent, all is continuous, and everything is perfectly and precisely meaningful.