EMU BUTCH, and VAPOR/PAPER, and TECHNE
A meditation from eon meridian on their novel and musical experiments
Since returning home on a multi-day journey involving multiple delays, I set down to reintegrate myself into mundane reality. It has been difficult. I ended up writing a new piece about all the things we do to when we start something new. Do we make a cup of coffee? Do we find our favorite pencil? Do we say a prayer, perform a breathing exercise, a yoga posture? I write a text editor.
It used to be the case when I started a writing project I opened, nvim, a terminal based text editor, that is very extensible and scriptable. Many years ago I used emacs as my text editor. Emacs is also a terminal based text editor, but is a complete programming environment, a sort of self-hosted operating system, and based on what was my favorite language LISP. Really my favorite language was Scheme, because it has limited syntax. But none of this matters now that programming has become anachronistic.
Back to the story.
One day, I logged into a computer and, shockingly, there was no emacs, there was only vi (vi short for vim and ancestor of nvim, neovim). Vi, created by Bill Joy in 1976, was the first full screen text editor. Because in the past, we could only see and edit a line of text at a time, but then in the past that is 1976 and the invention of Vi, we could edit a screen of text.
It was a sad and profound moment when I logged into this machine and could not use emacs. It was my tool, crutch, my scaffolding, that helped me navigate text, and I had writing all sorts of customizations and configurations. From that moment on, so I would never experience that sadness I felt in that movement, I exclusively used Vi.
Fast forward to today, and I did move to neovim, nvim, because of all the self work I have done, and I love nvim and have many customizations as well.
Returning to starting something new, when I start something new, in text, I open nvim. While in BANFF, working on Emu Butch, a neurofiction novel, I decided I needed to have a new text editor, one that had I had been dreaming about. It would record my keystrokes and translate them into music, and play them back, my own musical score to my writing, my ritual. My brilliant and dear friend Aya and I have been thinking on a much more elegant and radical performance piece involving text to sound in this way, but really what I wanted in BANFF was a text editing tool that was just for me, and for this neurofiction, Emu Butch. set about writing a text editor tool that I now call Palimpsest.
It runs locally, nothing leaves your computer and if you want to try it, you can do the onerous task of looking at the documentation on github and installing it.
For mac computers if you have brew installed (https://brew.sh/) its slightly easier:
open the terminal, type:
brew tap caerjar/tap
brew install palimpsest
anytime you want to run it you also open terminal and type: “pal serve” There are more things to write in the documentation.
If you, dear reader, would like a version for windows, or linux, or something, let me know, and I will put it on the list. Writing a proper mac app for this is also on my list.
Maybe in a follow up post I will go through the building of Palimpsest, but all of this is a distraction from what I really wanted to write about today, which is the brilliant Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism.
My original piece, in response to that, was fired up by great injustice, and a desire to comment on everything in that brilliant book, and future thoughts about Technological Capitalism, inspired byJaques Ellul, and the technological society. Societies have phases, like water, and that one phase of society is the “technological” society. Where is this critique of the phase and the phase transition beyond language games and category mistakes?
Now that I am a writer, and I live in a virtual reality of language. I write human song analogy to the bird song, and sing this song to elecampane in the garden. I also now edit. Except here ,where there will be no editing. There will be selecting and discernment, because after all, this is not my private journal where there is neither editing nor discernment. That stays private, in the journal the Order of the Meridian, incubating until 2054.
When you download Palimsest, if don’t want a vapor (wave) aesthetic there is a paper version.
x
Eon