The Trellis, Not the Vine

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Pull up a chair and warm your hands, because tonight's story is about the morning I fired myself.

Not from a job. From two websites. All this fall I have been rebuilding a pair of museums: scibe.org, where My Name is Scibe, the collaborative hyperfiction I co-wrote in 1994, lives again with every lexia intact and read aloud; and item8.org, where Item 8, the hypernarrative nineteen of us wrote on The Meta Network in 1997 and 1998, stands complete with its two hundred twelve surviving responses, its gaps printed honestly under their numbers, its indexes and glossaries and bibliographies and acknowledgements, the whole wrapper, the pretty paper around the present. The museums are done, or as done as museums get before the visitors arrive. And this morning, standing in the middle of the finished work, I gave one order over and over until it stuck: get me out of the center of these places. I was never the center. I refuse to be framed as it now.

Because here is the thing about a museum, and I want you to hear it the way I said it at dawn: the art is only part of what makes it interesting. The rest is the village. And in this village, my part was never the lead. Let me tell you about the play I was actually in.

In the summer of 1994, in Tempe, Arizona, Judy Malloy was lying in a bed with a leg a car had broken in about fourteen places, an artery severed, crutches waiting in her future for good, writing on a laptop Xerox PARC had lent her. She had asked the Wizards of the network for the name Scribe, and the network, in its wisdom, handed her back Scibe, and instead of correcting the typo she became it. Then she did the bravest, quietest thing an artist can do: she hoped, out loud, in public, in two conferencing systems at once, for company. Hoped for, her own words, but not asked for. She wanted windows on the world from that bed, and she did not presume to demand them.

We were the windows. Seven of us climbed through: Tom Igoe, Tim Collins, Anna Couey, Valerie Gardiner, Joseph Wilson, Doug Cohen, and me. And now I am going to tell you my exact part in Judy's play, because I have spent thirty years getting it sized right and this morning I finally said it plain. I am an author of Scibe. The DNA are in both of these works, and they're my DNA, not just Judy's. I wasn't just the person who wore all black and set up the sets in the play. I wasn't the headliner, but I wasn't a background extra. I was a character actor in the play. You know the character actor: never the name above the title, always the face you remember at dinner afterward, the one who steals three scenes and vanishes. And looking at what I wrote in those lexias, all that weather and longing and showing off, I will confess it here by the fire without a flicker of shame: I might have over-acted. I am a vulnerable, verbose drama queen; it is in the record; the record is now a website; let the record speak.

Three years later I tried to do it again, and this is the descendant work, and it is mine the way a snowball is the property of the kid who packs the first handful. On September 2, 1997, on a conferencing system called The Meta Network, in a room called artist, I opened an item and invited the mountain to fall on it. I even coined a word for what I hoped would happen: coelaboration. And it happened. Ginny Little arrived, and Dirk Flinthart, and Hope O'Keeffe, and Red, and KAT, and a dozen more, and the snowball rolled down the snowy mountain gaining speed and mass and momentum until there were two hundred forty-one responses and a year of our lives in it. Did I lead it? Friends, I barely steered it. I was the catalyst and the facilitator, a co-writer among writers, one voice in an ensemble of nineteen, and the largest single share of the writing is mine, sixty of the two hundred twelve that survive, and I am not modest about a single one of those facts. No false modesty around this fire. I began it, I named it, I wrote my share and then some. And the work belongs to the ensemble, the way the mountain belongs to the snow.

That is the truth of my whole method, and I can finally say it in one sentence: I am a trellis for creativity's vine. In many cases, even with Item 8, what I did was harvest other people's creativity in order to make something. The trellis does not grow the grapes. The trellis does not get drunk on the wine. The trellis stands there in the weather, season after season, shaped so that growing things want to climb it, and if the trellis ever starts believing it is the vine, somebody who loves it has to walk out into the garden and say so. A friend of mine in Kentucky says it to me regular as church: you think everything is about you, Chris. This morning I took her sermon and built it into two websites, so it will still be standing there correcting me when I am not around to be corrected.

Now let me tell you where I learned to be a trellis, because it was not on the internet. It was in Puerto Rico, working a job beside my father.

The job needed a room full of Midwestern General Motors parts men to stand up and join a conga line. Picture them: good men, parts men, a long way from home, arms folded in the universal posture of a man who has decided in advance that he will not be dancing tonight, not in front of coworkers, not sober, not for anybody. A conga line with no dancers is just a man walking in a circle with his hands on nobody. Somebody had to go first, and going first at full price.

So I jumped up. I acted the fool and the jester. I danced around that room like a man possessed by the patron saint of lost dignity, and I made such an ass of myself, completely, thoroughly, on purpose, that the arithmetic of embarrassment in that room changed forever. Because once I had been that big an ass, no man present could out-ass me. Joining the line cost them nothing; I had already paid the whole bill. And they joined. The line formed. The parts men danced. And my father, who did not hand out praise like parade candy, let me know that it was the proudest he had ever been of me. Besides the scuba diving. My dad had two categories of pride in his son: the day I acted a big enough fool to set a room full of strangers free, and everything I ever did underwater, where going first means bringing people back up alive. Catalyst as a strategy, my friends. You spend your own dignity to buy other people's courage, and the exchange rate is wonderful.

I have been running that play ever since, in every medium I've got. It's why I say it all in public: the drinking, the fear, the fucking, the tiredness, the insecurities, the whole unflattering inventory, said out loud and said first. People think it's confession. It's a conga line. If the man with the website and the radio voice can stand up and be the biggest ass in the room about his own worst material, then maybe the person reading, who has been carrying the same inventory in silence, can afford to be brave enough to share a little of theirs. I like to think it works that way. I have some receipts that it does. I might also be giving myself too much credit; some of my friends may not even realize it's a strategy. Both of those can be true, and around this fire we let them be.

So the museums stand, and the register on both of them, the house rule my editor keeps for me now, is: as close to reporting as print allows. An anti-hagiography. But with flowers. Judy gets her whole record, the accident and the bed and the thirty years of keeping that work alive on her own pages, because Scibe is a Judy show and always was. Lisa Kimball, who founded the Electronic Networking Association in a Greenwich Village loft and walked between every room in this story, gets hers. Charles Roth, who wrote the Caucus software we all lived inside and built its web language in one month in 1995, gets his. Frank Burns, who founded the network, gets his. Ginny and her Kalamazoo classroom, which sat right next door to Item 8 and fed it writers, get theirs. And me? I get my facts, at full weight, in the colophon, where the curator's name belongs: third in one byline, one of nineteen in the other, and this show, this fire, this voice, where I am glad, super glad, to be the center and sing the aria at full volume.

One last thing, and it is the most honest part of the night. Those two editions rest on two kinds of evidence: the documents, and my memory. And my memory, friends, is a sieve. I have SDAM; I don't relive the past, I look it up, and the witness these museums cross-examined is a man recalling across thirty years from the edge of the rooms, never the center of them. So the editions carry an open door, printed plainly, and I'm going to say it out loud here where my voice carries: if you were there, in the conferences, in the classroom, at the company, on the WELL, your memory is wanted. Not as a footnote to mine. As the record itself, in your own words, under your own name. Until the people who were actually involved add their voices, what we built this year is a very careful, very honest beginning. The acknowledgements name the debts; the bibliographies name the sources; the colophons carry the address, and the kettle, as ever, is on.

I wrote the sober, reported version of all this for the weblog, because the weblog is where I keep the record straight. This show is where I tell it. Same snowball. Same trellis. Hotter fire. Now: who's joining the line?

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