. Spinning .

A nice thing about this hypertext is the way Ersinghaus uses minor characters to reinforce a character, an episode, a question that remains unanswered. By following some of the links within a textbox, we are provided some conversation that took place (?) in an unknown space of time that refers back to a thread we are following.

For example, when Ham and Pen meet again, we get advice-like discussion from Cervantes, Maria of the Mountains, Ernest, and both Ham and Pen that adds meaning to the meeting that we wouldn’t quite see otherwise had we followed whatever linearity Ersinghaus allows.  This develops an acceptance of the timelessness of the story.  Even as Ham’s youth comes up again and again in his pursuit of some sense of truth, between that time is a block of unknown space, and after it comes another that we may or may not ever get to enter.

Rather fitting though, this idea of missing some pieces, fragments of time, for it mimics Ham’s own situation.

Well so much for comfort and security here.  I feel much as Ham must have felt in the woods.  The author has slipped his hand away, trusting me to have made the right choices.  Without realizing he’s gone–or ever had been there–I’ve raced onward, changing direction with the wind, choosing by running towards the warmth of the sun or away from it, going with the abandonment of formula or plot plan.

Somewhere–and it’s too far back to go back to now though I know it was (Pen on aliens) that started the burst of freedom–I lost all sense of control.  The pace of the story, the paths that I choose urged me on instead of stopping to sniff this rose or that. So story here took over and plot points were enhanced, encouraged by whatever data they offered: an e-mail from Pen, advice from Maria, from Cervantes and others, and all the while what Ersinghaus has me doing is finding out more about Ham until I have lost my way and must depend upon Ham to lead me from here.   

Hypertext at its best–if you can accept it.  For me, I’m still excited with the running, yet part of me fears what I might have passed by, and one of my deeper fears, that I am lost. 

I’ll have to bite the bullet and cope.

Ersinghaus is extremely adept at finding the perfect simile to express an image.  In his choice he may be taking into account not only the item but the setting or environment of story, as it adds to the scene by its tone:

(Ham on Cervantes)

We met at my office. Washington asked and listened through the interview, periodically reaching over to run his fingers over the ears of a Chuihuahua he’d brought.  The dog, he called it Miguel Villa, sat on my desk staring at me with its black insect eyes, unperturbed by field science.  I thought I saw accusation there. The dog would sneeze often and lick its small pink nose. One eye would snap shut and open slowly like the door of a garage.

The dog becomes the focus of the scene, the playing field and umpire as the two men sit and talk. You already get the feeling that Washington has set the dog between them on the desk for this very purpose, whether to put Ham at ease or to distract him into letting down his guard.  The movement of the dog’s eye, snapping shut, opening slowly like the yawning entryway of a garage, ready for admittance.

(Ham on Mexicanos)

"Stop calling me ‘Washington.’ My name is Cervantes.  Call me Mr. Cervantes." He put the pencil and pad down and sat straight and prideful in the chair. He patted Miguel Villa between the ears and the dog’s eye closed, rose slowly, like something oiled.

The interviewer is adamant that he be called by his preferred name of Cervantes, an affiliation with his people, as is his dog in both breed and name.  He is upset by Ham’s indifference, having come to expect, I think, an ally.  He shifts position, pats the dog, reaffirming his space.  Ersinghaus then brings our attention back to the dog and in particular, his eye, opening slowly, "like something oiled."

That bit of detail, that subterfuge, keeps tension within the scene.  It diffuses it from the two men and leaves the dog as a bubble of translation between them, the talk going in and out through that opening and shutting eye, which also, by its slow pacing appears wise, unagitated, a symbol perhaps of political correctness that filters reality.

I’m not sure whether it’s pure determination or whether Steve Ersinghaus has managed to make the reading of hypertext nearly pleasurable for me, but I do not seem to be having the frustrations that I’ve had with prior readings of this story form.

There is a nice flow that begins with a dramatic episode as the the story starts in Ham Sandoval’s youth, and as the plot of this thread moves along, via hyperlinks there are other directions to take (I’d love to see again, now that I’ve read a portion, the mapping out of this novel).  So while the narrative arc is being established, there are still subplots, backstory, insight, grounding, and foreshadowing contained within the sideroads that add to the comprehension of the whole.

My method is that of the tortoise.  I am consciously aware of a timeline of sorts, of a linear movement of Ham through the story, and am trying to stay on that track.  But I’m nosey.  And, the grass may be greener–who knows?  Or I’ll get through the checkout without trouble, or maybe I’ll be stuck behind the mother whose 2 year-old throws up all over the gum rack.  So I investigate all avenues, keeping in mind where I started to leave the trail, learn what I can about what word or phrase offered me the option of finding out more and follow it for a while.  I am, however, directionally dysfunctional and spatially impaired–not your best reader of hypertext.

Ersinghaus has kept me close on the trails though and I do find myself lost in the story, and not simply lost.

While I may be stubbornly clinging to my own perception of Ham, it does appear that as he matures there is still that substitution of physics and string theory that I visualize as a safety net holding all that he is and was, and holding it all together as well as maintaining a comprehensible history of sorts.I would think that this rationale enables Ham to control what he can and gives it a dimension that does not exist in real life.  Perhaps it ties himself in with the rest of humanity and makes him transcend what he’s been through, I don’t know.  But his interest, his dedication, to theories and the setup of the universe to explain life seem to intersect here, as he finds out about a relationship he was hoping to have with Pen:

The backgrounds shatter. Sometimes the math makes no sense. I took a sip. Cold coffee.

Ham may have just lost it all.  I have an image of gridlike netting, rolling like waves outward to the edges, affecting all that is balanced upon it. 

But there, in the center, a hole.

For a long time, Ham claims he fears nothing and from what we see of him, I would not wonder why.  There are certain fears common to a group of like status.  With children, we see the fears of losing parents, of bogeymen in the dark, and once they’ve learned to group themselves with peers, of being embarrassed, i.e., wetting their pants. 

With males in particular this fear changes form but not its basis which is, I think, a loss of what they’ve learned to control.  In Ham’s wanderings through the woods, while he boldly walked away from his mother, it was just a manner of controlling the situation–once he understood that his mother truly would leave him there.  Alone, hunger cramping his insides, he stumbles on in fever, vomits, shits his pants and lays there sick and broken.  His worst fear has been realized.  He has lost control.

From here, Ham learns to allow the Butlers to become his family, learns how much of himself–of what he knows–he will reveal.  Wrapping himself in the safety  of their welcome, he learns to fear new things:

(Ham on being)

And it wasn’t that I feared just what was behind, as Dorothy Jones had intimated, but also what lay ahead and that which would become behind.  I feared middles, being between the crush of the past and the crush of the future.  My mother, the past, my brother, the future, who couldn’t be found, who may not have even been flesh.

Without a defined past, Ham, with his determined passion for a sense of order that’s been missing and yet he seeks in the balance of numbers,  attempts to align and name that fear with something stable, something known.

I had to keep my memory, find a way to store it, make it permanent but in a form proper, in numbers, equations. Hypertext for hyperlife.

Does he know? Is Ham aware that he has already left a trail of textboxes that mark the way he’s come, that lead out in strings of story that are his possibilities in life and can be read in 900,000 ways? 

As narrator, in the the process he can control the paths he chooses to offer (via Storyspace) but once it has been done, does he understand that as Barthes insisted, the reader–particularly in the hypertext environment–takes over the control?

So much for providing an example of the thread of building character as I had planned.  I’ve gone astray and ended up in a more philosophical Ham Sandoval that despite his war-lost (?) father, his mother-lost (?) brother, and being left beside the road deep in the woods has managed to become part of a family.  Oddly knowing how to relate, his closeness to Maria, the youngest daughter becomes his routine, facing down his mother in a courtroom, deciding hatred is the best door he could find.

Then there is a knack and love of numbers, calculations, reason:

(Ham on coincidence)

We think in time regardless of the nature of time and space, just as we are spatial beings.  Time could be the smell of wood smoke and it wouldn’t matter to time.  Hence any time is the opportunity for things to happen.  Coincidences are the result of population and the innevitability of place and nature.  Place, time, events and motion–they simply are.

So if a bug falls to the earth and splats at the same moment as some other body falls and splats, we need not attribute cause.  But we will.

These are ways to think about a missing family, unanswered questions, I think, without the pain of feelings.  I think that what Ersinghaus is giving us is almost a diversion to the mundane likenesses of lives by bringing the enormity of the image in focus.  Ham needs to overcome the loss of three people he barely knows by comparing it to the vastness and the importance of the universe.

Or so I think.

Unable to read today, Ham Sandoval still visited my mind to keep me wondering.  I have as scattered a series of thoughts as the boxes of text that tells me who he is.  I see his fears, some that no one but Ham could imagine, some that I recognize as that of every man I’ve known.  He is grown, he is a boy, he is both within the structure of the story, but as I see him, he is boy even grown, grown as a boy.

How to explain?  By context of course.  But then, the medium doesn’t work like flipping back pages.  I must adjust to the nature of the beast.