Articles: Recycling Wingmail
Posted by: artwells
|
I've written <a href="http://www.oracula.org/oracula/wingmail.html">wingmail oracles</a> for a little more than eight years. Each year in March I've released the previous year's archive under the <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> license (or it's predecessor the <a href="http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/">Open Publication License</a>). This year I've decided to write a bit ahead of the calendar and create oracles up to mid-May 2005 when the wingmail archive will reach 3,000 lines. After that, I don't intend to write any new oracles for wingmail. The current archive will be rerun, beginning again with the oracles written eight years ago. There is no need to resubscribe or expect any down time. I feel done with wingmail, and I'm lucky enough to have a much greater joy awaiting--my family is expecting another child in late April.
I want to thank all the readers who have written in appreciations and descriptions of their uses for the daily wingmail. Over its eight years, wingmail has been used in philosophy classes, in management training, on blogs, personal web pages and bumper stickers, for inspiring the troubled, puzzling the comfortable and entertaining the bored. I believe that I have benefited the most from wingmail, though. In accepting the discipline and form of wingmail, I've found that the world is filled with a much richer beauty than I had known before. Each oracle I found has revealed that in even the most common objects, answers to great riddles can be seen, and even greater riddles can be introduced. As a poetic challenge and an oracular art, wingmail has been a very wonderful exercise, but one I can't help but think I've finished.
In working on <a href="http://www.oracula.org/oracula/modules.php?op=modload&name=Refind&file=index">refind</a>, a wingmail-derived web oracle, I looked back over the whole history of wingmail for the first time. I discovered that many oracles were repeat, sometimes several times, the same symbols provoking the same meaning perhaps varying in only a word or two. While this echoing is comforting in many ways, it feels more like a stagnation. Though I don't expect that it has caused any problem with wingmail readers, this repetition became an irritating oracle to me, offering me new insights into the nature of oracles and my habits involving them. When I quit work on Refind because of its negative effect on wingmail, I saw that wingmail as a creative and revelatory discipline was over. Wingmail's last year has been a pendulum swinging between looking for new meaning and allowing old meanings to remain. Recycling the wingmail archive seems to be the next welcoming step.
I've begun an offline work on the oracular arts and how they can be used as a tool for problem-solving and creative revelation. Whether or not this work becomes something publishable or beneficial to others, the writing process strengthens what I've learned through wingmail and is strengthening me a great deal for the challenges ahead. This process has also welcomed the conclusion that I need to move beyond wingmail. Thanks for joining me in it while it lasted. And thank you again for all of the encouragement and attention.
|
|
| |
|
