It's not just published writing that's going to change as we plunge into the 21st century. You see the mail-program vendors moving into "html when you want it" for simple html writing. But, way back at the beginning, in about 97, I had my eWriter (a textwriter, the upgraded typewriter) set to write html "source" or a browser to typeset. You could email it as an attachment or, with a little care to fit in line-wrap, right into the message space from which it could be saved as a text file with an .htm extension for loading into a browser.

But, the real mailing is for browser reading. So, when I've sent the last of these "spreading the faith" segments, have the whole batch, I'll put them in a hyperperfect-bound set of htm pages with the links up at the top, zip them up and send your real (if less immediate) set for comfortable reading, printing if you want, posting if it fits (you post only the "entry point" segment)....

That's how letters c'n be sent or collected and saved. Mail programs and word processors and such make the base transfer standard. In most mail programs and MS Word (and other Office document producers, even Excel) you can Save or Save As in HTML format and then work on the in a text or html editor. If an incoming letter is in plain text, you can, with a click, put it into html in the mail program before saving. (Use Forward to get your heading.) So, the world is coming along. On my table of books on my archive site, I even have a paper and sample page to show how to put in pop-up marginalia (no second window, just a splash screen * ). And highlighting, boxed notes and hyperlinks.

You can read newer articles in my manual for eWriter. You can't use eWriter because it's a Windows program, but you can read the articles up front in the manual. And you c'n look at the manual itself as a hyperperfect-bound book. I didn't use the Windows HTMLHelp construction. It lets you condense all the html pages into a single .chm file, as it used to do with rtf pages in it's .hlp files, but it locks you into a lame screen-appearance.

And we already know that, in the TOC, our rabbit holes hold little hyperperfect-bound codices as readily as variable length scrolls (like the Alexandrian library). So, our writing tools and our writing surfaces the carriers of our 21st century poetics ("the makings") and of the seemingly simpler (but very complex) cognitive act of writing. What about this business of new punctuation?

When we're talking, we don't think much about punctuating, if at all, we just do it, and our attention is focused on our listener or listeners. We punctuate for effect. We pause, we hold the voice up or down at a pause, we use different kinds of pauses. We sure as hell do not think that listening, and listening we partially control, stops during the pause. We stop sounding phonemes to let hearing work out. We go to school and learn to write, we learn grammar. And we learn to punctuate. At least when I was in school we learned a dead marking-off. We'd be given a paragraph with a lot, most or all punctuation dropped out and our job was to put the missing punctuation back in. We had rules of placement. This was a long way from learning to blaze a trail for others to follow. Most of us, though, got the feel of it. After all, it did pace our talking and we read it used by those who used it.

As poets, we learn to use "white space" even if only line breaks and stanza breaks. Still, the idea floats. A line break can be like a comma, like a period ...maybe even like a colon, semicolon, dash.... Rules 'd be hard to gather, because a line break is like a period or like a comma (when no punctuation is being used) according to everything else going on. Later, there'd be extended spaces within lines (whatever lines were) and indents and systems of (relative) indents and take-offs.... Most of us, though, got the feel of it.

When typesetting came in, a new kind of punctuation came in. Italics or boldface could be used to get emphasis or voice shifts or just a kind of parallel sorting out. Now, we were in another realm. All your punctuation marks and white-space marking were passed on through by the typesetter. But your turn on and turn off of italics were caught, taken as a command, and the printing changed. You know you're punctuating for semantic purposes when you put a subordinate clause between a pair of commas. You type in one, skip a space and you're writing in that clause. When you're ready to come back out, you put in the other, skip a space and you're writing in the original clause. Now, in a textwriter, using html, you do the same thing with <i> and </i> instead of "," and ",". Now, in typewriter days, until the Selectric, this could drive you nuts. You had to use underlining (very different from italic print) and margin marks. It looked and felt wrong...! Hell, the weight was wrong. The voice was wrong. You had to be hearing what the typesetter would produce and send forward.

Now, if you're typing in your mail program and have the html set, you can just use your buttons or keys like Ctl+I and it's like using commas and periods except instead of seeing what you're marking, you just see it work. that's fine. But in my textwriter, eWriter, You see the tags in your text just like you see your commas and periods. The two kinds of punctuation don't look different. White-space? Well, you've two kinds of white-space going at the same time. I've never felt any difficulty. The white space, and we can take a line-end as an example, for the typesetter (say a browser) to pass along to the reader is a <br> punctuation mark. The line-end for the manuscript text is a #13 (Enter or Return key's character). The <br> is written punctuation, and the #13 (not seen unless you go into a hex-editor) is manuscript marking (to assist readers of the manuscript). Welcome to the 21st century, it's manuscript and printed "text". When you move out into xml (xhtml is xml but old html browsers can handle it), you'll get yet a further kind of punctuation. you can build tagsets. You can mark something semantically. You can use punctuation to mark something off as, say, a proper name, by putting the names to be marked thus in tags that maybe look like this <prop-name>John Jones</prop-name>. A typesetter may put such names in a special font or ignore them while another kind of program extracts them for a list and ignores the text. Welcome to the 21st century textwriting. We're in an time of a thinking man's punctuation for sure.

THE SEA

Again at the table.
My arms, just below the elbows,
calloused from the gentle
swells of the table pulsing
under these twin hulls.

And I watch intently
down into this paled sea
from which
forces of constant rising
push into the swells

those creatures that will burst
forth to flounder or find footing
on my beach
and tell me in their dying
gasps or first breaths of alien

ways that shaped them
beyond my ken
and sent them, in their
last moment, or first, to stretch
my ken.

Faith is spread by doing in our everyday conversation, or preaching, what we do freely enough in our poems, licensed by peoples' believing it's all right to perceive, imagine, think and speak "in metaphor".... It's all metaphor, anyway, and a faith is a gather of metaphor. Faith without that "a" in front of it is to play metaphor, through a driving set, so no listener c'n help absorbing metaphor you're playing, spreading out among your listeners....

you take existing faiths, and your new faith, and you introduce your hardy "alien" species into the local wild. Do it entertainingly. Talk about going out on the Web. Everybody talks about surfing. So, tell 'em this is fine, presents a chance to develop and utilize skills ...and to shop. Then, tell them that while surfing can be an adventure, it's limitations is that you paddle out into the cybersea a little ways and turn and face the shore, the beach and, behind it, the mall. and you wait to catch a wave, a wave that somebody'll surely raise behind you and send along under you. Tell 'em to study navigation, to read the stars and constellations, an ephemeris and a sextant, and to go down to the beach...

...and take up cyberseafaring.... Sure is more appealing than trying to get folks interested in doing research on the Web..., eh? At least without a story. Of course, anybody going out there will have to use ordinary research methods fitted to the tools ...but the metaphor is a like a good wind for that sail and that dark ship....

Traditional faiths don't fit the always shifting realities. Take upload and download. I even saw a popular book on the Internet (before the Web) advising the reader to understand this pair of sendings by envisioning the other computer as if it were up above your house - like an UFO (my addition). The old hierarchical organization's faith. Boss at a "top". Or polite bowing, bow a little deeper than the other guy. We live in a networked society today. So, you want loading terms like outload and inload and, occasionally, offload - from your node (or noodle). Well, I spread this when I can. I don't turn over the tables in the temple. and I don't go preaching in the street when the temple priests and remote authority want a quiet week. I always juxtapose the old and the new like page and scroll in Web talk. Or frame of reference and system of referents when I set up to use reassociating rather than the hip but vague reframing. Insert your new faith, it's terms, even if only parenthetically ...hook a deeper curiosity... and be ready to tell a tale....