The Way Here

Another Substack provided me with a window on another platform, Tuhat.Net

Sometimes, Substack may seem to be too much. I love how much the platform offers and am always discovering some other way of amplifying my signal through the noise of cyberspace. Substack has brought me back to that feeling when I first stepped into the Internet even before the World Wide Web browsers showed up.

1994

It was August of 1994 and I’d just returned from an 8 week immersive program at the Goethe Institute in Prien-am-Chiemsee, a lovely little hamlet in the South-East corner of Bavaria.

Email was my first hint at what was possible. I’d been told about it by John Watson, who was then the conservtor of musical and scientific instruments at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. To be able to reach out and touch the mind of another member of my species at distance for practically nothing seemed to me to be absolutely incredible.

Anna Paquin was there.

In January 1994, telecommunications company MCI launched a famous, surreal series of television commercials starring 11-year-old actress Anna Paquin to promote its information superhighway initiative, “networkMCI.” Fresh off her breakout, Academy Award-winning performance in The Piano (1993), Paquin was chosen by MCI’s advertising agency, Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer Euro RSCG, to put a comforting, innocent, and human face on intimidating high-tech concepts.

The Campaign Concept & Imagery

• Director & Locations: Directed by Peter Smillie, the commercials featured a dreamlike, avant-garde aesthetic. They were filmed in stark, visually striking landscapes like the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and the rugged Oregon coast.

• Wardrobe: Paquin famously wore an oversized, dark bowler hat and a crisp white shirt while addressing the camera.

• The Message: Rather than selling specific phone plans, the campaign served as an early prophetic vision of the World Wide Web, explaining how fiber-optic cables “thin as a human hair” would effortlessly connect computers, scientists, teachers, and everyday people.

“There Will Be No More There”

The most famous advertisement in the series focused heavily on the erosion of distance through digital communication. Walking through a barren, minimalist landscape, Paquin delivered poetic, philosophical monologues about data transmission:

“There will be a road. It will not connect landmasses; it will connect minds. Its speed limit will be the speed of light. It will not go from here to there... because there will be no more there.”

The campaign is widely remembered by early internet users as a definitive piece of 1990s tech nostalgia, capturing both the wonder and the slight eeriness of the oncoming digital age.

It was a remarkable piece of advertising. It sticks with me even now. When I began writing this, I wasn’t intending on writing about the early days of the Internet and the World Wide Web, however, here we are. I was entranced by this sudden ability to shrink the distance between us.

1996

I was stunned by the enormity and began working on my own web site in the summer of 1996.

I was then fresh out of my first post-divorce relationship. I’m so grateful for having been afforded that opportunity although it had very nearly cost me my life as I had taken the ending very hard and nearly drowned myself in my own fluids by dint of having attempted to treat a flu contracted on the evening of February 9, 1996 with Scotch.

Recovering from the resultant pneumonia in the early summer of the that year, and teaching German at the University of Pittsburgh, I was also taking a course in Linguistics. I’d sit and read “The Language Instinct” by Stephen Pinker. I remember it being a blissful state as I headed into the fall semester with a third year of support from the department since I had nearly died from sepsis from pneumococcal pneumonia during what ought to have been my final semester.

1997

The coming year would find me immersed in my studies. With the help of my fellow graduate students, I successfully managed to launch some extra-curricular activities for our undergrads to help them use their German-language skills outside of the classroom. The ripple effects from that continue. For my part, however, I faded from the scene following my own star. Within short order it would lead me to a period of time working behind-the-scenes at the Carnegie Museum of Art, part of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. In the Conservation Department, we cared for the collections of the Andy Warhol Museum as well as the Oakland-based CMOA. On my way out, I was able to help with the set up of the Carnegie International 99/00. I had so many outstanding experiences during my nearly three year tenure there, first as a volunteer, then as a paid intern, and finally as the secretary to the then-Chief Conservator.

The 59th Carnegie International is on display now! It is called “if the word we” and focuses on the first person plural pronoun. We are co-creating this world we live in.

And now I am back into biography but it’s really the story of my personal use of the Internet. As the Carnegie International was getting underway, I was sent a link to what was then one of the earliest social media platforms: Sixdegrees:

Launched in 1997, SixDegrees.com is widely recognized as the world’s first true social networking platform. Named after the “six degrees of separation” theory, it pioneered core features still used today: creating personal profiles, curating friend lists, and visualizing connection paths.

The platform introduced several features that defined early digital social connection:

• Profile Creation: Allowed users to establish personal identities.

• Connection Engine: Users could invite friends, family, and acquaintances. People could interact with others up to three degrees away.

• Messaging & Bulletins: Users could send messages and post items on bulletin boards.

Why it didn’t last:
SixDegrees was famously ahead of its time. When it launched, internet penetration was low (under 20% of US households) and dial-up speeds made loading graphics difficult. Ultimately, it lacked the user base to sustain itself and shut down in 2001.

The Six Degrees Patent is now owned by LinkedIn.

Before it dropped from the scene, however, I had used the platform to establish connections with people around the world. I was a bit random about it. It didn’t set all that well with my then-fiance that I was interested in having conversations with many people all over the world, however, she was soon out of my life anyway. I took up with a former student for a time, but the age difference between us was significant and it didn’t last. All the while, in the background, a conversation with the then-manager of Athelas, a modern-Danish classical sinfonietta in Copenhagen led to an eventual in-person connection. That led me to looking for a job there in Denmark. I was successful.

2009

The internet transformed my life at such a fundamental level that when I got the opportunity to attend the International Semantic Web Conference in 2009, I jumped at the chance. Being in the periphery of these events - breathing the same air - I managed to get a good look at how we were cooperating - much as Anna Paquin had promised at the beginning back in 1994. At leaast, that was the beginning for me.

My wife’s stroke in early November 2009 threw a wrench into my active participation in these events at an international scale. A year later, we began our transition into our DC residence from which I observe the passing show of history. All of what we are doing here is weaving the future for our progeny. I like to take a long view of history.

Yesterday

While I am simply another cog in the machinery, I’m awake and aware that I am also significant as well as insignificant. If I can help to amplify a signal through the noise of cyberspace, I will. Occasionally, I get amplified as well. As I stepped out of Daily Provisions and prepared to “Go Live” on Substack yesterday afternoon, I was surprised to see that Jesse Paris Smith had mentioned me in one of her articles:

I am astonished by Jesse Paris Smith’s generosity. If you don’t know her yet, follow her or, better yet, subscribe to her! She is consistently helpful in providing questions for us to answer. She is also the daughter of Patti Smith who, in a similarly generous manner, shares her perspectives with us. As Patti says, “Use Your Voice!” - and so I do.

Now

Now it’s time to go back to the top and see if I can’t discern a pattern or structure to this bit of writing. I had in mind to talk about Tuhat.net - a new platform for posting 1000 word essays without all that Substack has added over the time that it has been gathering steam. I started my first introductory essay on that platform and promptly lost it as I moved to the inner sanctum of the Bunker this morning. Up since a little before 4 AM, I’m writing at a leisurely pace now. I have just pushed this post up to the sentence before this one to Tuhat.net. One more way of preserving something of my thinking on the World Wide Web, it is!

Now what?

I guess the best thing I can do right now is to dive in and read Jesse Paris Smith’s post more closely than I have been able to do since it first came to my attention. Before I do, I’ll share a bit that I had my “Werner Herzog” emulator produce before I turned in on Saturday night:

“In the vast and indifferent machinery of the modern world, there dwells a man named Hal Gill — a writer and front-of-house sentinel at a busy café, where he mans the register like a lone explorer at the edge of an abyss. Day after day he confronts the relentless tide of customers, their orders for coffee and croissants echoing like the banal hymns of a civilization sleepwalking through its own existence. Yet Gill does not merely endure this; he transforms it. The friction of these mundane encounters — the irritable glances, the mechanical routines, the quiet restlessness within his own breast — becomes the raw ore for what he has named the Alchemy of Awakening.

Through his Substack, Harrowings, Gill excavates the self with the grim determination of one who knows the material world is not his home. He draws upon the ancient Gnostic dread that this incarnation is a flawed trap, a prison forged by lesser gods, and fuses it with the merciless discipline of Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way: the ceaseless, unglamorous labor of self-remembering. There are no sacred robes here, no distant mountaintops bathed in ethereal light. Only the counter, the line of strangers, and the daily, almost hopeless choice to remain awake rather than surrender once more to the autopilot of mechanical man. In this refusal of all romantic transcendence, Gill reveals something far more profound — the ecstatic truth that enlightenment is not escape, but a deeper descent into the ordinary.

Born Harold Bledsoe Gill III, he first learned to cut a clear signal through the noise of history as a fifer in a colonial drum corps, projecting his notes across the pageantry of the past. His father, the historian Harold B. Gill Jr., devoted his life to the “inarticulate” — those forgotten souls of the eighteenth century whose existence survived only in ledgers, court records, and the mute testimony of objects. When the father passed, the son founded the Harold B. Gill Foundation, a quiet monument to preserve and transmit that legacy alongside his own.

With no biological children to inherit the line, Gill has turned the ancestral imperative sideways, channeling it into the foundation and into Harrowings. Here the public writings serve as dispatches from the front lines — reports from the counter, from moments of irritation or fleeting wonder, from the unending attempt to wrest conscious presence from the jaws of habit.

For Hal Gill, the question burns like a solitary flame in the darkness: how does one stay awake inside an incarnation that so often feels like a cosmic snare? The answer is neither comforting nor triumphant. It is an ongoing, unglamorous experiment carried out in plain sight, where the register, the family legacy, and the stubborn restlessness of the human heart are all pressed into the same relentless, beautiful, and terrifying work.”

Seems legit! …and I’m still:

and yet another distraction:

…and Day 2 of my current stint of uninterrupted sobriety:

I’d been first introduced to this band above on May 13, 2015 when I was joined by this lady at the 9:30 Club here in DC:

Sophy Burnham is a treasure - not that all my friends aren’t. I gathered a few together here:

In general, I’m just grateful for all my fellow travelers on this journey, without exception:

So, now I must write in response to Jesse Paris Smith at long last:

What are your words, the nonnegotiable values, the passions that drive you forward, your personal sources of hope that pull you out of the muck? And what is a physical action you might take in a moment of heaviness, in the way I put on music and opened a fresh Substack page to talk to you all? Think about it if it’s interesting today, journal or write about it, and if you don’t mind, please add your thoughts in the comments if you have some time.

I love this invitation. My words are always “legacy, life, gratitude” presently those emerge. I owe my life to so many who have gone on before….and all life on the planet that work together to create what we have here out in space and time. I have been cast into time due to so many different events that have happened back into the furthest reaches of time. The ripple effects of my life will continue to emanate, whether I am conscious of it or not. Why not be conscious?

The passion of simply existing…of being aware how miraculous it is. That drives me to get up and out on any given day. To be seen by another, as Jesse Paris Smith has seen me and then taken the time to actually acknowledge it publicly, that is so incredible to me. If I am anything, it is an imp inhabiting the body bearing the label “Harold Bledsoe Gill, III” and having been given this moniker, I feel beholden to the previous two Harold Gills to perpetuate their work through my writing, through my being. I’ve been lucky.

Rather than pulling myself out of the muck, I plunge into it and revel in it. That probably seems a bit off, but I’m reminded of how we all emerge out of the chthonic - a word that I learned from reading Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae in the run-up to my graduate studies. It ties me back to the years in which I was being drilled in the contrast of the Apollonian and Dionysian by Dr. William Stanton Noe:

Dr. Noe was a prominent Episcopal priest, educator, and civic leader based in the Richmond/Ashland, Virginia area.

Life and Legacy

• Military & Early Career: He served as a Captain in the U.S. Air Force in Iceland before being ordained as an Episcopal priest.

• Academia: He served as the Chairman of the Department of German and founded the Study Abroad program at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, teaching there for 33 years. He also chaired the English and Foreign Language Department at various colleges.

• Ministry: He founded St. Peter’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Swansboro, North Carolina, and served as the Priest-in-Charge at the Church of Our Saviour in Montpelier, Virginia, for over 20 years.

• Community: He was actively involved in the Richmond Symphony, served on the VCU Institutional Review Board, and was a volunteer firefighter.

He passed away in January 2019 at the age of 89.

In true Harrowings style, this only scratches the surface. Dr. Noe was a hypnotist and owned controlling-interest in a wine importing company that brought the best of German wines to Richmond. I encountered him in the wine and beer section of the Pottery in Lightfoot, Virginia conducting a tasting back in 1993 as I was preparing to go to graduate school. I consulted with him and Dr. Robert H.P. Baerent to get their recommendations as I embarked on my graduate studies. I was so fortunate to have been their student at Randolph-Macon. I digress…

The physical action I am taking is responding to you, Jesse Paris Smith and hoping that others pick up what I’m laying down. You inspire me. I hope to inspire others. I could go on and often do but, for now, I’m just reading up on Sam Shoemaker’s life and I’m about to share in the Spiritual Awakening Group from my experience, including getting to a meeting at Calvary Episcopal Church on a Tuesday evening back on November 18, 1997 where Sam had been the priest after 1951. It was there that I first heard Lewis “Buddy” Nordan hold forth saying “Y’all are my heroes.” I had taken note of it, only in that I found it to be a sad, pathetic statement to make at the time, not realizing that this man would come to be my grand-sponsor in AA and was a noted professor of creative writing, known in some circles as “The Clown Prince of Southern Literature.”

Beyond a circle of devoted, rabid fans, Lewis Nordan was relatively unknown. Critics ate him up with a spoon: “As if the worlds of William Faulkner and James Thurber had collided” (The Associated Press) and “An immense and wall-shattering display of talent” (The Nation). But, maddeningly, the Clown Prince of Southern Literature never enjoyed the wide readership he deserved. Now, sadly, he is gone from us. Lewis Nordan—“Buddy” to everyone lucky enough to call him a friend and teacher—died of complications from pneumonia two weeks ago, slipping away peacefully and without pain, according to postings by family members on his Facebook Wall.

This has been a tough season for fans of Southern literature—first William Gay passes on, then Harry Crews, and now Buddy Nordan. It was Buddy’s death that hit me hardest, though. It felt personal and cruel because here was a half-obscure literary hero I’d advocated with all the fervor of a Baptist preacher gettin’ his Jesus on at a tent revival. Lewis Nordan taken from us? No, no, no. It was to the book world what the deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper were to the rock ’n roll world. Friday, April 13, 2012 will forever be known to me as The Day the Laughter Died.

Upon hearing the news of Nordan’s passing, I was struck by a tidal wave of melancholy. The only cure and salve was to reach for one of his books, open it, and start reading at random—a story like “How Bob Steele Broke My Father’s Heart,” for instance:

Naughty demons accompanied my father wherever he went. All misery did not seem to be of his own making. In his home, the telephone often rang with no one on the line. Hoses broke on the Maytag. Pipes froze in the spring. Pets came down with diseases they had been inoculated against. Wrestling and “The Love Boat” appeared on television at unscheduled times. Lightning struck our house and sent a fireball across the floor. He was the only man in Mississippi to buy a bottle of Tylenol that actually had a cyanide capsule in it. He went to only two high school baseball games in his life and was beaned by a foul ball at each of them. A homeless person died on his back stoop. When he walked down the street bluejays chased after him and pecked at his face. He was allergic to the dye in his underwear. He mistakenly accepted a collect obscene phone call. This sounds like a joke or an exaggeration, but I swear it is not. There was something magical about the amount of benign bad luck that, on a daily basis, swept through my father’s life like weather and judgment.

Sentences like those remind me why I became a writer in the first place—the burning itch to turn words into music and give readers a jolt of joy, a thrill not unlike licking a lamp-socket so long and hard that the very fillings in your teeth rattle and dislodge.

Sam, of course, was, by then, long gone, but his “I Stand By the Door” poem formed the centerpiece of one of my recent writings. It’s a message I try to amplify:

I’m really grateful to be here and grateful to be anywhere. I hope that all this has answered the mail for someone! That’s always my intent. Whether it has or hasn’t…Onward!

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