For those of you who don’t fall into this category, the name Pete Novotnik may nevertheless trigger a flicker of recognition. So far, Pete has achieved a modest cult status amongst a constituency of new age techno-geeks and other assorted weirdos. For them, he has become a sort of Sylvia Plath of the computer age - a poet and martyr to the cause of technological counter-culture.
Personally, I don’t have much time for these people. They are, I suppose, an interesting sociological phenomenon. The most enthusiastic devotees pore over Pete’s writings as if they were religious texts. But not wanting to be associated with anything quite so old hat as religion, they have developed the idea that his writings are akin to computer software. They believe that through the act of reading them, you can reprogram yourself, discard outmoded ways of thinking and fine tune your consciousness to the zeitgeist of the digital age.
Garbage in, garbage out, if you ask me.
All of which makes my self-appointed position as Pete’s literary executor a rather uncomfortable one. So far, I have concealed my contempt. I really shouldn’t complain. Thanks to his devoted band of followers, editing Pete’s work for publication and gently feeding the appetite for discussion of what it all really means has turned into a nice little earner. Nothing spectacular - but enough to keep my head above water, alongside various other, more run-of-the-mill writing and editing jobs.
I have often wondered what it is that people find in his work that they can’t get elsewhere. I suppose there must be a lot of people out there looking for something to believe in, something that doesn’t carry the historical baggage of abject failure to live up to its initial ideals. Pete’s pseudo-poetic ramblings haven’t been around long enough for people to get seriously disillusioned with them, so they fit the bill admirably. And they’re sufficiently ambiguous to provide plenty of scope for new interpretations, which helps to keep the punters coming back for more.
Getting back to my role in all this, you could say that I am helping to fulfil a pressing social need. But that would be too charitable. I am more like a priest who doesn’t believe in God, but carries on going through the motions so that he may continue to earn a modest but comfortable living off the backs of genuine believers. It’s an existence, but hardly a dignified one.
My publishers encourage me to answer at least some of the e-mails they receive from these people - and yes, inevitably, it is mostly e-mails rather than letters. In the beginning it was fun, pretending to believe in the same things as they did. It was almost like learning another language - but one that changes all the time as new expressions enter the vernacular. I even invented some of my own and watched, fascinated, as the same phrase started popping up on discussion websites, without prompting from me, as if it had developed a life of its own.
For example, I suggested to one eager correspondent that Pete’s writing was the nearest thing we have to a “boot-up disk for the operating system of the soul”. This is precisely the sort of ungainly technological metaphor which can be almost guaranteed to spread through the devotee community like a disease, multiplying itself across chat-rooms and bulletin boards. But there is only so much sport that can be had with this kind of thing. Eventually it leads to people sending in turgid five thousand word essays, expounding their theories on the meaning of a few lines of text. These learned tracts usually include all manner of cross- references to other theories, books, works of art or internet sites - as if the sheer number of links which they contained was a measure of the profundity of their thought.
So why don’t I just bring this elaborate charade to an end? Well, I suppose that is exactly what I am in the process of doing. But before I slip back into complete obscurity, I want to tell my story. I want people to pay attention to something I’ve written, the way they’ve pored over Pete’s stuff for years. And I want to make a confession, of sorts, about my part in the events leading up to Pete’s death.
It won’t, I’m afraid, be a “boot-up disk for the operating system of the soul”. What I have in mind is more a download of its corrupted contents.
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