“I can look at a landscape without describing it.” -- Gertrude Stein
The language of the “page” is the code that references parts relative only to their
position in the field. (See Sec. 3.0, “For Example, Code.”)
THE FIELD IS CONSTITUTED BY EACH MEDIUM’S APPLICATION OF ITS OWN GENRES.
In this case, it is the image as a field or ‘landscape’ -- in Stein’s sense
of landscape above. It is a field of markup. This link shoots you straight to
a multicolored whirl of buying options a page which, at this writing throws
you into a maze of densely-clotted pathways -- as if they were Elysian Fields!
What is the "size" of the writing field? A forest is just a field on stilts.
It can be the source viewed, a field prepared, furrowed. This is a dynamic,
expansive writing space, a pixelated meadow on a revolving disk inside a UNIX box.
It is a field for which permission is an actual fact of the UNIX environment, in
Robert Duncan's words, "as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain
bounds hold against chaos". The Web is a representational discourse cast
from natural language cradled in the matted barbs of mark-up. If a field has it prose
and versus, these are its verses, nested within a frame of webbed electronic poesis.
Our task is to explore the texture of the clods the plow leaves behind; to celebrate
its nitrogen, iron, and mulch, to furrow the "everlasting omen of what is".
The Meadow