As of January 27, 2006, Western Union discontinued its telegram services, thus sounding the death knell for one of the first forms of more or less immediate long-distance communication. I have never received a telegram, and now will most likely never receive one in my lifetime. STOP

Is this a failure of myself or of technology? Or another completely different kind of failure, having rendered service well enough to have made itself obsolete? In this way success—a perfect usefulness—folds in on itself and becomes its eventual failure. Is it like a star that burns itself gradually away. Is that the purpose of technology, to find its purpose and to fulfill it, to, like a booster rocket, exhaust itself and dwindle back into the atmosphere we like to call the future. STOP

There are still a few telegram services you can find on the Internet, but the Internet itself of course is one of the successors of the telegram, itself a successor to the dot-dot-dash of the telegraph (like the enduring telephone, TYMNET, Telenet, and other data networks, faxes, videoconferencing, IMing, text-messaging, and whatever’s next, etc.), and it now provides a gateway to the telegram. It is strange to use the Internet to send a telegram: like pouring one of our Great Lakes into a graduated cylinder. As such the telegram is used mostly for a sort of retro or romantic effect if it’s used at all: birthday wishes for the old, who might have actually received telegrams throughout their lives; Valentine’s Day presents for one’s lover before a classy dinner out. One of the telegram websites claims that research shows that consumers will discard birthday cards but will keep a birthday telegram. Extend this to the idea of making an impression. That’s what they do. It costs $20 or more, depending on the level of service and romance you require. STOP

The use of STOP in telegrams is because you pay by the word, but each instance of punctuation is (was, I suppose) more expensive than a word. So the use of STOP became the norm. Short declarative or interrogative sentences became the norm. Because you had to pay per word, per line, your message would be best reduced to its shortest, most efficient form. The telegram is in this way a technology that discourages effusive language. Though it is redundant to throw down periods before it, this essay is not exactly a telegram (through the long white years of the page I send this out to you) but a shadow of it—it desires only to echo its form—so I only use, sparingly, and with increasing self-consciousness and several capital letters: STOP.

Technology enthusiasts know all about self-consciousness and obsolescence. At one point I fancied myself one of them—the geeky, the necessarily obsolete. I love old computer systems, the Amiga, the Commodore 64, the Adam, the NeXT, the old Macintoshes that you can mod (modify) to work as fishbowls now or simply clocks. I love the old technology—the spindles of punch cards, corrugated boxes of eight-inch floppy disks, 8-pin dot matrix printers that would hum and perforate every character in every line. I still have a stack of eight inch floppy disks (allow me, please, to use this parenthetical to point out that the difference between discs and disks is that the c, in theory, only applies to optical media) in my house somewhere. I would love to still have a tape drive in my boxes of discarded parallel and daisy-chained SCSI cables retained from my days as an IBM user.

Found in the void somewhere: a fictional telegram: I DON’T LOVE YOU STOP IF YOU LOVE ME STOP.

As I write this, I get an email from a friend—one of the longest I’ve received from her in a year, as she’s not always so good in keeping up long-distance correspondence, at least not on email or by phone—which in part bemoans the lack of letter-writing among writers. I’ve thought this too. Grand Valley State University (where I teach now) recently acquired Jim Harrison’s collected papers for something like half a million dollars. They consist of one hundred and sixty five linear feet of papers, letters, drafts, and other material, which are all now on their way to our archives, where they wait to be sorted through and classified and set aside in piles and catalogued and probably digitized or microfilmed or somehow reduced in physical size (see, if you like, Nicholson Baker’s book on libraries and the demise of paper, Double Fold).

I have received a handful of letters from writers who seemed to be trying to start a Correspondence, something that could eventually be Collected into Books and Published by the Few Remaining University Presses in the Future for use by Scholars, if there are any left by the time we’re done with the word slash the world. I’ve received letters in my life written on birch bark, on pornographic stationery, on maps, in handmade envelopes, on handmade paper, on the back of someone’s hand then photographed. Michael Martone sends me sort of pithy postcards. I like the idea of letters very much. Though I hate the physical act of handwriting very much, and as such now I pretty much type exclusively. I am not sure why.

And with the computer the letter seems almost pointless. I suppose my choice of font is individual, as is the leading and the margin choice, but in the world of Microsoft word with its helpful letter expert template and its standard document formatting settings, what’s the point? Though shows like CSI and Law & Order show us now that every printer has an identifiable toner or ink signature, so there is still a thumbprint buried in the robotic exoskeleton of the thing. We cannot avoid identification, though the telegram (and telegraph) was a good start to this—our words coded and repeated sans our own handwriting. Maybe I should seal my laser-printed letters with my ring’s imprint in wax.

Said friend has a job in San Francisco where she is helping to organize and catalogue the poet Robert Pinsky’s letters, papers, and other correspondence. She has, as such, acquired the bug for letter-writing, for Correspondence, which is nothing if not admirable, even if I don’t really have the heart for it. There is something there in that—some sort of special, quiet magic.

I have these great “letterettes” I found at a garage sale several years ago. I don’t use them often, because I don’t think of them that often, and when I do I want to covet them, to collect them (there’s always this, the collector’s impulse for hoarding and preservation, the unopened shrink wrap around decades-old toys). They have an old sort of smell. Recently I’ve sent a couple of them out. Given them up. I am trying to use them up, like any good technology, I suppose. They are the size of a small envelope and have various reproductions of natural scenes on their backs. They come with small gold foil seals, which have dried out somewhat in their age, and no longer stick for more than ten minutes or so, causing problems when they are mailed. Still one hates to just cover the letterettes up in a regular envelope or send them covered in packaging tape, ruining the elegance of their technology, of their form. I have decided in this moment that I will send one of my last letterettes to her. Maybe she can collect it for her future Selected Letters and Letterettes volume. It would be weirdly flattering—even as it was something of a betrayal, my private words made public for posterity and the greater scholarly good. I don’t know if I want it or if I do not. STOP

Isn’t the novel—that word that at other times means new—by now an old technology? We hear that thesis come across the teletype machines, the airwaves, the glossy magazines, and now the blogs. We’ve been hearing that for fifty years. I don’t think you can just declare a technology dead. It just comes to an end, a big dead STOP

I am on the train, that Victorian technology, coming back fairly late at night from Chicago. A series of travel complications left me without a clear way home this morning, returning to Grand Rapids and my wife and cats, the shimmering idea of home, from Austin, Texas, at least without a way home by air. Thus the train, an old technology. I hear many people speaking other languages, much more so than in the air. It is a gliding sort of nothingness, being cradled like we all are with this particular rhythm. The windows are dark, reflecting the inside of the train car and the occasional light or break in the darkness, occasional billboards lit up with messages. My laptop has wireless, of course—ingenious thing that it is, so freeing, and I almost didn’t get this technology installed when I purchased it, thinking it almost useless—and I have spent most of the four hours of our ride caught between finishing Richard Powers’ technological novel Galatea 2.2 and watching occasional wireless bursts occur when our train slips through these signal nets cast out by networks of PCs with their base antennae or something else entirely. It comes in washes, like the radii of streetlights’ illumination of the falling snow. It’s like a pulse. Just a glimpse of a connection to the bigger thing around us.

In these ways I have always loved methods of communication, the idea of complicated networks, of impossibly complex systems. I avidly check my email, have spent years exploring the PBXes and trunks, the 2600 Hz blue box tone access keys, and other analog illegalities of the telephone system, all the dead ends and loopholes that appear in anything appropriately convoluted. And the loveliness of Morse—the series of controlled bursts that, assembled, can be parsed back into language. The elegance of code. I even find the idea of smoke signals, in their way precursors to the telegraph, beautiful. They are charms against aloneness. They are ways out of the labyrinth. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to text, to messages and missives, sentences that seem like they will never end, and then they end. Books are hooks, are methods of communication, too, though slower in their ways. Speed is related in its way, perhaps, to permanence.

I remember playing a computer game on my old PC when I was younger. The game was called Starflight, and was billed as a space opera. It is still to this date one of my all-time favorite games. The plot of the game was very convoluted, but two points bear discussion: the starships of this future world ran on this fuel called Endurium, and one of your goals was to survey and mine planets in order to collect Endurium, in order to power your ship to explore further. The other plot arc was that the mythology of the game spoke of archetypal Ancients who had created much of the world, who had left the world behind and somehow mysteriously disappeared. The twist to the plot—I did beat the game after seeming years of effort—was that you eventually realized that the Ancients were Endurium, that the fuel we used to power our spaceships was alive, but that the creatures (whatever they were) moved so slowly that a decade for us was like a second to them, so we could not even observe their movements and so thought them inanimate. It was a question of time frame. A huge revelation. The idea still gives me chills, and I am taken back there, in front of the glow of my amber monitor (we didn’t have a color monitor, though my friend Matt’s Radio Shack brand Tandy had a sixteen-color monitor, though it didn’t always run IBM software perfectly), as I realize this Game Truth and my weird little world is forever changed and marked by that.

There are websites devoted to this game I played when I was about ten. Many of them are now gone, though there are many links that still point to the space (if that is the word) where they once existed. (This game still has a lot of fans, it would appear—one website I visited counted 164,000+ hits since 1996 when it was put up and eventually abandoned.) I have looked at these sites, and in my weaker moments spent hours poring over them, remembering and remembering one of my own first searches for meaning, and in this way searching my past for meaning, that old technology.

This text is part reminiscence, part transmission to whatever will come after this or me or us, and part trying to figure out how to recapture what I had, a fixity, a beautiful sort of enveloping obsession. This track of thought is a hole, a drain that I could circle forever, a planet I could orbit slowly, like I do some days the mailbox, waiting for the U.S. Mail, this very old technology, still delivered through all sorts of weather by hand, even sponsoring Lance Armstrong, himself almost more machine than man, one suspects, to at last arrive with some news from the glossy junk mail or real or other editorial world; I could ring and ring myself around the thing, considering it from the silent ice of space, a long-term obsession I can keep returning to, waiting for something to either fail or die, or failing that, from this distance, at least appear to move. STOP