Berlin, January 09, 1996

This is one of these boring office days where I am trying to get all my bills and checks together, and planing and booking new trips comparing prices, interests and paying modalities. Besides I am writing about pearls and researching what they mean in common and for me... Pearls as a unit of time or language, as a symbol for a unique problem to be solved or staying in our lives, as poles that we create tension in between, that is necessary for our lives. Thinking about those beads or pearls a lot of facts and stories come into my mind. Pearls could represent a manual effort and creativity, or on the other hand a mathematic or informatic problem, such as mentioned in Larry Wall's (creator of "Perl" programming language) introduction to his programming language Perl in September, 1993

"...Perl was created for someone like you, by someone like you, with the collaboration of many other someone like you. The Magic of Perl was sewn together, stitch by stitch and swatch by swatch, around the rather peculiar shape of you psyche. If you think pearl is a little bit odd, perhaps that's why.(...)

"Do one thing and do it well" was the rallying cry, and with one stroke, shell programmers were condemned to a life of muttering and counting beads on strings (which in these latter days come to be known as pipelines). This was when I made my small contribution to saving the world. I was rolling some of those very beads around in my fingers one day and pondering the hopelessness (and haplessness) of my existence, when it occurred to me that it might be interesting to melt down some of those mystical beads and see what would happen to their Magic if I made a single, slightly larger bead out of them. So I fired up the old Bunsen burner, picked out some of my favorite beads, and let them melt together however they would. And look! the new Magic was more powerful than the sum of its parts and parcels.

That's odd, thought I. Why should it be, that the Sedulous Bead of Regular Expressions, when bonded together with the Shellacious Bead of Gnostic Interpolation, and the Awkward bead of Simple Data Technology, should produce more Magic, pound for pound, then they do when strung out in strings? I said to myself could it be that the beads can exchange power with each other through that skinny little string? Could the pipeline be holding back the flow of information, much as wine does resist flowing through the neck of Doctor von Neumann's famous bottle?

This demanded (of me) more scrutiny (of it).

So I melted that larger bead together with a few more of my favorite beads, and the same thing happened, only more so. It was practically a combinatorial explosion of potential incantations: the Basic Bead of Output Formats and the Lispery Bead of Dynamic Scooping bonded themselves with the C-rationalized Bead of Operators Galore, and together they put forth a brilliant pulse of power that spread to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. That message cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

I then gathered my courage about me and showed my new magical bead to some of you, and you then began to give me your favorite beads to add in as well. The Magic grew yet more powerful, as yet more synergy was imbued in the silly thing. It was as the Computational Elementals summoned by each bead were cooperating on your behalf to solve your problems for you. Why the sudden peace on earth and good will toward mentality? Perhaps it was because the beads were your favorite beads? Perhaps it was because I'm just a good bead picker? (...)"

I will write tomorrow about this statement more and try to connect it to my own view about computers and the Internet, but have to run now to buy the English version of the Glassbeadgame by Hermann Hesse. This quote could have been a link to another page but I am including this here, although this statement has influenced me already after I created "Hermes' Mistress" and it could be part of my daily reading and research life. The parallel of a bit of information and a bead that I see is mainly in terms of culture. Culture has been manifested in beads and pearls as well as in bits of information, and who denies the fact that a bead is just as well a carrier of cultural information as it is a pearl. The fact that beads and pearls have existed as a trading tool before coins is only one aspect of the pearls' cultural meaning. Let's look at the oyster that develops a pearl because of a disturbance. In a way the pearl is an ulcer, a cancer-like object. It is formed within the shells of certain mollusks to enclose irritating foreign objects. How come it is valued as a gem when lustrous and finely colored. It even describes someone or something precious. In the German dictionary it is also mentioned as the name of a five point fond and as a valid person in the household. Too often we might cast pearls before swines, which I already recognized and used in 1993 and created the piece L'Adieu- Pearls before Gods. In a book by Robert Musil, in the beginning there is a quote of Meaterlink describing the fact once you talk about something it can be as if you dived for pearls and gems but suddenly when you get it to the surface it is just pebbles and stones. So I am trying to get my thoughts together about pearls that also mean for the superstitious people tears. The knowledge about different cultures and different thoughts can be wide and still it is difficult to get the thoughts together, to melt them to one big favorite bead when the possibilities are so complex that you can drown.