We all now about them. We get them in huge numbers every day. In the beginning many years ago I welcomed them. It was like writing letters again. I was glad to have been locked into that silent intimacy again away from telephone calls during the day.
Very quickly I realised that you have to be careful what you write. You have to think carefully about the words you speak when they are so fast to post. All the time you used to have on the way to the red mail box made you thionk about a lot of things. I guess that all the years in the phone I forgot about thinking about the cause you can make. The whole idea of posting your letter as soon as possible and to respond just after reading what you recieve might be all wrong. Now here are so much noise in my box.
At some point I thought that I could use the e-mail for performative actions. That was after I already had contributed to increase the amount of e-mails in space. I was already fighting for getting attention. We all have our projects to carry out. I knew that I would never be able to compete in numbers so I tried to write e-mails that were supposed to be different and thereby get attention. At first they were just advertisements for cultural events. I tried to write e-mails that were tempting and appealing. They aimed to ressemble the event they were announcing or be events themselves. It became an obsession. Later on I realised that I had become dependent on such writing.
The interesting thing about hosting a mailinglist or a mailservice is that you suddenly have become something. You are no longer just a person. I did not think about before the recipients of the mailservice began to address me in plural. It surprised me because I thought I was only myself.
In Africa everybody knew I was a person, though they were sure who I was. This is provoking when we speak about sex. We want to know who was having sex with a multiple number of black women. Do we have to be provoked? Was it this just simulation? We like ficion and find documentary usefull, but everything in between make us feel uncomfortable. I tried to use my experiences from announcing events in Copenhagen when I came to Africa. I did what many people do, when they are away from home. We write letters to our friends and familly back home. So I did it too. I just choose to expand my family a little bit. The peculiar thing about hosting a mailinglist is that you tend to forget who you are writing to. You have a blur impression about a number of people, but their personalities mix and evaporate. It gave me a freedom to write but it is not good to have unlimited freedom, when you write. Once in while I received reactions, and I am very thankful for them, because apart from being thought provoking they also framed the space I was writing in. I became aware to whom I was actually writing to. I was always very surpriced to receive that particular reaction from that specific person. Sometimes I would get comments from one of my best friends, but other times I recieved an e-mail from somebody I had not heard from in many years. I was very excited about these reactions, because we want dialogue. The type of e-mails I wrote were not open to interaction. It was difficult to find a way to speak to me. There are limits to e-mails – surpise. I understand why my type of e-mails have limitations, but maybe e-mails as such are also difficult as a tool for dialogue. If an e-mail is directed only to you, then you will feel obliged to respond, but otherwise you will just take it into account and continue with your other business. To be obliged is not a very good motivation. I never expected any response to these e-mails, but I just had the urge to communicate what was going on. We all have imagination, but some of us has it to an extend so it needs a form of expression. Mine was the semi-fictional mailinglist named Paradise Lust. The name it self was not so important, but when I came up with the name it was crucial. Lust was obvious. I had been reading many book about lust until the point of no return. The end of virginity after 120 days. I don’t know about paradise. Milton’s book Paradise Lost plays an important beginning. There was a lady seducing me with her interpretation of the devil outside the gate to paradise. She is one of people who learnt me how to think.
Paradise Lust has died and I miss it – I don’t know yet, if I have a substitute that can satisfy me.
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