We all visited the Winchester Mystery House on Saturday Evening. Sarah Winchester herself returned the favor by visiting us and delivering her words of wisdom for us all. Forget trying to recreate the mood here. Just think dark room with eerie lighting and a dark veil. Think quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Sarah Spoke:

"Good afternoon.

Thank you for visiting my home last night. I never had house guests, or gave parties. But when I heard that you, too, make things which are new, which are strange and beautiful, things which have never been seen before, feeping cubes and technospheres, nooks 'n crannies, self-assembling nano-organelles, creatures and worlds which grow of their own accord, as if they themselves were alive...I thought we might understand one another.

And indeed, I believe we do. Seduced, perhaps, by my invocation of rapture, I believe you understand that my home is my context, my life box, my meme sweet meme, my work-in-progress, my child, my husband, my life story. Many of you told me how you felt spirit moving in my rooms, how you admired my technological innovations, how the house itself seems alive, a fertile substrate, as you might say, for immortality, eternal life.

Was I crazy? Perhaps I was a blind watchmaker, robbed of insight by 38 years of purposeless visions. Or perhaps, climbing the 7-11 staircases of its own Mount Improbable, my home has found its own mysterious niche, changed the code, evolved the very idea of homemaking.

Many of you asked me what drove me to create. Passion? obsession? madness? genius? guilt? grief? love? Ah, sweet mystery of creation. Have you ever been haunted by a voice that says you must make something new? And did the spirit move you to make up the physics, break the rules, change the world -- just because you can?

Like Money who grew his gardens so that he could paint them in every light, I made my home so that I could walk its rooms, ceaselessly, night and day, day and night, forever.

And you? Why do you make worlds swimming and crawling with creatures that meet and mate and die there? Why do you make life? My husband, they say, made death, or made death possible. As a consequence, I unclasp wide the tables of my thoughts and with these same thoughts, I people my little world. And so from death, springs life. Expiation? penance? a clean start in a brave new world? What can we learn about this world as we make our new ones? Are we smart enough, sentient enough, intelligent enough, wise enough to make this world more loving, less fearful, more lovely?

What drives you? Is it your novelty gene which programs you to seed that gene in cyberspace? Is it hunger? fear? libido? Your passionate desire to understand not just the products, but the process of making life -- to see it so as to understand it?

Yes, people may laugh at your failures. They will call them stairs that lead nowhere. But is it not in these failures that you find evidence of real life, human striving, new possibility? What if these stairs lead not nowhere, but rather to a world richer, stranger, more diverse and full of wonder than you would dared have believed possible?

What if you can make a cyberspace not a page, but a place rich in possibilities for contact, communication, community, culture....and what if you can culture that culture to create the elegant simplicity of imaginative space?

Would it not be crazy not to try?

And suppose it is true that just as we are what we think, so these creatures and these worlds will be what we think, feel, need, mean, hope, fear, dream, make them to be. In this surreal time of meme acceleration, what is the story you will tell and show yourselves when all is scripted, rendered, made? Will you breed love or hate, kindness or violence, cyberplants, city plazas, common portals? Will you kill what you have made -- before it kills you?

Will you make it just like the real thing, or just like your dreams? Perhaps God made man in His own image because He could not imagine anything else. I saw windows in the ceiling....but I used atoms to build my rooms. People say I listened to my medium. I say, listen to your medium. For it is not immaterial that the digital world is immaterial, that biota is belief.

May your cathedrals of belief be places where, as in real cathedrals, hearts, minds and spirits soar.

As you slither effectively towards solutions, let complexity not become complication.

Whatever thy hands do, do it with all your might.

May you be often wrong, but never in doubt.

May you reflect the realities of the industrial base, and may you distribute the future skillfully and democratically.

And now -- in defiance of science, may a miracle occur......

As I opened my home to you, in the hope of great and beneficial mutual understanding, may you, if you so desire, open your codes, your creatures, your worlds to one another.

May there be a synergy addiction -- a digital Cambrian explosion of creative passion and expression.

And may you not just evolve, but co-evolve.

May your making and building be social and shared.

May you know and realize digital desire.

As you play in the meadow of memory and meme, may you play God and play Pokemon.

May you make tiny avatars dance on the head of a pin.

And like families of whales, may you make songs that cast a spell on all who see and hear and share and become them.

For, in the words of Cole Porter...

You do something to me,
Something that simply mystifies me.
Tell me, why should it be
You have the pow'r to hypnotize me.
Let me live 'neath your spell.
Do do that voodoo that you do so well....
For you do something to me
That nobody else can do.

Thank you."

--Sarah W.