Comments eaten by ghosts etc

I'm going to change the blog template soon. I'm also dispensing with haloscan, seen as how it eventually eats all your comments - many ingenious lovely things are gone that I should have saved. Does anyone know whether blogger's own comments also disappear eventually (well, yes, everything does, i know..). So, because I don't know how to pour existing haloscan comments into the new vessel, I'm afraid that extant replies and thoughts will be lost.


Speaking of words being virtually consumed, always been intrigued by this from Kafka:

The easy possibility of letter writing must [..] have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also one's own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. [..] Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can hold. All else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this simply nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it..

When he says ghost, does he mean the spectre of Felice (or whomever) generated by the writing? Is he saying that one never quite writes to an actual person, always partly to an imaginary point, an enabling fantasy? He speaks also of his own ghost. Again, does he mean that the ‘I’ of the letter lives and breathes only in paper and ink? That writing inevitably produces a residue of fiction, a second 'I' who accrues between the sentences and who does not survive the transition back to everyday life?

Walter benjamin remarks somewhere that someone's letters (say his to Adorno), laid end to end, have their own rhythm, their own story, parallel to but distinct from the rhythms of the life. They join hands with each other over the author's head. They seem to exist in a parallel time, or even to be the lines traced by a parallel self, a 'ghost' even - a ghost of the possible.

ps wonder who this mysterious individual is (sitemeter):

Domain Name (Unknown)
IP Address 71.214.85.# (Unknown Organization)
71.214.85.6
ISP Unknown ISP
Location Continent : Unknown
Country : Unknown Country
Lat/Long : unknown