Complete and unabridged version of interview dated 6/8/** by Ben Cartaphilus, Leinster Chronicle Correspondent.

So often is it that one finds oneself lost on the net it is more than a little wondrous to find an entire community of lay people who have done just the opposite. More wondrous still is the fact that it is all due to the efforts of a single person. Naturally enough the first impulse is to try to find the man responsible, in this case one Noah Carr, and indeed my efforts in this regard have been adequate if not wholly rewarding. Normally when I write up an interview one of the first things I try to get across is a sense of how my subject acts in person. Their expressions, postures, ticks and quirks are vital for giving a sense to the reader of actually being there over my shoulder, of taking in every detail of the interaction and becoming every bit as absorbed by the whole thing as I myself still manage to get. Hence my exacerbation at trying to report the experience of my pseudo-meetings with some of the contributors to the controversial website Elysium.ie and in particular the infuriating elusiveness of it's founder, the afore mentioned Mr Carr.

With no account of my subject beyond a passing familiarity with his opinions as gleaned from the Elysium site I find myself at something of a dead end in terms of what I can report beyond as description of the site and how it may be interpreted as the personal project of a particularly empathetic and fascinating man. As such I am in the difficult position of having little more than the actions of Carr himself, appraised at safe distance, with which to paint a picture of the man and his achievement, if either truly exist at all (and there is some speculation he doesn't).

For those who have yet to see Elysium.ie the site is initially a baffling experience. The opening page is a portal consisting of hundreds of portrait photographs collaged together within a black frame with the words "Welcome to virtual immortality" written in small, unpretentious Times Roman underneath. Beyond this is the home page, which provides a brief statement of purpose for the site along with links to pages on how to join and most importantly how to access the membership vaults and its thousands of entries. It is here in the vaults with their reams of alphabetically listed subscribers that you can spend literally hours scrolling through the names of people that have signed up to make their mark. Not all however are available to view as yet and the differentiation is made by printing in black and red to note memberships that have passed and those "pending" (and hence closed to inspection) respectively.

Unlike most novelty websites there is no sense of anorak-ism here, no slipshod accumulation of information assembled without scepticism or forward thinking. This is a project for posterity and as such every entry appears to have been carefully vetted to avoid becoming a dumping ground for adolescent suicide ideation and promises from the pathological that everyone's days are numbered. The site is presented with a profound sense of humanism and common sense throughout, there are no gimmicks, no hard sell, no flashing advertisements to clog up your browser and although it takes a while for the initial confusion to wear off you cannot but be left with a sense of beauty and humility once you log off, a sense of being privy to something simultaneously private and public: the accumulation of personal knowledge gained through painful life-experience. This type of writing cannot be simulated by any tired hack or bitter bohemian and most of the entries have a naïve imperfection that can only be found in people unused to writing with mimetic intent. Yes this can make reading some of the entries a difficult and at times frustrating affair but Carr seemingly wants it this way, there are no obvious attempts made to smooth over or edit what goes up on the site. In a gentle way the form of each passed-member's entry in terms of prose style is as telling as the content of what they have to add. The site administrators seem to have been given a policy of standing back and letting the members do all the work leaving him as little more than a shadow, a facilitator providing the medium by which pending members can assemble their autobiographies in words and pictures for access by total strangers after their passing.

The idea behind each entry is simple enough and each subscriber (I use the term loosely the service is free to all) has to conform to a simple constriction concerning memory allotment. Anyone wishing to apply to the site fills out a subscription form and must submit a series of photographs showing them at various stages throughout their life. A member may update their entry to allow for new information at any time they wish so long as they do not overshoot the 2mb of space they are allotted by the Elysium server.

The whole thing could so easily collapse into incoherence and vulgarity but somehow Carr and his team of technophiles have managed to weed out the chancers or maybe with so many entries already online and official notification of passing in two or more papers required to activate one's membership maybe people just could not be bothered with the minimal exposure such a hoax would bring. In a strange way it shows that an arcane respect for the dead has crept onto the Internet. Perhaps this vindicates the resilience of Spiritual culture over the smug rationalism of the Internet era, or it just shows that people won't engage in self-aggrandisement if they have to be dead to benefit from it.

With regard to the content of each entry to open but a few reveals a potpourri of stories of ill health, misfortune and mystery to tales of beauty and self-revelation. Most of the autobiographies available to view are complete and retrospective but some are cut short, presumably by sudden death or an inability to continue adding to the site during a terminal illness, such holes in the narratives are not uncommon but the blanks fill in themselves.

Before delving into the archive one would be tempted to let a sense of cynicism creep in to the appraisal of these e-pitaphs and the promise of spiritual transcendence through technology. You could easily roll your eyes as once again the internet lobby play up their own importance as "the future of society" (despite damning economic information to the contrary) but after a few minutes logged on it fails to feel like a website anymore, if anything it is a strange mix of graveyard reverence and family album nostalgia rolled into one. Its only when the realisation that you are engaged in a social discourse with the dead comes to mind that an intense sense of privilege is felt, that something has been added to your life, a sense of meeting people you would like to meet again and again if only the world were not such a capricious and unfair place. The sense of loss is contagious and is validated by the number of dead letters to members left on the website message board by users offering sympathy to remaining loved ones for their loss and consolation in the fact that the deceased continue to touch the lives of complete strangers. As such one's self may become better travelled than one's body even after both have ceased to exist. Herein lies the nature of this new digital immortality: the ability to let one's life story do the work long after the living has ended. This is immortality of a literal and literary sense, in the same way as the great artists have their work to leave behind them now the average person can share their perspectives on a level playing field where everyone has an equal say and an equal share of the available space.

One of the more poignant moments from my own personal use of the site came with an entry for a three-week old child born without any facial features above the mouth. Named Jewel by her parents the entire entry is a hymn to unconditional parental love that would move even the most cynical of journo hacks. Mercifully the child died without pain or suffering but the image of the tiny body hooked up to a ventilator lodges in the mind as an image of beauty, dependence and serenity in a way that can only be found in those that have accepted their fate. These things you cannot articulate but they are felt as intensely as the harshest moment of noise and distress. We know the child has no way of comprehending what is happening but somehow the picture tells us a process of acceptance and accommodation has taken place. You learn it is only in letting go that we can truly fulfil our role in the great plan.

On the other side of the coin are an equal number of stories although ghoulish and at times nasty serve to show us that death, like life, has a sense of humour. My personal favourite in this regard comes from an anonymous donor in memory of a friend named Graeme Hart. Graeme's story centres on his devotion for his girlfriend of some six years - referred to as "Jodie" - who decided that after such a protracted period of monogamy she no longer "burned" (her words) for him. Jodie explained her emotional state and pleaded for Graeme to be more assertive in his dealings with her and with life in general, a lack of passion being blamed for the impasse. For his part Graeme agreed to work it out on his own terms and a week later Jodie left him. Distraught, Graeme decided to cleanse himself from the pain of rejection by burning everything possession he shared with Jodie in what was their back garden. It was an idea he took to with gusto, constructing a massive bonfire some 12ft in height (thanks mostly to a large selection of designer furniture), which he doused liberally with petrol. The fire took instantly, almost as fast as the gust of wind that blew the flames back onto Graeme's body, almost incinerating him instantly. His painless death (the burns destroyed his nerve endings so he felt nothing) came days later, only after he had time to mull over the stupidity of setting a bonfire on a windy day.

The above examples are extreme to the sure but nonetheless they seem to summarise the breadth of tone the site takes. Nothing is taken for granted and every entry, structured as a short biography contains as many moments of wisdom, humour and heartache as the most accomplished of fictional works. So why then has Carr remained so media shy about celebrating his achievement? Intent on finding out the method behind the madness for myself I emailed him from the link on the site to find out (my normal methods of contact having met with a wall of silence it is almost as if Carr is either a recluse or a figment of the collective imagination). I have yet to receive anything from the man by way of reply. Perhaps my correspondence has become lost in the system or maybe Carr refuses to talk with the press. Either way the sense of mystery in intensified by this action. In the meantime the only illumination I can get is to be found in the site's FAQ page (the term is again applied loosely there are no questions as such only brief points explaining what is going on) in which Carr talks in prosaic fashion about his rationale for setting up Elysium. One line in particular is most telling:

"This site is not about me, I like to think of it as a graveyard with open plots, I'm just the caretaker."

To read such a remark from the new enfant libre of cyber lore speaks of his site as a graveyard struck me as more than a little telling. I had expected something of the ghost in the machine philosopher rather than a sober minded cleric. If anything the interpretation of immortality here seems to come from an artistic perspective with people attaining their immortality through the thoughts and feelings of others, keeping their life stories open to inspection in the hope of passing on their hopes, dreams and knowledge, truly a step forward in terms of cultural evolution at a global level. Its as if Jung's ideas of the collective unconscious were finally being articulated by a popular medium.

Even from a purely historical perspective the benefits of such a site have been championed in such diverse publications as "Wired" and "The Irish Journal of Psychology" who have both labelled Elysium.ie an important and valid historical text indicating the shape of people's lives and attitudes across a growing range of cultures. In a second attempt to draw Carr on his rationale for the site I asked him (via email again) if he feared the publicity surrounding the site would outgrow his resources. Again silence from the man himself, but an answer of sorts was again to be found on the FAQ page:

"Of course there will be a ceiling to what we can hold here but there will also be imitators and competition. I can envisage all the major religions using Elysium as a template for similar projects."

As one can expect the investigator in me became fascinated in the apparent nonentity. I know the signals of a disinterested party when it came to interviewing, I know when a person does not want to be spoken to but Carr's actions didn't suggest ignorance or disinterest, rather they were like a trail of breadcrumbs for me to follow. Maybe he wants to test my patience and gauge whether my interest is genuine or fleeting. The goal for me now is how to get Carr's attention so as to lure him into a proper interview, to see the man, to get an idea of his psychology. The lure of such an enigmatic and benign character was practically mythological so I emailed him again (please note this is my third attempt at getting noticed). This time I sent another politely worded request for an interview playing up my "real and significant interest" with the Elysium Project and its importance as a cultural artefact. Once again I was met with the textual equivalent of empty static. Which leads me to join the rest of the bitter hack journo community and their supposition on Carr's identity, if he has one that is.

So here continues the debate over whether Carr exists at all. I'm not the first person to try and arrange an interview with him and on explaining my frustration to some of my colleagues I was consoled with shaken heads and knowing smiles. It seems every publication in the country and beyond has been trying to coax Carr out of hiding or at least find someone who has met him, even briefly. Without pictures, witnesses or family above ground the speculation continues as to whether Carr is a pseudonym of sorts so the innocent can be protected or whether the name is an amalgam for a group of people working as a co-operative. But again all this is idle speculation given credence in the face of a lack of evidence suggesting any thing at all to either confirm or deny such suspicions. At the moment this seems to be the one that got away, for how much longer the charade can be maintained remains to be seen and may well be a make-or-break issue with regard to the site's credibility. That said I'm well used to uncertainty, after al I covered the Extropy exhibition not too long ago and am still none the wiser about it but I'm comfortable with that now, just as I am comfortable with Carr's less than media friendly implied persona. So this is all I have to work with: a series of unanswered emails and backroom conjecture, its hardly the stuff of great journalism I have to admit. The real test for the project we are all waiting to see however is will the good intentions of Noah Carr (if that is his real name) be continued beyond his own passing or the exposure of the machinations behind Elysium.ie itself?

Or perhaps it is the journey and not the destination that is the story here, regardless of the outcome. Perhaps the beautiful lie that has inspired so much is of more significance than any bland truth to be found in the popular press? In the meantime I continue my scroll thousands of names in red and black reading and learning from the safety of my home and office (when no one is looking) about this many-faceted thing called life as I try more and more ways of finding the originator of the site, the talented Mr Carr.

Thus I leave you, Ben Cartaphilus, Journalist, Pendi. Thus I leave you.... pending member 13,044.

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