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"There's a Crack in everything: that's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen |
My previous Post has had me thinking, again, of an annoying disillusionment I sometimes feel with the New World that the Internet has brought. From this Saturnine point of view, I find myself taking a rather dark look sometimes at the Information Highway. Are we always better off, now that we can "connect" so quickly? Or has all that access, paradoxically, resulted, sometimes, in isolation?
If that's so, maybe we can find each other, start a secret society. We'll become people who have fallen outside of the loop. Loopy people.
Who knows, maybe it smells kind of like the ocean there. Salty. Maybe there are old wooden tables to sit at, where you can watch the moon rise. We'll have a drink and some of those long, long soul satisfying conversations that went out with the '90's and the invention of laptops and cellphones. Conversations with pauses, hand gestures, that go nowhere and everywhere.
Our membership will include people who were geeks or misfits, but they reinvented ourselves to become something else, and are now regressing back to our earlier geek template because we're in various stages of aging, breakdown, confusion, exhaustion, overweight, or just waiting for rebirth while still inhabiting a body - all ages, sexes, races and economic backgrounds welcome.
We can have comfortable campouts (in places like the Berkshires in July, when there are fireflies, and with hot showers and barbeques).......or go to Sumatra economy class and stay in a home stay for $3.50 a night, and drink rice wine and bat at mosquitoes and talk about art, or crumbling temples, or Hindu mythology, or lost loves, or spiritual ecology, or petroglyphs, and live in ways that are frugal.
We will talk at length.
Leisurely, encircled conversations that wind and spiral around
themselves, with memories that are really stories with no beginning, and no
particular end, and all the lovelier for a little embellishment.
We might, however, remember people we've loved, loved in all
of its forms and fashions, agape, eros, hot or cool, and how privileged we were
to have loved them, more so, if they loved us back in some way, for whatever
moment or place or time. We might contemplate the real value of things, sweet
things, hard things, natural things, vivid things, sad things, but all valuable
things because they opened our hearts, and made us not only feel alive, but
be alive. We might talk about
loss too, and death, and grief, and learning eventually to live with loss, and to deepen
from the hard gift of grief. Yes, that
too.
The threads in the tapestry that you notice, that stand out in
the warp.
We might write poems.
Poems that come up in the middle of the night and insist on being scribbled
onto a napkin. Poems that no one else
will ever hear, and it doesn't matter.
If we're feeling risqué, we might talk about Dionysus and the mysterious
Eros of nature. We might remember more
personal examples worth sharing. We
might talk about books. We might talk about Georgia O'Keefe and Stieglitz and that
woman who wrote The Solace of Open Spaces. We might talk about jazz; we might
listen to jazz.
We might ask what god a Balinese Gamelan is speaking about, or
is it a river, or is the god or the river, or both, speaking through the
musicians?
We might come up with reasons why Beethoven wrote the
"Ode to Joy", even when he was a joyless and bitter old man. We might toast to Beethoven for what he gave
the world, and then toast to every beach and river and forest we had the privilege
and pleasure of walking in and talking to.
We might. There would be time.
