(as I write, a tiny spider drops onto my laptop. There She is, reminding me that it's all very relative. And my mentor Spider Woman points out thus that there are bridges over every abyss.)
Well, of course. The internet is the greatest library ever made. It's changed culture so fast we have hardly had a chance to catch our collective breath. Yet how has it also re-invented communication? Are we so over stimulated, so "busy", that we can no longer tell the difference between real intimacy, conversation, communion - and superficial or just imagined "connections" with others? What about dis-information?
When I put up my first website 25 years ago I had a guest book, and even made a few friends that way. Then the guestbook began filling up with spam. Emails between friends became group emails, things for me to "circulate". I share less and less, and increasingly feel an unarticulated loss. A loss because I realize that people receive hundreds of emails daily, or information that is literally streaming by them at 70 miles an hour on Facebook or Instagram. What I feel is diminished. How can I make myself smaller, faster, more flamboyant, so someone notices me? There is so MUCH. Everyone is so BUSY.
Temporal Density. And I seem to be falling through the crevices of modernity.
Could it be possible there are other people like me, fraying,
unraveling, beginning to say strange things to electronic answering machine
menus that get longer and longer and more labyrinthine........lingering for
meaningful conversations at checkout counters........mumbling Rilke or Lessing
while ordering coffee at Starbucks drive thru......are they quietly wondering
if they really are becoming invisible, and they do these things just to test
the waters?
Not drop-outs so much as drop-thrus. Dwellers in the crevices.
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 burn little oil lamps to read cheap paperback books by
and fall asleep without clocks or cell phones or bras. We would allow each
other our delights, and our melancholies.
Exaltations and Maudlins are welcome as well.
I won't apologize for "creating my own reality" in
ways that leave me sad or discouraged sometimes. If any other aging geek in the
bunch has a rough time of it, I won't promise I can make things better, or even
that I'll always be able to listen. But I won't expect them to apologize
either. I won't send them any emojis, "likes", or photo-shopped memes either, as substitutes for human empathy. And we'll never, ever talk about "money" or our various
bodily complaints, unless it's absolutely necessary.
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.
