I've been thinking about connection and disconnection, nearness and distance, a lot lately. Maybe it's just end-of-year-stock-taking, maybe it's part of the aging process, maybe I'm just seeing the world becoming increasingly fragmented in spite-- or maybe because-- of our personal technological and communication devices and the "advances" they provide.
Only Connect is the title of a book about connecting reading and writing, written by a former professor and colleague of mine at UNH, Tom Newkirk, about those connections and about how connection in general is essential to being human. The title is lifted from a passage in E.M. Forster's novel Howards End: "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." I'm always struck, when I quote real and accomplished writers, how ballsy it is for me to throw my little onanistic bits out there; I can't help but suffer by comparison, and yet there it is....
Humans are a social species, as, I guess, what species isn't? But given our constantly shifting and developing ever-more-sophisticated means of communication, isn't it ironic that we actually have less and less personal communication, about less and less essential stuff? It's easy to discover what someone had for breakfast or what they're doing at any given moment, 'cause we tell each other those things way too readily. How much of the real, important, soul-searching-and-connecting stuff gets out there, though? I'm afraid that it's less and less, and maybe because we're so inundated by the trivial that we don't even know what's important anymore. Connection kills the beast and the monk(!), socializes us, and lets us know how alike we really are. Some of you who read this may be stunned that I think this way, but I guess sometimes--or often--perception is reality.
Saw a Louis C.K. special recently on HBO, I think. I don't love some of his stuff, as it's too crassly and gratuitously vulgar for me (shocking, eh? I do have some standards, though), but he can be a pretty brilliant and incisive social commentator. One of his bits concerned an experience he had at his daughter's dance recital; as the performance began, suddenly every parent in the audience held up cell phones to take photos or video of their darlings' every movement. The cameras, of course, were directly in front of the parents' faces; effectively, they were blocking the real, the here-and-now, in order to record the event to be viewed later, maybe--do people really look at that stuff after it's happened, after it's recorded? Or do they just post it to MyFace for friends, relatives and strangers to ignore?-- and in inferior aural and visual quality. As C.K. put it, the resolution's way better in real life. I was thinking of that when I commented on people camping out for days over Thanksgiving in order to stock up for Christmas, choosing the one event over another or, in this case, reality for a technologically reproduced facsimile. The actual is sacrificed for a virtual representation at one remove, at least, from reality. How can that be good?
Another sign of the coming apocalypse, or maybe just another indication of fragmentation and disconnection in society, is the practice of people foregoing land phone lines for cell-only. Now, I get the rationale economically, and it may be a really minor point, but back in the olden days, when you'd call a phone number, there was an air of mystery or uncertainty involved. Who was gonna answer? Were you going to speak with the person you were intent on calling, or with their spouse, or a kid, or babysitter, aunt, uncle, grandmother--who? It was nice sometimes to talk, even briefly, with someone other than the ultimate object of your call. How else would you get to chat with a kid, to learn about what was happening in someone else's life, get different news or info? Now, we call a personal phone, know exactly to whom we'll speak, and that's that. It may be more efficient, but it feels like something's lost in that efficiency, that some sort of societal connection is lost in the name of putatively more efficient personal communication.
It will be interesting to see, if we have time enough left for much further adaptation on this planet, what effect the fractured communication and connection modes we're embarking on will have on us.
The preceding was written on Sunday, and I fully intended to polish it, finish it, publish it, maybe even ish-ish (whatever that means--I just realized there were lots of "ishes" in that lisht) it, and play all of the "connection" and "together" songs I had but, alas, as if to illustrate fragmentation and distance, it ain't gonna be. So, as of Monday: no end-of-year show, no well written, cogent, coherent blog post: just stuff. At any rate, Happy New Year to all, and may we all get what we wish for, and not necessarily what we deserve.... Hope to see you all back here next week, but the future's so hard to predict, innit?
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