Last night when I read the treatise on the hate of email delivered in the "intellectual situation" of the new issue 5 of n+1, I felt very bad. I decided to limit my emailing, but I also thought of the above statement by Hakim Bey in Moorish Mail-Order Mysticism. I am not chained to the office, but I am chained to communication. Babble. But is it so bad? Efficiency has been ruined by cell phones and email and constant communication creates an excuse not to ever really do anything, just to talk about it. The author (I cannot say with certainty who) complained that we are desensitized, unobservant and rude. Yes, yes, and yes. But could we Please say that something is being talked about that needs to interrupt meals and be paraded in confined spaces? With ample communication, we are able to find out more faster, to apologize for tardiness, reschedule; it does make getting to know people easier and more internationally possible. Are we supposed to know what someone ate for breakfast in the Honduras? No, but we do and it's interesting. I may have ADD but uh, I am so thoroughly immersed in the culture of multi communication o rama that all I can do is apologize in a text message to everyone that just read my hemming and hawing.
Anyway, onto Mail-Order Mysticism, I agree that communication is magical. Information is passed and with email it is terribly mysterious. There are no rules for it and despite all the spam and chain mail and poorly written letters, when someone says something nice or in just the right way, email can make me react in not computered ways. Writers are my favorite people because they have worked so hard to communicate using what we have been giving. And I love recycling. But they can be a depressing bunch.
I was trying to find some old emails today that were important media specific emails. And so here is a really good email from times past, and I had not met the person who wrote it before it came:
Miss Thornton,
Puzzles are like fish. And I am a sportsman with a hybrid SUV. I want
to outwit the fish but I don't want to kill him. So upon catching the fish
I hold him, marveling for a suffocating moment, then release him back into
the stream. I shake up his box and store him between Monopoly and Trouble.
I have a friend who's grandfather was an artist and he owned a very old
and very large house in the Hamptons which he filled with mildewing
textiles. Then he died. And the rugs and blankets and pillows and hand
towels continued to mildew and fifty years of architectural magazines
continued to brown and the house became the sort of place where teenagers
congregate unsupervised during the Summer to wear bikinis and eat popsicles
and get disemboweled by madmen. In short, the house is terrifying. But
also quite lovely. It's the unspoken Hamptons. No one wears white linen
pants with white linen shirts and brown coarse chest hair. It's cheap beer,
scrambled eggs and unadorned crackers. And popsicles.
Projects. I'm always tripping over projects. I have frames full of
thousands of crayons, pigeon feathers, glue bottles, assassinated
presidential memorabilia, pencil shavings, cigar boxes full of dominoes,
bird cages, mirrors, wallpaper samples, shreds of graph paper, gum wrappers
and a thousand mutilated magazines. And paperbacks. I'm convinced a young
man could forgo the expense of higher education and learn everything he ever
wanted to know from paperbacks purchased or found on the streets of New
York.
Well Miss Thornton, I'm going to go toast something.
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