Before I proceed to ramble too far, I'd like to give a shout out to the Letter Writer's Alliance. It's nice to see people promoting letter writing. I've put a membership to the alliance on my Christmas list, so I haven't actually shelled out money to them. I have, however, been writing more letters. I've probably been averaging about four letters a week. It's a real joy, with the laptop turned off and relegated to a shelf, to sit down at the table with a small fire burning in the wood stove, and to write with a pen on a piece of paper, or to pull out the old Olympia manual, or the even older Royal.
There's two branches this ramble takes at this point, and unlike Robert Frost, I am able to take them both.
Road One: In some ways, the Letter Writer's Alliance represents some things I don't like about the internet, (while at the same time, representing the best the internet can offer). I like the idea. I would like to join. Then I could be a member! Those little LWA pencils are pretty cool. There's other stuff on their site I would like to buy. I don't check my Twitter Feed often anymore, but when I do, I look for the LWA postings. So here we have something that's a pretty good idea, but it's taking up far more mental energy than I need to devote to it. Now, with me, and my personal inclinations toward the internet, if you take that example of a flourishing of interest in just one topic, and multiply it by 100, you get a pretty good idea of why it's better for me to keep the computer turned off. A certain amount of the world wide web adds greatly to my life by connecting me to -- or even just alerting me to -- like minded people. Just a couple of clicks further, and the whole internet phenomenon is carving great bloody chunks out of my lifetime, and I'm barely noticing. It only shows up in the contradiction of my claiming that I don't have enough time to read anymore yet I'm spending hours a day following the winding paths that branch off from every Twitter post that pops up on my desktop.
Road Two: I'm deeply troubled by one question. Is my exercise in writing letters, (and my love of typewriters, film cameras, and wind-up alarm clocks) primarily an expression of nostalgia, or does it have some legitimate symbolic meaning beyond its being merely something that I enjoy? The full scope of this question is beyond a blog post, but here are a few observations. One ideological reason I like to write letters is that I am, in some sense, self-sufficient. Sure, I rely on the postal service, but letters could always be delivered any number of ways. If all the internal combustion engines were to seize up, the postal service could go down to the bike store, sling the mail bags over there backs, and be off to deliver the mail. Even in the absence of the postal service, you could address a letter and find someone heading toward the city your letter needed to arrive in. Writing the letter takes the simplest of tools -- a piece of paper of some kind, and a writing implement of some kind. You don't even really need an envelope. Fold the paper, seal it, address it, and you're good to go. I intuitively feel there is some sort of value there, some sort of strength, similar to that I feel I have when I choose a simple, elegant means to travel rather than a complicated, ugly, polluting way to travel. Email is irrevocably tied to electricity, produced sustainably or not. It's tied to a very complicated and precise system of servers, software and infrastructure. It feels to me that some freedom there's been lost.
Also, it cannot be stressed too greatly what a relief it is to put a letter in a mailbox. Once it's there, it's out of mind for a while. There's no reason to go back to your mailbox ten more times on the very day you sent the letter. You can move on to something else. I have a strong suspicion that business was much more efficient in the pre-email days for that very reason.
Right now, the rest of what I have to say makes me sound to my own ears like even more of a crank than I really am. There's something ineffable that bothers me about dependance on electricity. Maybe it's because I spent so much of my twenties living in alternative situations that didn't involve electricity, (my school bus, a friend's cabin, etc.). I can't say that I see the utilities as big monsters or poster children of corporate greed, but I'm suspicious of the way more and more electronic devices creep into our lives. They require that we consume more and more power, and that power does not come from ourselves, and it does not strengthen us to use it. Electronics seem to cut us off from our bodies and from our immediate environment, even to the absurd situation of folks walking down the street staring at their smart phones. ("People don't really do that," I say to myself. Then I see someone doing it. "Yes they do.") It seems like some subtle sort of poisoning that we're all falling victim to, and it also reminds me of the Island of the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey -- the passage about which I here lift from the Wikipedia:
They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-Eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars." (translated by Samuel Butler)
It's not that the internet, (and TV, radio, smart phones, etc.), is in itself bad, but it lulls us away from more fundamental parts of our lives, from home.
So I'm living with less involvement with the world of electronics right now, and that is why you have heard so little from me. Perhaps to be unconnected these days is to go unheard, but being heard, after all, is not really the point of life. It just seems to be the point of social media.
I'm rereading some old favorite books, working my way through some of Jung's work, writing letters, cooking food and riding my bike. Slowly, I've stopped thinking, "this is so great, I should write about it on Facebook! There's a hawk! I can't wait to Tweet about it." And so on and on and on. I'm not viewing my life as a narrator right now. I'm living it.
And, as always, I get up in the morning and wind my alarm clock.
4 comments:
Funny you should mention electricity... I just purchased a manual coffee bean grinder just in case. bethers
Here's my take on it. I like bikes and wind up alarm clocks because I (with no mechanical training) can understand them. I know and understand how they work, and to some extent can make small repairs or see how simply they could be repaired. Cars are very stressful because they either work or they don't, and when they don't it is out of my control to fix them.
If your power goes out, but you have in place a wood stove, oil lamps, etc. you still feel like you have some control and aren't dependent on the whims of the electric company.
Letters....well they are just so much more personal. I think there is a place for electronic communication and a place for letter writing.
Lynne in MD
I have been thinking about disconnecting for a while too and have been successful in some respects. I never used a typewriter or a film camera, so most of my disconnection is achieved by staying away from the TV and Laptop. Then again, I am not a writer, so in my disconnected time, I read, listen to music, go walking, or simply sit in silence. I also quit using any alarm clock and wake up when I am done sleeping or when my dog decides it is time to feed her. The effect is very liberating.
Firstly, I am not connected to my twitter feed like you seem to be...and therefore, I have no intelligent comment on managing it. I am more tied to my RSS feeds on Google Reader (google keeps trying to ruin my reading experience), articles on Instapaper and books. Lately, I have a half dozen paper books in my queue. I do have an e-ink based reader by Sony and I use it on ocassion.
Email to me is fairly simple. I am required to deal with it at my work place. I understand the complex structure that supports it (server side etc). I add a few more layers of complexity to it to make personal email more convineant, less intrusive, and the managing of email more elegant. I only need to check my personal email inbox once a day unless someone important (family and a handful of friends) emails me. Then, I get a text message via a complex process of first converting those emails to rss feeds, generating a twitter feed from this rss feed and have a secret twitter account tweet it out (only I have access to those tweets). The end result is a complete abandon of checking any email for days on end without the urge for missing out on something important.
I think technology provides a solution to the important question of wide-spread distribution. Since you are a writer, how do you distribute your work? How do you plan to reach more people? Do you even care to reach more people (if you didn't, then you would not be concerned with twitter etc)? I agree that it is important to write well first.
It has been a long time since I have written a letter to anyone. I have most of my (RSS unsavy) family receive an email when I publish a blog post (they are subscribed to my feedburner email list). My blog post has to fight with all other emails in their inbox. The family members wanting to read what I have to say always respond back. The cousins who are more active on facebook get to read my blog posts via RSS Graffiti. I guess the point I am trying to make is that it is important to write well. It is also important to focus well to write well. As long as you have a good product and have managed to reach the people you wanted to, the medium or venue should not matter.
When you stay unconnected, you do go unheard. Being heard is not the point of life as you rightly said. Making an impact, however, is the reason behind being heard. So, when you go unheard, you kill the chance people like me to explore a point of view from which we can positively gain.
Yahoo just did a feature on a young man who gave up cell phone, e-mail, and social media for 90 days.
http://news.yahoo.com/90-days-without-cell-phone-email-social-media-015300257.html
And by the way, it's not that easy to find a manual wind-up clock these days. Bethers
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