Well. I did make a foray into the high desert wilderness near Sycamore Canyon a couple days ago. Not far, however. Too much virtuality has left me stunned. Too much driving especially, that oh-so-virtual reality where, like with digital media, we are insulated by the silicon dioxide / amorphous silica, that of windows rather than IC chips … I figured once, some years ago, that I have spent about 500 24-hour days in a car, traveling about 50 mph, since I arrived in this in-car-nation, so to speak (ohhh, now there’s a pun for you…). But as it is ingrained in my existence, I must say that I do enjoy cruising across/through the western landscape in a vehicle. The unrolling vistas, the feelings of Power, the big road. … Enough of that. I stopped and walked some ways into the VR world, and coming upon a manzanita bush that had been uprooted by a heavy tractor, I cut a branch. Manzanita has always intrigued me, mystified me, to be more precise. For bark, it has only a thin silky-smooth surface of a dark reddish-brown hue. Dead parts of the bush lose their color quickly, or, well, the color becomes dead to the eye and harder to the touch. The surface invites touch. The leaves are small and roundish, silvery on the bottom. Dead branches stick out from live branches and are a gray-silver.
I am back swimming, much to the deLight of my travel-battered body. Spent today stripping ten years of acrylic floor polish off my mother’s kitchen floor. Forty years of TeeVee demands that kitchen floors gleam like the nose-cone of the Enola Gay, reflecting atomic glory and modernity and TeeVee dinner trays. Working with acrylics is always the same. Dries too fast, sticky, hard to get rid of. It takes two or three applications of the stripper to remove the layers. Looks like I will be swamped with this chore tomorrow, although in the afternoon I am supposed to visit with Hope down at Computerlink to see about some web work. I’m getting a bit desperate. Supposed to be cold tonight, in the north of Arizona, -20F with wind chill. That’s cold…
My proposal to the PORT MIT project was accepted by the curators, Remo Campopiano and Robbin Murphy. Now I have to get into gear and do something about it. The project begins at the end of January and runs in to the end of March … Email overwhelms me, especially at the moment when the OTiS/SiTO listserv is going blazes with new things, and with the PORT listserv, I can’t keep up even reading the texts. But a few weeks ago, out of the blue, following a visit to my Web site, Alexandra began writing to me…
As far as writing to you goes — it seemed important to respond to your site for the reasons I mentioned in my first letter. I certainly *wasn’t* flattering you. But you had put something out towards “me,” and it moved me … And to stop just with that — your offering, my receiving of it — seemed somehow incomplete. As a writer who frequently reads in public, I’m often struck by just how abashed my audiences are, how seldom they move past their reticence into response. They seem struck dumb by the common belief that, as Audience, their only job is to receive, passively. But both for their sakes, and — quite selfishly — for mine, I want/need them to respond. Hate it? Love it? Grok with it? I want to know. Like you, I’m interested in real conversation, in an exchange of energy that transcends the patterns of ordinary communication. As Buber wrote, dialogue requires mutual attention and intention. It involves the willingness to be available to the Other; to recognize the common humanity between you. And then, dialogue is a living thing itself, isn’t it. My best friend Jane describes it as an imaginative dance, one in which the mind is free from its need to maintain persona, free of anything but the moment’s opportunity to speak, and to receive. I’m not saying that my silent audiences are locked off. Sometimes silence itself is a form of — one half of — a dialogue. I can feel the difference in a silence like that; it’s permeable, spacious; it speaks back in a language of feeling rather than words. Or, “Come, let us not be animals”… Just to finish what I’d been meaning to say about dialogue: the silence of my audiences, when it’s a dead rather than a living silence, has often made me feel weary and discouraged. Even when the silence is a living one, though, I long for just those few words that might let me know, directly, that I’ve made a moment’s difference in (any one of) their lives. Which response might lead to a little more from me. And then more again from them. Dialogue. And then it might be like that story you offered, the memory of which was touched off, it seems, by the very simple thing I did, which was to offer you thanks, and a bit of my own story. (And again, I did this because of my own experience of non-response, and because while I may, just may, pick up from an audience sitting right in front of me, this online sort of offering seems not only to allow for, but to require some actual feedback. I mean, until I wrote, you couldn’t exactly feel us as members of *your* audience out here silently communing, could you?).