I was finally invited to an event at The Farm.
I went without a pen, notepaper, or business cards. What was I thinking? Conversations morphed one into another I tell you the truth I love the smartness of my friends I wish I could bottle hold embrace inject their mindfulness through my skin to the bloodstream zapping consciousness with energy and acting out through my words thoughts actions to change heal cohere a movement to . . .
Sigh. But who can fight all the time? Comfortable denial is appealing - I mean, come on - we have so much fun together! It's gotta be balanced - I agree that the crazed pace of activist fronts perpetuate the very systems they mean to change, palliative bandaids on open wounds. From the porch we admired lightening arcing across the sky, calling to mind photographs captured by technical artists. Do you notice how often, now, conversation turns to natural disasters? These are not the idle conversations of yore about the weather....last semester a student (surfing the net, ahem, during class time) was compelled to announce, "There was just a huge earthquake in China!" Friends in Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas have thunderstorms and twisters constantly on mind, coping with floods and power outages. This is it, people! The beginning of the everyday evidence.
My plan to let blogging go was not to be. I scrounged a pen and scribbled notes throughout the evening. They are incomplete, scattered. As ever too many brilliant comments deserve notice and most have already slipped away (Laura!) - the effervescent quality of liveness when the energy of language binds us each to another in shared moments of experience. I asked former blog victims to warn the new ones. The Belgian Generals vanished instantly, but not after a stimulating conversation about solid helium and the problems of superconductors in which I tried to explain what I've been learning about the language of math, and was told a physics insider's joke: "What's a particle? An equation."
Matt expressed mild interest. To whom and how do we invest the time to email, text, and/or call? So much communication is possible to us now - do these methods add quality or merely aggregate? What mode or type of sensory perception connects us to people - with or without talking? I value these text-based communiques so much - my most special people are, or soon will be, thousands of miles away. "Bogota, baby, Bogota!"
Confusion percolated through the danceable: minimalist reggae with some kind of elements of hip hop, dubstep, two step, grime and for one specific Muslim Gauze. AfroBeat inspired dancing ensued, a combination of aggression and ecstasy ~ how indeed do we turn what Butler discretely (once and only once) labels "the male problem" into constructive displays and nonviolent discharges? The Big Picture tips the normal (traditional, customary) mode of news from quantities of text with tiny pictures to huge photographs and minimal text; revolutionary lyrics tickle the edges of consciousness obscured by the sounds of rhythm and kinetics of motion... I talk with friends about relationships past, present, imagined my own included what have I learned from regret? The key lesson articulates itself for the first time: "Feel the emotion the first time!" Because if you don't, that precise emotion will come up again later and it will be wrong, misplaced - a here-and-now interaction wrenched/distorted by the there-and-then possibly even another person replacing the one in front of you. (Perhaps, ohmaybebaby I've cleaned the slate dispensed with the backlog caught myself up to the present giving more/better chances to present/future dances.) [Note: someone may not wear a purple dress to any more weddings!]
How many directions do we look? What does our collective gaze encompass? What sense do we make of what we see? Comments about a now contacted tribe in Brazil disturb: sarcasm our only antidote? The alternative is politics. Sure, hope fleets by, ungraspable never to be contained but is this not also the essential quality of life?
