It's Me, I Swear.

I’m writing these words to you. When you read them and hear my voice, whether you know me or not, you learn something of my mind. You know a bit (but not everything) of what makes me tick. When I write I shake up my failings, my joys, my tendency to drift off into the Otherwhere. I’m not trying to sell you anything. You either twig to my choice of words, my syntax, all these commas, and yes, the dreaded em dash everyone is avoiding now – all part of my unique code – or you don’t, and you turn the invisible page with a flick of your pointer finger. This is the new book, the phone that we carry everywhere to have access to all information, false and real, and to document our lives. To prove. 

I’ve been trying to use my phone as a phone. Why do we call this object with no discernable receiver or snug earpiece, or long coil of connection to twist around our fingers, a “phone?” I crave a proper word for it. Yesterday as I chatted with a friend on my “cell” (who uses that term anymore?) I experienced that phenomenon where for a moment you can hear an intrusive echo of your own voice. Everything I said was parroted back with a three second delay. My head was so crowded by my echo I couldn’t think to continue the conversation. We paused until whatever caused it passed, and I could speak again without me talking twice. 

Maybe phonecho is the right word for it. It is an auditory, hallucinatory, visual canyon we shout into, our words bouncing off each other. Whoever shouts loudest gets their message across.

I can’t write or read on my phonecho. I’m in awe of people who do.  I write best by hand, or on my computer. I comprehend what is read from the pages of a book, and I sluice what is read from a screen. 

I also dream a lot, offline, and remember many of them. These dreams are not on my phone, or yours, or anywhere, really. Are they in my blood, soft tissue, nerves, pons? They are the rucksack of images I have processed throughout my days, hauled out and handed back and forth between the here and there. 

Last night in my dreams I had a winter glove on my left hand, and in the palm was a strip of masking tape, and on that tape were some handwritten numbers. The numbers changed like a padlock code. I understood that I had to press the center of my palm when the sequence was correct. I had to unlock the code to be able to communicate. No matter what sequence I chose, I was never successful because the code was constantly changing, its language bending toward AI sameness. 

Clipped numbness. 

False humilities. 

Whispered truths.

I made that last bit sound like AI, but was me, really. Trust me. I mean it. These are my words that I am writing to you, words I’m not sure I can prove.

Po Chü-i

The older I get the more I need to read poems by very ancient, and quite dead poets of earlier centuries. Po Chü-i is a Chinese poet who lived from 772-846.

There's great comfort of reading the thoughts of another person, from a great distance in time, and how they connect now. Being human hasn't changed. In this poem about the dreaming and waking world, Po Chu-i reflects on how those two worlds  are both entwined and separate, and how the dream spaces allow him to move as he ages. Po Chü-i  had a long and successful career both as a government official and as a poet, and these two careers seem to have come in conflict with each other at certain points in his life, which is interesting to think about as well as I read this poem.


A Dream of Mountaineering

At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed a mountain,
Going out alone with my staff of holly-wood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys --
In my dream journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as stong as in my young days.
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be, as between body and soul,
That the body may languish, which the soul is still strong?
Soul and body -- both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking -- both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and night are divided in equal parts --
Between the two, I get as much as I lose.

Translated form the Chinese by Arthur Waley