Dear Kellie, I try not to over think the facebook. But it is curious. You know me. Give me a blank space and I will write on it like a beaver building a damned dam. Anyway to make the flow of words pool for a bit... But your post got me thinking about mourning, of course, and what we have all lost as we abandoned the rituals the Victorians couldnt get enough of. Mourning cards! Black arm bands! Widows weeds! Crepe, lots and lots of crepe. The modern funeral home/parlor tries so hard to replicate all that calling space but I found that space truly depressing, a dead dead living room with decor not even trying for the gothic or the Victorian anymore but now, even without trying, more often than not a Holiday Inn lobby. Sigh. I think you are on to something that the facebook feed is a kind of wake even when the apparent subject matter is not death but kittens or food about to be eaten. It is the documentation of the constantly dying off, the illusion and illustration of the eternal present, a slow motion presentness. I think (today) that I like to think that this is the scrapbook, the electronic memento mori but it is not really. A locket that we think we will open but we never really get back to it. No, for me its this elaborate ruin we think we are restoring but can only restore to a previous state of ruin. Like the Parthenon in Greece--always being restored meticulously not to the building of the Golden Age but to the moment after it blew up. The facebook is an architectural folly, a construction with its only purpose being its construction. Not shelter, not theater, not cathedral, not garage, not bar, not yurt. A folly. I am missing you mightily and hope you are doing better. I will just put that out there here. In my Authorship class I had writers think of the construction of authorship being like the carapace of the caddis fly larvae, not shell but detritus adhered to a soft and vulnerable worm beneath. Here is a nice grain of sand. Here a frond, a shard of shell. Anything in the storm. So, here, this little scrap for the rubble always all around us and always on our backs.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 21:31:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015