Hint as to a destination
A domain where our cyber-souls might meet
I read the blog of a woman here in Madison on a fairly regular basis. Earlier this year, she had an abortion and found herself in a downward spiral. It was a real shame as she is very intelligent, fun-loving, beautiful, and has a good heart. I have never met her and don't maintain regular email contact with her or anything, but it still depressed me to read about her predicament. Take for instance:
"i still see babies and preg women on tv and i cry at them, at episodes of ER, of episodes of anything really"
"the bathtub vision of me and warm red water seems better every day skin is so soft and vulnerable"
Now, I grant you that people who write do take liberties and also indulge themselves with literary devices such as hyperbole, but I still find such things irksome.
She has friends and family that read her blog which must make things a bit more difficult. Ya know, there are times when I rue having let certain people know of this place. There are certain things that, however tempted I may be, I dare not publish here. I had another online ditty a couple years back which no friends nor family knew of. It was rather a lot of fun to be able to write with impunity. I mean, I put some stuff in there that I've only told 1 or 2 friends and other things I've never confided in anyone I know. Plus I was able to put anything in there no matter how poorly written it was. Some oddball writing techniques, poetry, my puerile attempts at erotica - whatever struck my fancy.
One really neat thing about that journal was the comments of readers. Since we didn't know one another from Adam, our dialogues were very open and honest. Now, they could have been lying, of course, but I suspect not. People are very willing to reveal some of their most intimate secrets to total strangers under the veil of anonymity. I have some very revealing emails stored away. It seems a shame that we are often times incapable of removing our masks with those we trust. You know, to speak in confidential terms and share a dark, unspoken fear. You'd think we'd be able to stop the performance for a while.
From one reader:
"Last Christmas I attended a bonfire at my mother's house (she's crazy). It's a long story, but I was taking the loss of my marriage badly and she thought it would be therapeutic. The idea was to write down your pain and toss the shards of paper into the fire - confront the demons and burn them alive My mother and sisters watched as I tossed my pain into the fire - only I don't think they knew what to do when I stripped off my clothes in the 20 degree weather and tossed my underwear into the flames.
I guess I got caught up in the symbolism and wanted to be free of everything he'd touched. I think if I could have shed my skin, I would have. I'm better now, but I thought you knew me, knew my story when you left the note, 'I've heard about you and bonfires'. All of the sudden you became very dangerous - someone that could know too much about my real life. I know, I'm a freak, but a very private freak."
From another woman:
"You want to know what I fantasize about? By the way, sexually I'm usually fairly white bread, but my fantasies are decidedly wicked. I guess we are all that way. *wink*
Anyway, when I'm alone, and I feel the need for release, I fall into many different fantasies. My imagination is extensive (not always a good thing :). The one that never fails goes something like this:
Note: In real life I am decidedly hetero, but somewhat bi-curious. (i.e. have never acted on it and most likely never would)
In my fantasy I am with a man and another woman. The man is an artist and loves visual stimulation as much as physical arousal. The woman is present as a helper of sorts. The man begins by tying my entire body in a spider web of intricately arranged knots. The effect is that my breasts are bare, but framed by rope which criss-crosses my shoulders in front and back and weaves patterns across my smooth, flat stomach. The patterns continue around my buttocks and between my legs so that my pussy is bound by silken twine on either side - leaving my core bare and exposed. My wrists are tied together and secured above my head by a larger rope that can be raised or lowered so that I may either kneel or stand.
While the man decorates me, the woman caresses my body with her hand and mouth lavishing attention on my breasts, buttocks and pussy. When he is satisfied with his artwork, he lowers me to my knees..."
I think you get the picture.
All of the people who wrote to me were women. It amazed and saddened me that several of them were in really bad relationships of whatever ilk and it seemed like they were reaching out through the aether for someone to listen. So they didn't feel like they were just a voice in the crowd.
"When I explain things, it is probably going to sound a little crazy. I know there is obviously a problem with myself, a problem with my marriage that I would get myself in this situation, that things would get to this point. I am very aware of things. I know it's not healthy but as much as I know this, I cannot control what I feel. That's one of my major problems...my feelings always control me."
JoAnna, a woman in a bad marriage, wrote this to me:
"Hi there~ I just wanted to let you know that I enjoy your entries...it is an escape..."
She and I had very interesting email conversations. Even in her most upbeat emails, there was always something to betray all that had come before, something that revealed her intense loneliness and the sense that she felt trapped in her life.
"I am sitting in my empty house and thought that while I am all alone I would write you a note...I am imagining what you look like. It turns me on, not knowing. I like the way you write to me. I find your stories very arousing and some times I have to step into my room and lie upon my satin sheets and 'relieve' myself. As a matter of fact I can feel myself about ready to go to my room. I want you to write to me, and tell me what you imagine, your fantasies. Tell me that I turn you on and just what you would do to me if you could. Make me want you. Make me imagine what you can do...I'll give you all the details about what you are doing to me. Oh God, how I am longing for some touch, not necessarily physical, but emotional. Can you make me feel special?" (Emphasis mine.)
"I just wanted you to know that I truly appreciate your kind words in your entry. Talk about tingles. It is so nice to hear those things. It is something that I have needed for quite some time."
"I look forward to your e-mails, and reading your diary. I love the way you talk to me, as if I were the only woman in the world. I seriously felt as if I were going to cry..."
It was nice to be able to bring a smile to her face, to make her feel "special", even if my powers were ephemeral. It was rewarding to be able to bring a modicum of cheer to someone who seemed to have an otherwise fairly gloomy life. And it was fun to write erotic stories about a woman that I had never seen. An exercise for the imagination. But this woman obviously had problems that some schmoe sitting in front of a keyboard hundreds of miles away was powerless to cure.
What does this say about people? I mean, what did housewives trapped in bad marriages do before the advent of the Internet? Take little yellow pills and just lead that life of quiet desperation?
A girl (she was 16, if memory serves) wrote this to me in an email:
"as for the honesty in email, isn't it queer how easy it's become to open up to strangers?!"
So much said about the Internet is negative: pornography is luring men away from women, behind every chat room door lurks a stalker, most email is spam, and everyone out there is seeking only to relieve you of your money. All of the utopian rhetoric has fallen by the wayside and we're left trying to figure out how to assimilate the technology so it can co-exist with all the foibles and failings we've always had and can't get rid of no matter how hard we may try. As I discussed in a previous entry, the Internet is too new to really to set many sociological impacts in stone. We can do so with the Industrial Revolution because it ended well over 100 years ago. But the Internet has only been a major force for less than 10. Aside from stalkers, spammers, and the salacious, surely millions of people put the Net to good use. Emailing kith & kin, chatting with loved ones on the other side of the globe, shopping, paying bills, et al. But let's return to the question posed above. Are people so dislocated, so estranged from the real people in their lives that they are compelled to make "confessions" to a total stranger via the anonymity of the Internet?
I think that being anonymous is the key. There are plenty of reasons to wear one's heart on one's virtual sleeve. For instance, telling a flesh & bones person a secret opens you up to opprobrium. It does as well on the virtual side of things but this can be remedied by closing a window or putting someone on a chat program's ignore list. You don't have to suffer scornful glances on the Internet and, generally, word does not leak out to everyone else in your neighborhood. Secrets are usually no fun to keep and the swellings of the heart need to be relieved. So confessing to a stranger across the aether can be a relief - a relief without repercussions. You can say what needs to be said while saving face, in essence.
While it's not fair to say that this phonomenon is wide-spread based on a dozen or so people from my experience, I surely can't be the only one to see this happening. I'm no sociologist but I wonder if we are interacting with our fellow human beings face-to-face less and in less intimate ways. By this I don't mean to suggest, like Naomi Wolf, that men prefer porn to real women, but rather do people go online to meet "friends" instead of social gatherings in their communities? Is there a general way in which friendships are declining? About 400 years ago, Francis Bacon wrote, "A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce." Are we discharging the swellings of our hearts electronically more often that when looking a friend in the eyes? Lots of questions without answers.
Being optimistic on the odd occasion, I don't believe that we've lost touch with the people in our lives. I do think, however, that, as our lives become more hectic, we lose some patience and, in general, become less willing to just listen. Perhaps, in a certain sense, we have come to expect everything from the news to entertainment to the deepest feelings of those in our hearts to come packaged in short, pithy sound bytes. And I think this is the primary reason those people (women all of them) opened up to me as they did. My blog entries were open, honest, as well as lengthy (and, often times, meandering like this one). And when they wrote to me, I wrote back and answered their questions in addition to asking questions of them - and I "listened" instead of spuriously passing judgement. Here's an excerpt from a chat I had with a woman who told me about a boyfriend she had had who beat her:
Her: I dont talk about this enough, I am very ashamed
Her: I have flashbacks
Me: Don't feel ashamed!
Her: after he beat me I did not leave him right away
Me: How long did it take you to leave him?
Her: 3 months
Her: I was beat a lot in that 3 months
Her: I called the abuse hotline once - useless
Me: why did you stay with him? did u think he'd change?
Her: its like I was in a trance or something - SO much fear
Her: I felt like I could not live without him
Her: a common thing with abused women apparantly, it builds slowly
Her: it was absolute agony - like an addiction
Me: Why didn't you report this guy to the police?
Her: too scared - get this - the truth is - I DID NOT WANT TO LOSE HIM
Me: Emotions are such wonderful things but can be so fucking weird sometimes.
Her: thank you for not telling me to 'get over it' or saying 'what the hell is wrong with you'
Her: very rare - you are cool
I don't mean to come across as Joey Blow-My-Own-Horn here but I think this dialogue really says something. People want others to listen to what they have to say, to share themselves, and to know that they are not alone in how they feel. If this takes an interlocutor hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away, so be it. Francis Bacon began his essay On Friendship thusly: "IT HAD been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words, than in that speech, Whatsoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god." Setting aside the "untruth" which Bacon goes on to consider, it must be admitted that human beings are not merely the solitary beasts that Hobbes envisions. We are creatures of proximity - social creatures. Sure, we do require time alone but we also spend a good chunk of our time craving and seeking the company of others. Love is supreme and criticisms do sting, especially from those we love. Was Brutus' cut not the unkindest? It is a bitter irony to think that, in our attempts to get closer, we look to people far away. How many of us read or hear the words of a friend and feel something bubbling underneath the surface - a need to explain or get something off of the chest - yet turn away onto the next email or let the comment go thinking "well, they'll get over it"??
We also all have the need for not only emotional closeness but for physical nearness as well. And I don't just mean sex, I mean also the simple consolation of touch such as pats on the back, holding hands, and hugging - just simple acts. Who among us hasn't sat around petting a dog or a cat and thought how wonderful it must be to have such physical affection given so freely and so often? What kind of society would we have if it one could touch another (in a non-sexual way) without fear of being seen as too effeminate or of a lawsuit? Men espeically. Generally, we can only engage is such activities if our team wins the Super Bowl (subliminal message: Go Pack!!) or if a loved one dies.
While it may seem like an odd notion, touching is part of listening. It indicates understanding and sympathy. The next time you find yourself in a conversation, think about this. How well do you know this person? How are away do you position yourselves from one another? Do you or your interlocutor touch one another during the conversation? For instance, does one of you slap the other on the shoulder with the back of a hand to indicate agreement? Or perhaps put your hand on the other's? We, in America, at least, have this sense of "private space" or "zone of comfort". A radius of 2' or so from our bodies and, if a stranger enters this space, it's considered intrusive or threatening. But, for people we know, it engenders a feeling of intimacy. When you're at a table with just one other person, do you sit next to or across from them? Perhaps some things to cogitate upon.
Writing this brings a whole host of things to mind, not the least of which is irony in my act of writing this in a blog. In addition, Ervin Goffman's ideas of our front and back selves and how we present ourselves to each other. Also, why were the people who wrote me all women? But I suppose these are for another time. I leave you with a quote from Erasmus which is nice because it presents a view of the topic at hand, sort of summarizes Goffman's theories, and ties in with a recent entry of mine about Marillion as it appears on one of their album sleeves. To wit:
" If a person were to try stripping the disguise from actors while they play a scene upon the stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber? . . . Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows."
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