I’m up tonight at midnight in the Mountain Time Zone
waiting on a link for a press release that officially
will be going out from Istanbul, although really
it will be coming out of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
That’s what the internet has done for the good people
who run the thing. We can be everywhere doing everything,
like some luddite in New Mexico releasing words
about internet infrastructure in Africa for an office in Turkey.
And while I’m waiting into the morning hours for that single link,
it occurs to me that all love is subtext. Words are just the surface
and the bubbling over. It’s human energy in the network,
veins of an underground river that drive what we crave.
This is why computers can say anything they want to
with whatever intelligence they can muster, they can
write for us, sing for us, think for us; but if we don’t see
a person there at the end of the line, what does it matter?
That is the subtext, the breathing, beating, feeling heat of it.
And so we can be fooled for a while and maybe over and over again,
but a person has to show up, sooner or later, or it’s a dead letter.
Because it’s never the words per se, those noisy abstractions
that land like snowflakes and quickly turn into atmosphere.
We grab at them anyway as the only proof of our selves.
But we don’t know the language.
We mishear the sounds.
We misread the signs.
We misunderstand the significance.
Love is not in these proliferating words.
And maybe that is the big secret
to art and cyberspace and love.
You don’t have to have anything to say;
you just have to show up and say it.