A few days ago we got soaking rains. A front came in. The skies grew overcast. The heavy drizzle was chilly and the nights were cold indoors, requiring space heaters.
When this happens, a mist comes over the McDowell Mountains, darkening them under the blanket of grew puffs that shroud their summit, like something out of a fantasy story. The shadows below the clouds draw out the green of the vegetation, and it turns from the sun-faded succulent green to resembling jungle tree tops. That is, you can't tell the difference between the low Sonoran vegetation and what might otherwise be the treetop canopy of the Blue Ridge of Pennsylvania, or the Coastal Ranges of Oregon.
The smell of rain is delicious to breathe. I think about people I've known, that I've lost along the way, to the world. Do you think we would be friends again? I want to ask some of them. I wish I could give them blanket amnesty from words we might have exchanged in haste, confusion, and anger.
Advent. The world yearns for deliverance. Today I went shopping for Christmas cards. They are not easy to find, the boxed set. I went to four places before finding them at Barnes and Noble, where there was a small selection. Hardly anyone sends mail anymore to each other. I call myself the last letter writer. Letter writing is civilization, and when I go, so will go civilization. I don't want that to be true, but at the moment it seems that way.
Going through the selection, I examine only ones depicting the Nativity. Of the more than fifty choices of design on the tables, there are perhaps eight that qualify. They are all abstract representations. One apparently shows an empty crib. No baby Jesus. Another makes sure to show the Holy Family as People of Color. I don't mind the color of the figures but I hate feeling like I am being lectured to by a Christmas Card.
In a couple cases I notice the cards do not depict the Nativity per se, but rather depict Nativity scenes in front of churches. That is, we see a contemporary rural church in the snow and in front of it is a creche of the Holy Family, alone and unobserved in the snow. We experience the Nativity as simulacrum several times removed form us, and thus not a threat.
I want to choose a design with animals. Animals are important in the Nativity. Disappointingly, none of the cards depict cattle, except one of the simulacrum cards of a modern creche. So in the card, it is supposed to be a fake cow, and it is not even clear that it is a cow. You will never find a painting of the Nativity form the Middle Ages or Renaissance that has animals that does not have an ox or cow. The absence of cows on these sets of cards speaks volumes to me.
I think about the people to whom I will send cards. The box has fourteen yards. I will use all of them I hope. Do I have Mark and Laurie's address in Reno? I hope so. I certainly want to send them a card.
There are people I would love to send a card to. I wonder if I could get away with it, without angering them? In some cases, the Nativity scene would be enough to trigger them.
Amnesty. Just tell me somehow you want to be curious about each other again in an innocent way. That what's I'd convey to them.
My last living connection to Oregon, who is the only person in that state who will certainly be among my addressees, is a guy who used to be the Poet Laureate of that state. In met him years ago when he taught one of my English classes as a young visiting professor-poet. I sent him a postcard from Edinburgh this summer, because I knew he was leading a tour there later that summer, as part of his professorial position where he nows teaches in Portland.
He and I probably have many differences in how we see the world, yet he is my brother. I treat him as such. He emailed me after my postcard and said he wanted to be in contact. So now I send him my highest caliber of thoughts on a regular basis and wait for his return. It is playful. He sent me pictures of a specimen in a museum in Scotland, after he took his tour there in August. It is a bronze axe head dating from Antiquity. He himself found it, when he was a boy, climbing on Arthur's Seat, the great ancient mound just downstream from Edinburgh on the Forth. He gave it to the museum, and finally he had come back to see it.
It was beautiful to receive the gift of his correspondence. It is hard to have a conversation by email. It is no substitute for the way people used to communicate by mail. I have thought a lot about this, and why it is so. The bottom line is that digital-only communication has destroyed our culture.
It's hard to imagine the type of intimate communication we used to have with each other, that we no longer have, because nobody has it anymore. We are living broken disconnected lives, stewing in resentments from afar, believing we are in contact with the entire world at once because we can see their names and pictures on small LED screens we carry with us everywhere.
We don't even hear each other's voices on the phone anymore. The analog phone system, where you could hear each other breathing during the pauses, no longer exists. We hear only dead digital pauses now, a simulacrum of the sound waves that used to be carried continuously from our lips to another'e ears by the means of copper wires. Our voices are now converted into ones and zeroes, and our messages are wrapped in the boxes of email applications, surrounded by the hoopla of color of websites and such. We don't have the paper to ourselves. We can't write important long things to the edge of the page, our handwriting becoming a scrawl because we cannot keep up with our thoughts. None of that type of communication exists anymore.
The world yearns for more Childhood is broken. Courtship is broken. Marriage is broken. Work is broken. I am writing this to you because I know you feel it too.
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