People I am close to tell me I don’t feel anything. I used to tell myself the same thing. For a long time I was numb, just trying to fathom the whirling decades. I feel a lot of things now. Sometimes I feel them so strongly my heart almost breaks. That’s why I started writing poetry. A poem is like a little package that we use to wrap up deep emotions and big ideas.
At the moment I’m sitting outside listening to crickets. I think of them as the heartbeat of the night. Always chirping, they give me a sense of time, like little wheezing metronomes. And the wind is blowing, which expands my sense of space, bringing messages from far away, a warm breeze from the hills or a nostalgic scent from the sea.
Last year I started writing a novel. I spend my life explaining things for other people and I wanted to explain something that matters to me. Mostly people pay me to explain how their gadgets work or why their software is better than someone else’s. They ask me to help them Get the Word Out so they can obtain funding and build a customer base and hopefully reach Critical Mass. If enough people want to buy their products, maybe a bigger company will want to buy them.
I don’t know if any publishing company will want to buy my novel. It’s not written for any Series A shareholders and there is no verifiable market potential. I’m not selling anything other than my thoughtful musings. But it’s full of feeling and heartache and mystery and love and intrigue. I’ve written 70,000 words so I figure I’m about two thirds done. As a reader I abandon many novels before I get to that point so I don’t know why anybody would want to read 70,000 words of mine. Yet I often sit and think about the story during idle moments. Then I have to translate it into scenes and dialogue and characters and plot twists. It’s a lot to keep in my head, especially when I spend most of my day thinking about how to define the latest cloud strategy. I have the occasional hour in the early morning to fashion my thoughts into prose. Please stay tuned.
Tonight I was watching Fareed Zakaria while I was chopping vegetables. He’s a better explainer than I will ever be. Or maybe he just understands things better. He says the American economy is doing fine, comparatively speaking, but we’re running out of things to make. It’s an uphill battle to compete against all the other countries that can make things less expensively.
I don’t know how to make things. Most of the people I know don’t know how to make things either. I interviewed Jaron Lanier once, at a conference in Palm Desert. He had just flown in from Poland and he was very tired. He said we have become a nation of bit twiddlers. We don’t make anything, we just move bits around—financial transactions and marketing brochures and engineering specs. I don’t think we would survive very long after the apocalypse. Most of us don’t darn socks or grow vegetables or forge steel. We just stare at our screens and type. Sometimes it’s a mystery to me, how all this twiddling can translate into an income and a livelihood and an economy, but that’s what we have become.
Tonight instead of coming back up to my studio to move more bits around I got sidetracked by the crickets and the starlight. Floored, really. I plopped down in an Adirondack chair outside my office, unable to go further. I was thinking about the picture that started this post, snapped when I was 15 or 16, when my world was all starry potential and the Poles still cowered behind the Iron Curtain. I remember that exact moment. Supertramp was playing and I was bobbing in place like a happy idiot. And now I remember something else that Lanier told me during that interview, after his red-eye from Poland. “You are lucky,” he told me. “You can write whatever you want to write.”
So I’m sitting outside listening to crickets and talking into this tape recorder, which miraculously is transcribing my words into text. When I’m done I’ll tell the machine to post it to Tumblr, and on to Facebook, so you can read it through whatever app you favor. Unless you get sidetracked by some other bits streaming by.
The crickets have been chirping for a long time and they will be chirping for a long time after we’re gone. Theirs is an old song, the hum and throb of the world. Sometimes I think about the vast expanse of time and the brief moments that include me. Who is this watcher, this wonderer, squinting out at the moon, listening, breathing, feeling? That’s something I can’t really explain. But I’m going to keep trying. That’s in the novel, by the way. It’s all about the subliminal messages that we receive from the world and from each other. And it’s about the dark things that broil up inside that we don’t really understand, messages from the past that define our worlds. It’s about the echoes of hope that we have been hearing since we first started writing and painting and scratching pictures into rocks, striving to connect with something beyond ourselves. That’s why we write and draw and paint and make music, whether we are explaining how a database works or expressing what we feel when we gaze into a lover’s eyes.
So even if it’s just an hour here and a paragraph there I’m going to keep writing. Because I can. Good, bad, or otherwise, at least it’s my agenda. It’s what I see and feel and laugh about and long for. And I hope you will keep listening, and maybe even read my book someday.
Just as long as there’s two of us, I’ll carry on.
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