AFTER a long summer season, it is finally time for some waterworks. Like the rain outside, messages keep pouring in on my cell phone and, perhaps, through a quirk of fate, I feel unduly worried about a new form of communication early Sunday morning. Gone the days of verbal communication, and ‘text’ in its stillness is keeping people well-connected with each other. Such are the virtues of contemporary times.
I sit cross-legged on my settee watching through my window the trees bathe themselves anew. I hold a cup of coffee in one hand and the newspaper in another. It has been seven years since I first started using cell phones. Weird as it may seem, I cannot help worrying about every message that I receive. The anxiety in part comes from the ethical responsibility to reply, and from my bad habit of showing off my realization of this responsibility.
I hear a beep. Bowing to the inevitable, I press the ‘yes’ button of my tolerant cell phone. I dust off the screen and gaze at the entrance to the text world. I watch dozens and dozens of messages, because they are exciting for me and offer an amazing mix that forces one to wonder how varied all of us can be. “What if someone does not understand you?” I feel an obligation to help my friend in her time of sad philosophical indulgence. God knows, from where, my empathy enlarges my moral compass. Does she expect I can fly her to moon? I tell her try understanding that someone instead.
Responding to the messages is a job slightly surreal. I think much about the illusion that you can impede your meaning and ideas without using the voice. But reality gives you a chance to sit and kick around ideas, to create something new, completely fresh and immediate. It has a voice in its silence ... a modern potpourri of styles, syncretism of some sort. The beep is heard once more. Great expectations surge in me and I look forward to an opportunity for another discourse in the vacuous atmosphere.
“You are so helpful! Thanks.” It is a reply from the same friend. I just told her what she could not understand for four and twenty years. Tautological expressions in this era of technology truly reflect the mode of staying connected at a faster pace. It seems like an absurdist comedy of some sort.
I am the type of man who cares about his heart and its nuances. And if emotional health is one’s primary concern, this hybrid of literary urge and technological necessity provides me with romantic salvation. SMS is it. It comes from this. This comes from that. I believe I have no idea of this second wave of expressionism, but I know that by writing about it I feel far more honest about its advent and hauteur. Another beep. Am I a jester or a day-dreamer? For the first time in my life I think what Shakespeare would have done in my shoes if he wanted to reply in short messages through cell phone. He wouldn’t need to memorize adages and proverbs at least. This is a message from a friend in Islamabad. “Is it ok to be unfaithful to one’s wife?” If mind is where you keep rationality, I felt my mind full of condemnation for such a frank abuse of personal margins in some lymphatic expanse. Could I help him despite my fondness for celibacy? I concentrate and think of what good old married couples have to say: “It is not a good idea to stand on a wrong leg.” I respond to the message telling my friend in capital bluntly about the horror of such dishonesty about which he seems so confused. I wish he had read Updike’s Couples.
By corresponding through these messages one tries to keep a courageous good sense of one’s milieu and among priapic intellectuals. There is a strong connecting bond in this creative activity. One disciplines oneself to respond to human inquiries pronto. It is afternoon and I drive to the nearest nursery to gather a few ferns for the damp northern corner of my garden. Yet another beep.
An old pal concerned about my well-being. “Do you want to teach for 20K?” “I want 20K to teach,” I reply. I buy a few varieties of ferns, plant them as soon as I reach home, and wait for a nocturnal message, as I generally do. I sleep better this way because it keeps me away from sleeping pills. Right. Another beep.
I never know who would send me a message in the night, but does it really matter? This time it is from a stranger. So reads the message in the late Sunday night: “What’s the difference between mad, sane, and normal?” Being unacquainted with a person gives you a strange kind of defensive authority. Like and-shut-that-door boss I reply: “The difference is just a consensual illusion!” I could not hide the truth.
I go to bed and switch the lights off, play Pink Floyd’s The Wall and try to go to sleep thinking what this technology has offered to mankind. One thing it has given is the ease and temptation to communicate. Perhaps the best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Use of messaging for staying connected is increasing at a baffling speed, overtaking telephonic conversations and e-mails, let alone in-person conversations.
The way your language is organized determines how you perceive the world being organized. Managing to say the right thing to the right person at the right time has always been a monumental social accomplishment. And text messaging has put us in a situation where the jargon for these messages is shaping our sensibility. They say culture is a socially acquired knowledge, and we must get ready for a cultural change as being shaped by such technological determinism. It is bound to affect your imagination and fancy.
Guess what? Another beep. Oh these messages — they flatter me a little too much. This time it is Lear: “Does nothing come out of nothing?”
AFTER a long summer season, it is finally time for some waterworks. Like the rain outside, messages keep pouring in on my cell phone and, perhaps, through a quirk of fate, I feel unduly worried about a new form of communication early Sunday morning. Gone the days of verbal communication, and ‘text’ in its stillness is keeping people well-connected with each other. Such are the virtues of contemporary times.
