[August 1, 2006 revision in orange]Let's face it.You have something far better and more important and harder to do right now, or you would not be here.Me, too. Is it true, as TTA says, that I am just prolonging the inevitable goodbye? Oh, surely. Aren't goodbyes the best and most important and hardest things to do? Thus, inevitably, the things we most likely screw up?We all have our sad private reasons for our funny public behavior.At the moment, actually, life--"meat life"--is good. Here in virtual space, I seem to be waiting for something. Here's a post from last year that seemed to suit the day.
Long before the Internet, AI, high-speed connections, proxy servers, blogs, social bookmarking systems, digital manipulation of photos, professional publicists, organized P.R. firms, and spin doctors, there was, is, and ever will be:
virtual reality.
Not necessarily in the sense of the term as we normally apply it. I ask you to broaden, for the moment, your definition of virtual. Or, let us say, to refine it. Right back to its pristine roots.
Virtual: Note the order, as I tell my students, of these definitions. That is the chronology of the etymology. Only this time, instead of pushing onward to the frontier of the word at definition 3, we go back to 1: Existing or resulting in essence or effect, though not in actual fact, form, or name
.
And 2, too:
Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.
Essentiality and mentality, and our awareness of how they benefit and threaten us, are as old as the
human condition.
Note, too, the wistful relationship between this word "virtual" and its close and nicer cousin, "virtue." Best foot forward, we create ourselves on paper and in pixels as we would like ourselves to be.
Me: witty. erudite. comely. not too in love with myself. rarely depressed or agitated. a terrific gardener. loving mother. devoted wife. and like that. Only my virtues need apply.
You:a conveniently distant cipher (yes, even if you are my friend or beloved in "real" life, you are distant here), with the ability to leave me--at will--some scattered commentary, or to read me silently, virtually invisible. A friend without too many strings attached, part of a community that doesn't hold town meetings. Intimate, yet not too far from being able to blow me off.
Ah, relationship heaven.
Which is why the Internet is so
addictive.
And sometimes leads us to that gates of the
forbidden.
And is so potentially
damaging.
What was that other word?
Ah, yes.
Reality. Such an upstanding word. No bullshit about it. It is what it is. Really:
- The quality or state of being actual or true.
- One, such as a person, an entity, or an event, that is actual.
- The totality of all things possessing actuality, existence, or essence.
- That which exists objectively and in fact.
What's not to understand? Even that lovely word
essence is in there.
Except that, when passionately coupled with virtuality, something happens to reality. It hedges. It becomes
essentially actual,
virtually real,
fundamentally factual. But what else?
Colette, my favorite author, is someone I can't actually read anymore. I can recommend her--highly. I can remember her--fondly. I can even quote her--in abundance. I live by her words, but I am no longer intimate with her words. Why not?
Because she made herself up. And I can't forgive her for not existing.
Judith Thurman, her best biographer to date, calls Colette "our first true superstar." Initially an invention of her first husband and manager, Henry Gauthier-Villars (who went by the Priapic handle "Willy"), Colette spent her formative years as an authoress locked into an attic room from the outside, churning out a daily quota of titillating prose for the infamous
Claudine series, a group of pop novels that skirted kiddie porn, Sapphic erotica (from a man's p.o.v. of course), and three-way tea parties to the delight of Parisians of all legal ages. The books were put out under Villars's name at first, until Colette fought to have her own name put on the cover. After her divorce from Willyin 1905, she went onstage as a mime and continued to write. She also fell into the arms of the Marquise de Beboeuf, known to Colette as Missy. The affair lasted some years but didn't prevent Colette from crossing back over the river to marry two more men in her lifetime, prominent journalist Henri de Jouvenal des Ursins, and intellectual boy-toy and diamond merchant Maurice Goudeket.
Colette was the embodiment, if you will, of the virtual real. She luxuriated in the pleasures of life, from the simple (a sip of Burgundian wine, the icy dew that rests on the skin of plums) to the complex (the amazing twists and subtle turns of the human being in love). She appeared to be as nude on the page as she often was on stage, but the appearance was just that: "She is never as transparent or as spontaneous as she seems," says Thurman. "Quite the contrary."
Thurman reveals, for example, that the marriage of Colette's mother and father--described with such passion, wonder, and envy by Colette--may have been a marriage of convenience, at least for her mother, widowed with several children in a small town.
Colette's portrayal of her mother, Sido, as a loving force to be reckoned with, Mother Earth incarnate, may well be, welllllll, a slight exaggeration. And Colette's own performance as a mother was less than stellar: her daughter, fondly praised as "Bel-Gazou" in Colette's work, was raised by nannies and boarding schools, and grew up almost estranged from her mother. Meanwhile, Colette took it upon herself to educate her second husband's teenage son in ways that give the phrase "well-rounded education" a whole new, and sinister meaning.
Still, there she is, the woman who
said, "
Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you." So perhaps we should, as we go along managing our images and creating ourselves online or elsewhere, remember there is some virtue in virtuality.
It can be argued that
Thurman also makes herself up to a certain extent. Her photos are universally fresh and lovely, knowing, witty, with that certain
je ne sais quois that I...Hey! Judith Thurman is the woman I want to be!
I can't forgive
her for that, either.
*The title of this post is a nod toward my new favorite band,
The Kings of Convenience. Stay tuned for me learning enough about audio clips to actually snag music for this site. 'Cause I agree wholeheartedly that
Love Is No Big Truth.
Hey,
Scholiast, I believe this is the final proof you need that I am a
Norwegian at heart.
Or at least a Nordaphile by genetics.
Or a
troll-lover by nature.
Or something.
Are we getting anywhere?
Yes. Ahem.
[image of
Secrets of the Flesh via Lisa W. Schamess library; persistent nibbling away at corner bearing National Book Award medallion courtesy of
Louisa]
categories: puzzles technology thought words
