Fall

I live in the desert so while it is Fall in the World, it is still very much Summer for me and mine. While Summer in fact, it is Fall in spirit, with school having started again, and vacations, for the most part, over.

I had a phone conversation this morning that reminded me I had this blog--although the conversation was not about the blog. Indeed, the conversation was with one my favorite professors and it concerned epistemology. He had written me a letter (which is a kind of old-fashioned blog written to usually just one person, but if to more than one, to *known* persons, which is to say to people that the writer knows and to whom he or she is writing, not to be pedantic) in which he had outlined several killer arguments against two dominant strains of thought in epistemology. I had called him, being of my generation, not his, and not doing that thing called writing letters, to make two points of clarification having to do with his argument. Getting off the phone I realized that this blog was intended to serve as a kind of extended conversation for students who were no longer in classes (should they find it) and any other interested party so I decided to make my first actual blog.

What I had wanted to discuss in the first entry was the impersonal intimacy of email as contrasted with the private-feeling nature of the blog. Many of the people with whom I have intersubjective communications exchange their thoughts with me almost exclusively on email. Others I meet in phone space. I've been thinking that email is de-personalizing in a strange way because it demands an almost immediate response. Immediate responses are not going to be particularly careful. Blogs, and comments, are not required. The blog arises freely, with no urgency. As noted, I had intended to do this earlier and time got away. There is a student from several years ago to whom I owe an email but that failure is more severe. I have been thinking about her, and wanting to write, but as the time slips away the immediate nature of the email is covered over and any response I make now implies a not-caring, even thought that not-caring is not true of my mental state. No one is sad that I did not write the blog. Nor will there be a feeling of betrayal if no one responds to the blog. So the email is at once more intimate (because it shares with the letter the sense of being from this one to that one) but more impersonal (because it is in the context of right now, this minutes). The blog is more personal (as a diary is personal) but less intimate because it is from a persona to no one and everyone.

So the Fall that is not Fall is upon us. And the communicating obligation which is not one has been fulfilled.

Comments

[Jennifer Leigh]

My read is that this loss of carefulness in email responses doesn't lend to depersonalization as much as it creates the opportunity for a different knowing and exchange of personalization -- a less rehearsed version of a performance often communicates secrets through cracks that get sealed before opening night. But it's also true that I have what most people would consider too much reliance upon textual (psycho)analysis.

Am I the first person to post at your blog? There's a crudely blue euphemism for that that I shan't repeat but which amuses me to no end. Also, fyi: no not-caring has been inferred.

[David K. Johnson]

A blog to everyone is, therefore, a blog to me, too. A pleasure to read your words, Alison, and to infer from them that you are well after all these years.

[John]

The problem with e-mail

this silver thread between us
this perfect conductor
of digital speech anchored
in our fingertips
this lifeline
thins and
lengthens
every day
becoming
more tenuous
every day
more con
voluted
crossing
itself
loop upon
slender
loop
suf
fic
ient
in
its
glis
tening
conduc
tivity
to pass
a word
here and
a word
there
sometimes
even an idea
or a dream gets
through the mesh
but so composed
it leaves me hungry
for a connection of the flesh