What follows is an aside of sorts. I was asked to write something about how I’m doing, about the lay of the land, with my book on Matrimony about to come out. This is what happened instead. You never know.
What do you suppose they were thinking, those brainy, driven, hard-wired, intuitive malcontents that germed and seeded what now’s called ‘the internet’? Were they wonks in a basement with wires and soldering gear and switches and a feeling that they could remake the Whole Damn Thing? Soon enough a military industrial complex or two laid claim to the now notorious fledgeling, of course, and, of course, we’ll see where that drags us all. But I’d like to imagine that there was genuine care and concern for a better day, maybe just before the dream for cosmic domination and for selling crowded in. Was it originally a gizmo that would have you calling your mother more regularly? Was it originally a helpmate, as so many of the game changers seem to have been in their nascence, before things went global and viral? We’ll never get back to that state of things, but what a thought it is.
I was set to wondering about this – again – by receiving an unsolicited review of sorts a while ago, a breezy one liner that described me, if memory serves, as being intellectually compelling and emotionally unavailable. This was probably an inadvertent binary opposition. That can happen when the critic’s cursor is taken up and ‘send’ is so easy to do. Originally there was a ‘but’ between the two epithets, but I don’t think they exclude each other, and so I’ve provided the ‘and’. Available to what or whom, for what or whom, or why, he/she didn’t say. But emotional availability was clearly on their mind.
Now, if that general assessment is accurate, then no matter how compelling I might manage to be, the chances are that being emotionally unavailable would make me unavailable for the truth of the barb. My rehabilitation on these matters, then, wouldn’t really be the point of the communication. The catharsis of sending the thing would be the point of the thing, I’d guess. Not for me, though. For the sender. Just imagining the ping and the impact of it, the death by a thousand cuts of it: for some, that could be a day-maker, I suppose.
The internet and the emotional un/availability of someone who occasionally goes on it or appears there meet probably millions of times per day. The skew of the logarithmic ‘information’ firehose is what produces so much of that phantom, brittle ideological certainty that haunts the tirades, the quips, the internet slagging matches. It haunts the loftier stuff, too, I’m afraid. The ‘showing of support’; the ‘condemnation’. The wearing of a flag, the wearing of a t-shirt. The ‘speaking for the faceless and the dispossessed’; the ‘speaking against the lawless crowd’. ‘Favouring the freedom fighter’; ‘defiling the terrorist’. I don’t know how emotional availability – if that’s what all of that comes to – is supposed to survive an encounter with the opinion fest that has become the internet.
The internet is, among other things, a seduction accelerant. It seduces you into imagining that you’re ‘heard’ when you’re on it, that you’re ‘seen’. Hence the ‘sharing’, I guess. And now here comes the next helpmate: arbitrary, allopathic AI, the artifice of intelligence. Neither you nor I will ever be alone again in any way we’d like.
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For whatever record there actually is: I don’t think that genuine citizens of a working democratic meritocracy need to announce their take on everything that passes them by. If doing so is emotional availability – it may not be – then I take a pass on that particular value. Having had something of a public life, I’ve come to realize that ‘the public’ has made most of that happen. I don’t know who to thank, who to credit, who to laud, who to tip my hat to. One of the ways I try to do all of that is to have a realistic take on the worthiness of any opinions I might have, and to disperse those opinions judiciously, if at all, or recosider them so intensely as to dissolve them most of the time. I’ve not ever really trusted the impulse to purgation or to autobiography, nor the fret that seems to animate them. “Autobiography begins with the feeling that you are alone”, wrote John Berger. I’ve not been alone, that way, very often.
So, I’m sorry that I’m not more of a current affairs slide show. I’m not a good place to come for a reading on the next big thing, the next awful thing. I may not be a fitting companion on the ramparts anymore. I have a book coming out in a week or so, a book about matrimony and ritual and culture making. That seems to me an important concern to have, challenging how we’ve come to privatize love. I’m doing a pile of interviews for it, for the first time in a few years, in which I’ll slip from time to time and be emotionally available, as I understand the term. It’s already happened a few times. I’ve written a couple of other books that might see daylight over the next year or so. One of them, I’ll admit it now, flirts with autobiography. Gads, just when consistency seemed within reach …
But let me say that I am heartened beyond reckoning that people put their shoulders to the heavy work pleaded for by this sorrowing world, that they do weigh on justice and injustice, mercy and mercilessness, that they hear their hearts and their opinions in action. The world needs these folks more than it needs me.
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It seems to me now that one can come to a time in life when the response repertoire requires an overhaul, a genuine rethink. It seems important that I resemble my age and condition, with all the confounding translation that deserves. It seems important that whatever work’s left to me bears the maker’s mark. I am not recommending my reticence to anyone. Decades ago ‘spirit work’ was all the rage. During that time, and since, I seem to have gone from ‘working on my spirit’ to ‘working with my spirit’, what remains of it. But that might not be the emotional availability in question. Yesterday I was asked to come to a critically afflicted corner of this world and bring my notions of ‘elderhood in a troubled time’ with me. Not much room for opinions there.
Like you, I wonder whether my little life can issue benefit in some way, even as I’m living the closing scenes of the second act. Like you, I sometimes dare to imagine a bit of genuine consequence accruing to my labours. Like you, on my better days I’m trying to work myself out of a job. Like you’d do, when I set down to write I imagine you and the life that’s come to claim you. I bear the world in mind.
So, I don’t know that I feel better after all that, or that I’m supposed to, or that you’re supposed to. My unavailability’s available, though. That’s something.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
