Geography Lessons
According to Rob Brezsny, here's what I'm dealing with this week:
As is so often the case, Rob is eerily on the mark. I'm getting ready to go back and reconnect with various people whom I haven't gotten to see much during my life in Prague. At the same time, it's intriguing that certain of my readers are people I haven't seen in over twenty years (you know who you are, and maybe there are more of you than I realize). I wonder what that means?
In a somewhat related matter, I don't tend to spend much thought on whether I might ever meet the people I encounter in cyberspace. Years of involvement in various e-mail lists have made me grateful for the many selfless people out there who enjoy helping people they've never met, and I try to be one of those helpful people from time to time myself. But I can't say I ever developed a longing to meet them--what if they proved to be terribly dull on every other topic, or to have unpalatable religious or political beliefs, or just kind of grated on my nerves and spoiled my online appreciation of them?
Curiously, blogging is a bit different. I don't read all that many blogs, and most of them I don't read all that often. Nor do I tend to harbor a mad desire to meet most of the bloggers I do read. On the other hand, I never ruled it out, so I've now met three people I might never have encountered otherwise. In fact, I've seen two of them in the past two days, so as we don't normally hang out, we couldn't resist pondering the matter.
It struck all three of us as rather intriguing that meeting in person provided no real surprise. All three blogs, while not exactly revealing all about the authors, convey our personalities. We knew how the other blogger expressed him or herself, and that the other blogger had managed to catch our ongoing interest. But I found it a little uncanny what a clear notion I had of aspects of them that don't come into their blogs, like vocal timbre and general physical presence.
This and related thoughts kept me awake part of the night. Some blogs, while very good, don't really give a sense of the blogger. Others (constantly or in the occasional remark) convey a very individual personality. Yet I know from the blogs written by several of my friends that just because a blog has a personality doesn't mean that the reader would necessarily suspect quite what the blogger was like. The reader might not be surprised, but the reader might not have formed quite the same image of the blogger as the blogger presents in person.
For various reasons that need not be gone into here, I've concluded that some degree of psychic connection is going on here and there. I don't know how it works, I just know that it occurs. It's sort of like the way I don't always know whether I know something about someone or am just imagining it, but when I don't heed my intuition I generally regret it. And sometimes when it's just "knowing" something about someone without knowing where that knowledge came from, years later I find out I was right.
Let's just say that a certain amount of that weird intuition is floating around at the moment but I'm not sure how I should be remapping my geographies. Maybe I should just be pleased that people from my past enjoy the blog as well as people from my present and people I've never met. And maybe I should look forward to meeting more of the bloggers I read.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The geography of your heart is evolving. In places, coastlines are disappearing. Elsewhere, new islands have risen out of the sea. Boundaries are shifting, as some nations dissolve and others are born. Even the climate is changing, with warm winds blowing where once there was year-round chill, and monsoon-like conditions invading desert ecosystems. Roads that formerly led to the center of the action no longer do, and highways that used to be peripheral are now main routes. I suggest you take note of all this by redrawing your map, Leo. Get up to date with your heart's new landscapes.
As is so often the case, Rob is eerily on the mark. I'm getting ready to go back and reconnect with various people whom I haven't gotten to see much during my life in Prague. At the same time, it's intriguing that certain of my readers are people I haven't seen in over twenty years (you know who you are, and maybe there are more of you than I realize). I wonder what that means?
In a somewhat related matter, I don't tend to spend much thought on whether I might ever meet the people I encounter in cyberspace. Years of involvement in various e-mail lists have made me grateful for the many selfless people out there who enjoy helping people they've never met, and I try to be one of those helpful people from time to time myself. But I can't say I ever developed a longing to meet them--what if they proved to be terribly dull on every other topic, or to have unpalatable religious or political beliefs, or just kind of grated on my nerves and spoiled my online appreciation of them?
Curiously, blogging is a bit different. I don't read all that many blogs, and most of them I don't read all that often. Nor do I tend to harbor a mad desire to meet most of the bloggers I do read. On the other hand, I never ruled it out, so I've now met three people I might never have encountered otherwise. In fact, I've seen two of them in the past two days, so as we don't normally hang out, we couldn't resist pondering the matter.
It struck all three of us as rather intriguing that meeting in person provided no real surprise. All three blogs, while not exactly revealing all about the authors, convey our personalities. We knew how the other blogger expressed him or herself, and that the other blogger had managed to catch our ongoing interest. But I found it a little uncanny what a clear notion I had of aspects of them that don't come into their blogs, like vocal timbre and general physical presence.
This and related thoughts kept me awake part of the night. Some blogs, while very good, don't really give a sense of the blogger. Others (constantly or in the occasional remark) convey a very individual personality. Yet I know from the blogs written by several of my friends that just because a blog has a personality doesn't mean that the reader would necessarily suspect quite what the blogger was like. The reader might not be surprised, but the reader might not have formed quite the same image of the blogger as the blogger presents in person.
For various reasons that need not be gone into here, I've concluded that some degree of psychic connection is going on here and there. I don't know how it works, I just know that it occurs. It's sort of like the way I don't always know whether I know something about someone or am just imagining it, but when I don't heed my intuition I generally regret it. And sometimes when it's just "knowing" something about someone without knowing where that knowledge came from, years later I find out I was right.
Let's just say that a certain amount of that weird intuition is floating around at the moment but I'm not sure how I should be remapping my geographies. Maybe I should just be pleased that people from my past enjoy the blog as well as people from my present and people I've never met. And maybe I should look forward to meeting more of the bloggers I read.
posted by Karla at 11:00 PM
4 Comments:
This is at least in part what makes you a good reader between the lines!
That was quite a horoscope. How did he do it.
Travel well, we'll miss you here very much.
I don't know quite how Brezsny does it, but he's been doing a pretty good job of it since the late 1970s, when my friends and I used to eagerly check our horoscopes every Wednesday to see what wild things he had to say. The focus of the horoscopes is a little different now, but they've been strangely accurate (for a mere general sun-sign reading) all along.
I'm no astrologer, but it intrigues me. The surrealists were very much into astrology, so I need to follow up on their use of the technique.
Well, anyhow, see if one of your clients can ship you to SF again this summer! Or Pittsburgh during the school year.
Karla - astrology?!?!? You can never tease me about comic books again.
I don't know that I ever did tease you about comic books. Or if I did, it was only once or twice. I don't have anything against comic books. I don't normally read them, but the medium is interesting.
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