Steve and Donovan
“The water joined!” my wife beams. “I wish you
could’ve seen it.” And in her story of going past the isolated causeway of rock
and sand between the Songhees Walkway and the little almost bare island off the
point, where the sea struggles to close the gap, I feel a decided sense of
pleasure; I always look for that connection in the waters whenever I pass
there, yet to date have not seen it myself. My infirmity will not allow for
easy access there. My condition seldom allows spontaneity. Yet the sea swirls
almost infinitely in its patterns of tide and momentum, and I can securely
imagine the closing of the gap. After all, true islands do not have bridges.
Connection can seem so
fragile. We tear apart at the seams. We think we are islands as the gap widens
between our ‘selves’ and an ‘other’, forgetting the foundations that yoke us to
one another, no matter how deep the valleys beneath the sea. And it is
difficult, me on a little atoll, you on peak, he in a distant grove, she on the
other side of the ocean, to see the continual connection. One's turf is one's
turf. So when the scientists speak of The Singularity, or when the spiritualists
speak of The One, or the various priests of God, we easily do see ‘That Entity’
too, as separate from ourselves. We imagine it ‘out there’. Distinct. Apart.
Something yet to be reached. After all, even the porous skin of my molecular
containment provides for me a barrier twixt thee and me, as osmotic as I may
deem myself to be.
Or am I too obtuse?
Connection can be fragile.
M’Lady Nancy Sinclair, at 94, sitting at her computer, sneezed. A finger must’ve
touched a key and inadvertently her machine switched off. Some disconnect got
her entire letter to me ‘lost’. The steps to retrieve the missive, to switch
the contraption back on, to restart the program, to check the draft, the
delete, the storage boxes, these steps are challenging. We do not easily tread
across the causeways of the unfamiliar. We fear slipping on the rocks. We fear
being taken in by the sea. And yes, the sharks of dire contamination can swirl
around us. Difficult to accept that they too are but part of the Great
Connection.
Thespians, Donovan
Deschner and Steve Nagy, remain among my connections. Vibrant young men, they’ve
shared an apartment these past five years. With Donovan's leaving now to live
with his girlfriend the ‘disconnect’ of immediacy in the friendship is taken
for what it is. Yet the poignancy of their separation, of unavailability, is to
watch the gap between them appear to grow larger. Like the correspondence
between us. Like the lack of ready reciprocation or the lack of spontaneous
opportunities to connect. And though beneath the surface of the waters we may
reach out with our sensitive souls trembling for resonance with the other, the
fact is that speculation is often all that one can imagine for a response.
Where then is Michelangelo’s?
Yet connection can be
so vital. Ephemeral and mystical, it is the thing that coincides as if by magic
with thoughts of someone else. It brings about your news just as I was thinking
of you. It reveals a photo on the web just as I was wondering how you are. Connection,
like relays along the synapses of being bound by tide and circumstance, continues
to charge the memory and the senses, allowing even those we once knew to live
on long past their lifetimes. Indeed, “no man is an island.” Yet twixt thee and
me? How far we may indeed seem to drift, out to sea.
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