Tommy Can You Hear Me?

Last night I got a letter from a very deal old friend from Sweden, an old love who actually meant what that word says and stuck with me, and I with him, through the years– the kind of friendship that Marina Tsvetaeva compared to a mountain. Between friendship and passion, she said give me friendship any day. I walk in a cemetary of unmarked graves every single day. And let’s quote Neil Young: “How I lost my friends, I still don’t understand.”

Or Townshend:

How many Friends Have I really got? (You can count em all on one hand)

That love me, that want me, that will take me as I am?

My old friend Ake (‘awke’) Larsson was in St. Petersberg when he received my letter this week, as usual tinged with news about the curious desperation and isolation of Life in America.

He wrote about the boozy St. Petersberg tables where they were celebrating some colleague’s PhD, and it sounded like something out of Milan Kundera–just that, the idea of people at a table, the same table, for a long night in which an event is consecrated and celebrated, between people, friends, who went out of their way, in this case traveled from Sweden to Russia, to celebrate.

How often do any of us have that anymore?

These damn machines.

I fear the erosion and extinction of corporeal time, corporeal friendship, bodies together in time and space, more than I fear any other loss including the first amendment or polar ice caps. I sit at miserable piece of white plastic each night and I type forth, trying to connect and be less alone. The Internet. Soundless, it starves us very slowly. It is like a very tiny straw through which we are permitted survival breath. My father’s voice–I rarely hear it anymore. Friends voices, I never hear them. We email each other about getting together and then we cancel and send more email. Like ash flakes falling on a dying world, these emails.

I have a box of old cassette tapes from the days of audio tape answering machines and on them are all the messages I received for a period of about ten years. Some nights I listen to them. It took me seven years before I could listen to my mother’s voice on those tapes, after she died. And so many friends who are somehow ghosts now, literally or figuratively. I even have one from Hunter S. Thompson, who was still enough of a relic before he died to think that if you wanted to communicate with somebody you called them. Luckily I wasn’t home, and now I will always have his funny rambling message, which itself has a long story behind it. But I could only tell you if you were in the same place at the same time, maybe at a table, maybe in St. Petersberg. This way we could remember it.

The gadget men invented all the right crypto-demonic technology to make sure we were always in their domain, and never in our own. The medium is the message. Have you any idea how perfect a formula that is? It’s as good a E=Mc2, assuming one has no quarrel with Einstein. If I kiss you. If I email you. If I write you a letter. If I ignore you completely. If I sing to you.

What has become of the human traditions that use voice and body, dance and laughter, conversation, sound, fury and folly,to remind us where our bodies’ contours run, where we are, and are not? How can I remember you if I never see you and never hear you? How will we form memories? How will we know we were here?

How are we to know that we won’t die like those 15th century Austrian peasant’s babies who were taken from their mothers to an aristocrat’s tower, fed and clothed, but not touched? They died.

The most sensitive medium in the world is human skin.

I am thrown back to a reverie from adolescence, in Orebro, Sweden, circa 1978, before the age of computers, when even telephone calls were rarified. We were a gang–it was before we knew about isolation, adulthood. We congregated in our abandoned shoe factory/anarchist collective/rock club/vegan restaurant in the manner of a wolf pack. When we saw each other we jumped on top of each other, melded together, moshed, danced, like kids do, never realizing that adulthood would ask of them the end of all this bodily communion–all friends as one organism. Tribe.

I went home in November of 2001 and we were all ‘home,’ in town, and the rock club, center where it all happened was now a parking lot, which was a hard thing to lay eyes on, but what did we expect? We met at a pizza joint, drank and reminisced and laughed. When we walked out, I noticed that we were all walking as we did back then–in close pack formation, holding on to each other. That’s how close we were, but we got that way through our bodies, was my thought. Why the obsessive focus on “sex” when the human body is feeding itself all the time, from the handshake to the bear-hug. I don’t ever let anybody air-kiss me.

My father sometimes stretches out his hand, palms up, to my son, when he has said something funny, and says: ‘Touch me.’ It’s so basic. I wish I could do it.

My friend Ake seemed to be feeling like I was. He wrote to me… Celia, what we need to do is choose a city and choose a pub and sit there together for a long night, and the next day. It’s going to be either Istanbul, St. Petersberg, Stockholm, or Tommelilla. We’re going to meet and we’re going to talk.

I am going to book the ticket as a strike against this vast conspiracy of solitude. I know how I lost my friends. It was made so easy by the medium of email, the rash things I wrote, or didn’t write, though this spidery vein system that was carrying us away from all that we love, against our conscious will, as time itself conspired too. We forgot how much we love each other because we forgot to use our senses. Tomas Transtromer foresaw it in the lines from a late 70s poem about the welfare state: ‘We look almost happy in the sun, bleeding to death from wounds we know nothing about.”

Call your friends. See them. Hug them. Don’t email them. We reach the awareness, weirdly and gradually, that email is a subversion of time and space. If it doesn’t happen to you through your God given senses of touch, sound, smell, sight–it doesn’t really happen. It will not form a memory.

I am going to raise my son never to email a woman, only to call, if he really means something. “Real men don’t email,” I will shout, like a crazy old bat, like our grandmothers who insisted on wearing their finest clothes just to go to the bank.