Surely I am not the only writer who has created a blog for their work, just to discontinue it because of growing pessimism about ‘writing on the internet’ and the internet as a whole. Nor am I the only writer who has simply forgotten the isolation ritual that is necessary to begin an extended project, thus goes on a retreat back into oneself to find the noise, where practically no one, let alone the internet is included. But even for the most determined writer to be isolated in order to be tormented with what he or she intends to write about, is confounded to a space and time that is uncomfortable and uneasy simply because it is supposedly new and demands change. That time is now, right now, and that space just happens to be the internet.
Over the span of 5 years, I’ve created 4 personal blogs, acted as a contributor to 2, and made-up 2 that I seem to forget because “those don’t count.” The fact that I’ve kept track of this is a reason all by itself why I could not keep up with just 1 for more than 5 years. The continuation of discontinuing, especially something that one knows he or she must continue, is a conspiracy for total destruction.
It’d be optimistic to say this was a futuristic start to a novel about totalitarianism entitled “3014.” Or an article for 1 of 4 conglomerates to kickoff a journalism career where I am nowhere to be found in the warzone called, “that street in front of the building where we will march and demand our freedom.”
But to live a life that is confounded to a totalitarian world and feel the need to write about it, as if it were a manuscript for a novel, or a transcript of a speech, or a screenplay for a movie, or an outline for a lesson inside of 4 walls where I ironically feel safe is not optimistic. But such is life, and such are my intentions to not be “optimistic,” yet honest and thoughtful and loving as possible in a world that proves to encourage the dire opposite.
It’d be optimistic to say I was in the middle of a project when technology, surveillance, and the U.S. government is concerned. But we are in the middle of this project where technology, surveillance, and the U.S. government is concerned with us, and that fact is not a scare tactic off of our dream islands that happen to find cords creeping through its sand and digging up dirt.
This is the total opposite: a call to presence in a present time where we trust wifi to lock our doors, put our children to bed, fix our breakfast, tell us when to go to work, how much gas is not in the car, and we dare to challenge the slightest threat against our country, yet dare not to challenge the ones in our homes against our families.
Technology itself is as much the issue as the gun, the bomb, or the cotton gin. That is not to suggest these tools are not enablers of the destruction, but if the issue of anything began with what enables us instead of what creates us, our solution would bring us to where we are now: in-the-middle.
As we dig through the sand, I encourage you to start with the Creation; the God of all things, seen and unseen, for the time is not with the tangible, but the spiritual.
I encourage you to make your way over to U.S. history, for we have found the answer to world history in His sacrifice; torment “1984” by Orwell, for the time is not to ask how we got here, but how we are going to get there; once there, on that island, between projects on a manuscript, article, movie, lesson, sermon, plugged or unplugged, ask what good we can do with the tangible and not what the tangible can do for us.
And title that good thing, “Service.”
Peace,
Sister Kahrima
dialogue 