Knowledge of writing for an audience encourages inanity and hedging, for those who one truly is writing to are not anonymous in the slightest, and exposure is the most cardinal embarassment of the online world, when we exist in it, even if we keep one foot on dry land.
The nature of community--virtual in truth meaning "not real"--is a complicated question. [ze]DH brought up some time ago
in a very insightful post about how he has changed over the years... I have tried bringing up the topic with people, but have felt very little success in pursuing it much further than poorly phrased value statements, particularly with those who share the experience. Perhaps these are questions which are generated by the communities they concern, and concern the communities they are not generated by. However, like [ze]DH, I am certain that the questions raised reflect very deeply on our perceptions of how we not only communicate, but interrelate.
Can friendships really be made over distance? We used to have penpals with people we scarcely knew, but now the thought of giving out our real addresses makes us cringe. What does it imply about people who communicate virtually (note pun) solely through text? Is it a mutually exploitative enterprise, fulfilling a base desire for companionship that removes all complications like responsibility or the old function of the community--support? We have received so much help from our community here, a community we had never thought of because it was developing alongside us. During the move, our helplessness would have been laughable, had it not been for people offering assistance, providing valuable advice, even giving us furniture and appliances, or patch of floor and hot meal. How tenuously linked we are! Yet we are drawn in some uneven webbing together, all the same. Regardless of how much the western mind values its independence, without support or a network to value our accomplishments, we falter.
Relationships are delicate things. They do not move in laws and courts. They are sustained by the most strange sensitivies of human interaction and neglect. They are curious.
This would be incomplete (and I fear will remain incomplete anyway, as my moments of extemporizing in this forum are rather infrequent), without referencing the concept of family. Of environment. Of upbringing. So I have referenced it, and all the things that beg to be said are impossible to articulate before bedtime. Every metaphor I have tried to write them in has fallen apart in a mess of leaves and wings and roads and music. But it is something I am thinking about.
I referred to Minakuchi as "home" today, without even thinking about it. It really has become our Japanese
furusato,... we haven't been back yet. We need to plan a
satogaeri soon. Pieces and stages of life seldom transition like chapters, and perhaps it is foolish to think of them in such breakable pieces as that at all. All of it is as sincerely part of me as everything else, everyone else. And distance does not change these things, just stretches out the webbing a bit more, but the connection never breaks, not really.
