BEING THOREAU 2000

by andrea r. roberts

2000. I cover my ears. I protect myself from a Dionysian spirit of loud drunken yells. Hedonistic temporal tributes, religiously marking a year's end and inaugurating another's beginning, penetrate my apartment walls without repentance. These brown eyes behold red, green and silver fireworks, but the computer is the lamp for which I long.

The planet spent the fall months before the millennium count down conjuring up images of the Jetsons or flying cars. We might have been "caught up in the rapture,” if you interpret best seller fiction as gospel, or beamed up if you follow the ranting of late night talk show hosts. Our collective consciousness being connected by way of television, telephone lines, and satellites. The world flashed light beams of the bright, gaudy, and humorous. These images were what we imagined the beginning of a new age would look like. "The New World Order" would be air borne, catastrophic, convenient, and interconnected. Utopian designs, however, lead us back to ancient yearnings.

2000. I entered it like a woman of the 1900's. I was equipped with a college education and indoor plumbing, but little else in the way of twentieth century amenities. I leaned across the railing of a third floor apartment in downtown Houston and sent my soul cries out to the ones I love without the aid of a telephone or the Internet. It is not because I am ignorant of such advances, but because I lacked the capital for these, now, 21st century necessities.

For years, I had intellectually contemplated simplicity, as Henry David Thoreau did. He hoped to reserve the last vestiges of simple town living. Like my antebellum ancestors, I sent out drumbeats from my breast that New Year's Eve. I scraped and borrowed to maintain some link friends, business associates, and job prospects. This simplicity was not of my choosing. Just as the hay-strewn floors of slave-quarter cabins were not the simplicity my African-American foremothers and forefathers desired; I had not foreseen my voyages would lead to this austere life. How does anyone meet the challenge of separation from circles and networks?

My friends and chosen kin all shared the urge to scatter themselves like stars, to shine alone. There is the office administrator by day, aspiring film editor and director by night in Harlem; the witness protection program Dead Head and broker's daughter living in Connecticut; the sultry Lolita-esque psychology researcher who beds her law school studying boyfriend in Queens between yoga and therapy; and an angel in the form of a gay, Islamic divinity scholar labors over ancient tomes at Harvard Seminary. Presently, there is a corporate research analyst whose profession necessitates 12-hour days in cyber space followed by late night Hemmingway revelries over scotch in the District of Columbia. I wonder if any of them have seen my smoke signals. I reconnect by way of telephone line and Internet access, the tangible connection on my budget and their time. Yes, it is simple to say I miss them. They are the ones that have fed me, lit a path for this neo-scribe, ignited heat for spent pin tips allowing ideas to flow again. I search for the tools to re-create the serendipity of chance meetings, philosophy over coffee, early-a.m. clinic defense, protests, sit-ins, rallies and open-air funk band concerts. Rolling on the grass to find the primordial, laughing over Stiller and Norton's cinematic treatise on religious diversity and inhaling the vapor of herbal supplements are the cherished pixels of light I type. I send these e-post cards to myself in solitude. These waking dreams are wormholes, wider than hotly contested bandwidth.

Princeton physicists' discovery of light, faster than light inspires more than the Science-fiction enthusiast in me to believe great portals have yet to be opened.  "The interesting thing," one scientist said of the discovery in the journal NATURE, "is how did they manage to produce light that looks exactly like something that didn't get there yet?" How did Thoreau see so much in the stillness of solitude, trees and earth? What real power lie in the North Star, the heavenly compass for the foot soldiers of the Underground Railroad?

I reach back now to a past informing my future, propelling me faster than the future I might have mapped for myself. The present sends me over fiber optics to pull myself into a realistic notion of forward. I take care daily that I do not fall prey to straight lines and boxes. Light, cyber space at night seduces me. I seek more--more money, a higher degree, a larger house with more rooms, on more land, with faster Internet access. Will I be the last to have DSL?

Thoreau saw the value in memory, the memory of past lives' knowledge present in the wisdom of nature born of decay. Our terrain, the environment will compel us to conserve space, outer and inner. We will grow new institutions to honor the space that holds our memories. Like, Thoreau, we might begin to honor the cycles he was content to contemplate in nature. Meanwhile, we concede, as does theorist Donna Haraway in her work, "A Cyborg Manifesto," that: "Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of the spectrum [and the] engineers [of such machines] are sun-worshippers." Communication is light, and light is communication, but is the Internet as basic as indoor plumbing? Is telephone usage a crutch or a godsend? Are there larger questions below the surface of technological disconnection? A communiqué arrived in my e-mailbox from a suffocating ex-lover, co-dependent caretaker. A picture of the building we would meet in front of in college floated in cyber space above a seasonal greeting and a reminder that, " I have the freedom to determine the direction of my life." She had mined freedom from the disconnected nature of her words.  In the message, I vainly search for the light that has arrived before release.

2000. I sooner turn to keyboard than notepad to explore my own mind. I put pen to paper for the visceral explorations of my soul and my spiritual path. I sometimes think I am more serious about what I am writing if I type it into the computer rather than write with pen and paper. I employ pen and paper for poetry and pleas to God for aid. At age ten, I read The Color Purple where Walker's writing presented the miracle of writing directly to God.

"Jesus is on the telephone line.
Tell him what you want.
Jesus is on the telephone line.
Tell him what you want.
Call him up
And tell him what you want. "

I spent pre-pubescent Sundays in a small, old, and white wooden church where I sang these praises of connection and uninterrupted access to light. Today, I pray silently and still cherish divine enfranchisement. Nevertheless, the computer is the altar of the secular and holy finished product.

Toni Morrison's manuscripts burned in a house fire shortly after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I gave too much trust to a man once, and I lost him and my writings to a storage company in Manhattan. Boxes of books and journals are now second hand store finds, autographed with "I love you," "Thank you for introducing me to the audience," and "You will be a great journalist one day!"

I resist morbidity and embrace the prophetic light I have yet to recognize. Nearing 2000's end, I am pulling from past light, circling back to emptiness and disconnection. These are peculiar advancements. This is the shape of light, communication, and being Thoreau in the year 2000.

Copyright © 2000 Andrea R. Roberts. All Rights Reserved.

Andrea R. Roberts is a new contributor to *spark-online. She lives and works in Houston, Texas, USA.