Is the 'Net Working?

I have been without Internet access for almost a week now, and that will continue for almost another week. (I do have access to the Internet via my phone, but even my skilled thumb typing doesn't make that a good method for writing brief essays.) What this disconnection from the Internet has shown me is that much of my intellectual and artistic life is now web-based.

Which takes me back to the 1980s and the zine Anti-Isolation, put out at the time by Miekal And (before the re-capitalization of his name) and Liz Was (before her second renaming of herself).

Anti-Isolation was an irregular assembling that came out only two or three times (though mIEKAL has plans for another issue), and one issue was focused on networking, in the mailart sense. Anti-isolation was a zine about bringing together poets and artists who were scattered across the continent and the globe but who were of the same ilk. It was that networking that diminished the physical isolation of these artists by enhancing the intellectual connection of them.

In that networking issue, Crag Hill included a visual essay of his entitled "Is the Net Working?" which considered the issues of connecting people intellectually across great distances.

But the net has changed. It is wider now. It is faster. It is immediate. It is deeper. And it has added an apostrophe: 'Net.

The net that ties us together the most these days is the Internet. It allows us to talk to friends anywhere on earth, even friends we've never met. It allows us to write a message to the world, though that world is usually the narrow world we've made for ourselves. Though "narrowness" doesn't imply smallness.

So the reason I feel a general disconnection is because the art of my life is based on this net of connections, one that is held together by the Internet, but one that is greater than that. It is a net of interests as well, and it is a net that exists diachronically as well. I'm am still pulled back to the 1980s when I think about the universe of poetry and art I live within. My processes may be much different now, as are the ways I connect to people in my world, but mine is not a world without a past, not a world ignorant of or dismissive of the past. We in the present know that the future is built upon the past.

What I've also noticed during these Internetless days, which are coinciding with the hottest days of the summer (for a person who lives in a place without air conditioning), is that social media has taken over poetry to a great degree, and that this takeover has blurred the line between poetry (and art) and life. That a person's Facebook wall may be a place for providing insights into or examples of one's own poetry, but that these are also and always venues for displaying one's life. Because one's art is one's life, and vice versa.

This concept of art and life merging is ancient. We have believed for centuries that an artist's art controls to some degree the life that that artist lives. But the merging has increased over time. Maybe first with the Dadaists, whose disregard for the normal conventions of art was coterminous with their disregard for the normal conventions of society in general, making it possible for a Dadaist to live one's art by living in decided contravention of the mores of one's time.

When I think of a life merging with a life, I am returned to thoughts of my friend mIEKAL, who once had a name that seemed proper in conventional Anglophone society. mIEKAL has lived a life, for decades, where his art has infiltrated his life, just as much as his life has infiltrated his life. Just as his house is filled with evidence of his artwork, just as he fights convention (in his sometimes conservation [honestly] way) all the time, so does his non-art life become his art. There is something about his mania for farming that is a work of art: how he tends to 100 or more fig plants and keeps them living and bearing fruit even though he lives in the frigid wilds of Wisconsin. There is something about his interest in growing strange fruits that parallels his interest in outré forms of art. And I recall when he and Liz were growing gourds with which to make their own musical instruments.

Our life is our art or there is no art to it. Whichever "it" "it" is.

A couple of weeks ago, right in the fat middle of an intensive spurt of gardening on my part, I had finished one part of a brick walkway, and I posted a photograph of my handiwork on my Facebook pages. mIEKAL saw that photo and commented that that work was "better than art" (those three words were his entire comment. I responded, "It is art. Note the subtle variation from standard brick patterning." I had to fill a certain form with bricks, I was working with the constraint of certain pre-determined dimensions, and this forced me to solve a problem of how to fill it with bricks, and that led me to an interesting solution to setting the pattern for the bricks. That led to the art. And artmaking, if not art itself, just as poetrymaking vis-à-vis poetry, is about solving problems, and about building things.

I am a builder, and I'm not able to go to my studio as often as I would like, because my studio is the ether, and it is just beyond my grasp for another six days. I am left, for that most part, outside of my world, and I want to return to it.

Because, as George Bailey did, I want to live again.

ecr. l'inf.