The oddest things force us into existential contemplation.
At the moment, my ailing computer is the culprit. Last week, at approximately 8:15 AM on Monday morning, my dear laptop crashed. The screen went black, then blue, then blank. Then it wouldn’t turn back on, then it did, then it didn’t again. When it finally came to, it started throwing an arsenal of error messages at me, with language that can best be described as technological potty mouth. We had a war of words for a few minutes before finally, a capitulation: “Do you want the system to repair itself?” Yes! Please! Do that! A few glorious moments of dan he coo it? (see my brother or the muppets for translation,) and then: freeze. Done. Dead.
I brought my lump of plastic and wires to the Israeli computer wizzes, (MS Word thinks this is spelled “whizzes,” so in the interest of intellectual honesty I’ll mention that spelling,) who proceeded to fiddle with it for a number of days. Finally, this Monday, I got the call: “hamachshev mesudar,” the computer is ready. I raced over to pick it up, excitedly pressed the “on” button, and enjoyed about 5 minutes of sheer pleasure clicking through my icons and intact documents. And then: freeze. Done. Dead.
I’m telling you there is something wrong with my finger tips, they touch computer keyboards, and things go haywire. It’s something out of the X-Files. (And I would know, considering I’ve seen every episode – yeah. I’m cool.) Anyway, they held on to it for a couple more days, and last night, I again get the call. More skeptically this time, I headed over to pick it up, and things did seem to be in working order. I paid them their 100 shekels, and brought home my laptop. I turned it on, ready to actually get some real work done for the first time in over a week. And then: freeze. Done. Dead.
Actually, this time it gave me a scary beeping noise first. Then it made weird pictures all over the screen, as if a menu bar had repeated itself over and over again. So now I have to bring it back to the computer guys, get my money back, and tell them to just reformat the damn thing (not before saving all my documents first, obv).
So why am I chronicling this sad state of affairs? I started off by saying something cryptic about existential contemplation. Basically, being without my computer for the past several days has really thrown me for a loop. It’s insane how dependent I am on that thing. And at first, I felt pretty silly. I was actually feeling a deep loneliness, as if one of my friends had gone away for a while. And my friends here would give me hugs and tell me that it’s just an object, Thank G-d it’s not my health, yada yada. And of course, they are right. They couldn’t be more right. But at the same time, I think there’s something to this whole loneliness thing. I have so much of my life on that laptop, so much writing, so many pictures, my job, my connection to everyone back home. Sure I can use the school computers to send emails (and type blog entries,) but it’s just not the same. It’s like eating breakfast in someone else’s kitchen after a sleep over. Something is just off.
In college I took a few bioethics courses, and one of the topics we discussed was the interaction between humans and technology. You can talk about this in medical terms, especially when you consider all the people walking around with pace makers, people on dialysis, on respirators, using artificial limbs. (How many artificial body parts do we have to have to be considered more machine than human? Where does our humanity lie? Ah, bioethics. I miss it.) But even before you reach the point of machines entering our very flesh, we have to realize that we really are just as dependent on them already, in terms of memory. We use our computers as extra memory banks, and our brains come to rely on them for storage, much like when we become very close to another person, and they start sharing our “load” of memories and experiences, though of course that is a crude analogy. In an article I read at Penn, we learned about how part of the pain someone feels when a loved one passes away is the pain of losing a part of themselves, in a very literal way, in the form of all those memories stored up in that person’s mind, which have just been lost forever. This is why, when someone’s computer “dies,” they actually feel some of that same pain – as tested with brain image scanning and whatnot by men in white coats with pocket protectors and taped up glasses. Obviously it would be ridiculous to say that losing your hard drive feels like losing a person you love. But there is a very specific element of that loss that is similar, and that is the loss of some small part of you that you had stored up within the other, which is now gone forever.
We can make all kinds of judgments on that, of course. Sounds pretty scary, actually, and something about it rubs us all the wrong way. But even just acknowledging it as a fact of reality is weird. I am in pain without my laptop. Not because it is expensive, not because I am in love with it, not because I am addicted to it. It hurts because part of my memory is in there, and I am separated from that. As a writer, my stories and poems and essays and rants are a huge part of my self-definition, they are a record of myself, a statement of my existence, a testament to my past and present. And it’s just hard to be away from that part of myself, to have to give that part of myself to an Israeli computer guy, or type it out on random old desktop computer, like I am doing now. Thankfully I didn’t actually lose my files, and hopefully I still won’t. But just being unable to access them right now is really tough. Lonely, even. Which brings me to the real point of this entry.
The reason I started writing this post is because we just read a piece in class by Rav Soloveitchik called “The Community”. It’s a very interesting philosophical essay on whether man is at his core a lone individual, or a member of a community. Judaism says it is neither, and both. Adam’s creation is recounted twice in the Torah: once at the same time as Eve, and once at different times. He is at once a singularity and a member of a partnership. And those have different connotations for his relationship with himself and others, and different implications on his behavior and mindset. The essay is fascinating, so I definitely recommend it. It really got me thinking about who I am at my core: am I essentially on my own or part of a partnership or group? Am I more one than the other? And I don’t think the answer is so easy. In fact, I think it is different for each person, though we all need both elements in our lives. I’ve always been the type to love being around one or two close friends – somewhere in between alone and part of a crowd. But in general, I think I may actually be the alone type. Not alone in the sense of a sad person sitting at home wishing they had more friends, though I’ve definitely been there before, as we all have. I just mean that I think I thrive better when I have space, even if I may often crave the opposite. Of course I am definitely the relationship type, but I think that’s more a craving for unity, in a spiritual sense, than for community. (Marriage in Judaism is probably the most beautiful concept I have ever learned, and rather than being defined as a partnership, it is defined as an actual coming together as one, like two flames that join. Deep stuff, but an awesome concept, that often gets taken for granted.) Everyone wants to be loved, but that’s a different feeling than the one I am describing. Anyway, I know I’m digressing. But according to this essay, alone-ness (as opposed to loneliness) is essential to creativity, uniqueness, and individuality. So maybe as a creative type, that alone part of me is stronger than I’ve acknowledged in the past. Maybe the fact that I’ve never been the type to have a large group of friends, but rather individuals here and there who I get very close to, indicates something deeper about who I am. Rather than lament that and wonder why I’m not more “popular,” I need to embrace that as something beautiful, something deep. And maybe the fact that I feel a strange type of pain when all my writing has been taken away from me (in the form of a computer stroke,) just means that I so identify with myself as an individual that losing the concrete manifestations of that self feels almost like losing a part of my own personal internal community.
No one can exist in a vacuum, and I believe we can only reach our greatest spiritual potentials as members of a partnership, a family, a larger whole. But it helps sometimes to recognize the importance of our alone-ness as well. Our modern world is one of alienation and loneliness, characterized by fake online relationships, distant communication, and the ability to survive without ever having to leave your house. This is of course an unhealthy extreme. But interestingly, in that state, we actually lose our sense of self even more than we would as part of a real community. The trick is knowing how to be part of something, while maintaining yourself as an individual, and knowing when to take the time to make that happen (see previous post). Maybe being alone isn’t so bad, as long as you know how to define that state, and use it towards enhancing those times when you are with others. I could go on and on, but I’ll stop now. (btw, don’t misinterpret what I’m saying here, obviously it’s not so bad to lose a computer, I’m just using the feeling as a starting point for these other thoughts.)
See, anything can be turned into a philosophical treatise!
Anyway that’s me these days. Sitting around, writing in journals (my hand hurts SO much,) wishing I had my laptop back and healthy again, and finding meaning in even the most mundane experiences. It’s a good life.
Love, shira
PS just got back from the computer place. They said HP just sent out a thing about how certain models have internal hardware issues that may need to be sent in to be fixed. Mine was on the list. Argh. Looks like I might not have a laptop for quite some time.
