The fourth of this month, translated…
What writing symbolized, is this constant trying to understand the word, at the same time, having our dreams understood by others, like the lone tower, sending out the weak signals, hoping, that one day, an alien from outerspace who’d intercepted the message will visit, to give to, or even, break this signaling station………
Li-Feng Chih
Professor Guo-Nan: in this exchange, it’d reminded of the awes of life you’d had in your “Green Cherries”: how the ancient people spread their wings, and allowed the blue birds to guide them, and now, people got used to using e-mails, and messaging one another on Facebook, and, there’s that loss of written communication now. Like the verses of Shu-Yen Hsia, “Age of Facebook, Age without the Dreams”, in the communication apps, in the social networking sites, in the multi-million pixels, we’d posted our lives’ goings-on, renew our photos on the profiles, the strange and familiar faces, followed by the streams of what we were currently up to, the winters that preceded each and every spring. Everybody became possessed, in exposing oneself, and the speed of transfer of the messages is measured in seconds, minutes, even, nanoseconds.
I’d heard the high school students’ using the communications app to post the goings on in their lives as “what’s happened now”, and several hours later, the activities aren’t the same any more, without any traces, vanished, I’d only logged off for one day, and, the world rotated to a brand new version, and, I’d wanted to borrow the “theory of unmoving objects from the monk in the Jing Dynasty, “The things that didn’t arrive today, won’t be here again; the things that are here today, can’t be returned back to the past”, the realities of now, is only saved in this parallel wormhole of time, with the condensed quantum measurements, and, the life of yesterday already got lost, like that thinning out smoke, rising up in the air.
But the key to al of it is, what is the “communication” we’re, discussing about? Like those debates in the stories of historical times, the soliloquies of the masters; the battling out of great minds, or the recent war on the rebirth of literatures of the local lands……………and, all of these instances, were merely, the cross sections of the current time, that spark that will, be gone in an instant.
………
You know how I’m a nerd, actually, I’d, abhorred interactions with people I didn’t know, and these past few years I’d written the articles, and sometimes, my families started asking me of the “literary realm” (I’d found, that as this term evolved, it’d had that defaming tone like “hot online” and such), and being asked, “are you standing next to these authors, whose essays were published in the textbooks? Did you hang out with them a lot? How did you get acquainted with them? How did your group of literary discussions come about?”, I’d felt flustered, not known, how to explain.
On the term, “of the same levels”, I’d actually, googled it. Turns out, that it was a meteorology term, meaning the transition place between the flows of air. More widely stated, we’re all, thrown inside the middle of this, bell curve, we are, the degravitated users of software, and all I’d known about them, I’d gotten off their Facebook pages, I’d put that layer of coat of paint over their wall of activities. And it seemed, that we’d, done, communicating, like I’d become, an old friend to them, like I was, their neighbors, someone who’d, watched them as they grew up.
………
And this, is how communication IS lost, with the advances in modern day technologies, because we are all now, interacting with one another online, without needing any face-to-face contacts with each other, living inside the ivory towers we’d built up, living as, parallels that traveled at the same frequency, seemingly, that we were, intersecting, with what we’re, talking to one another about, but, we are all, on separate paths, we just think we were, intersecting, but we’re actually, N-O-T!
Life, the Obstacle Course 