This
Journal

October
1999

Last night I got to be Boss of the Door again. Only this was a much simpler task than previously. Absolutely nobody could go through this door, and absolutely nobody tried. So I was happy.

This was the Homecoming Dance, held (for the first time, I'm told) in the school's newer, bigger gym, The Salvi Arena. All I had to do was stand or sit here and allow no one to pass. So from 8 to 11 last night, there I was. (Could Security Guard be in my future? Can you see me fifteen or twenty years from now wheezing around some dark warehouse, museum, or office building, rattling doors in my potbelly uniform?) The night was painless. I got to listen to the music, watch the elegant-awkward crazy kids, chat with a wonderful colleague, and receive an unexpected stipend for my service.

Homecoming is a fairly threadbare high school ritual, but it persists. I suppose it was originally conceived as a way to welcome returning alumni, but we don't make much of this anymore. Why would they want to show up in the fall anyway? Still, if an alum happens to show up to look around the school or take in the football game, I suppose nobody's going to object. No, Homecoming persists because it breaks the routine and everybody likes a party. First there's Spirit Week, and then there's The Game, and then there's The Dance.

Carmel High School seems to elect a Queen and King but they don't make much of it. In fact, last night there were two large rattan chairs onstage, but they remained empty. I suppose the King and Queen were out there somewhere in the crowd having a great time. The stage itself remained unoccupied until a group jumped up, pushed the chairs aside and began to dance. Judging by crowd reaction, the evening's highlight occured when the backlit silhouettes of a group of shirtless young men (the football team?) appeared up on the track/balcony doing a little dance.

Today I just hung out. After Mass I read the paper and came back up here to my room and read a bit more of Birkerts, then checked my e-mail, then read some more, and listened to Robert Johnson.

Robert Johnson. For all the hype on this old legendary devil-dealing, woman-stealing, killed-before-his-time bluesman, the music still speaks. I don't know what most people hear today, but I hear something wild. It's good to know these sides are preserved on CD; they'll continue to matter to some people. But it's a miracle that they can speak at all. These songs come sailing through the air, exotic as the ghostly shakuhachi of Japan, to make us wonder what world, what complex tangle of history, could have made them.

"We have liberated data, but in doing so we have also wreaked havoc on context, which we might think of as the home for data. We live, in George Trow's memorable phrase, 'in the context of no context.'"

So I'm reading Birkerts on the way electronic media are changing our relation to our selves, each other, and the world...and I'm checking my e-mail...and remembering last night's dance...and listening to antique blues...and watching a PBS show on a train trip across Asia (The Vostok Express)...and eating way too many cookies. I'm all out of context. There is no context other than me in this room to which I bring the world in bits. Birkerts mentions this old tale by Forster called "The Machine Stops" and I remember it from long ago.

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.
Ernst Fischer