Today I'm flying back to New York from Mexico City. I just spent five days there, with no specific mission in particular.
I traveled mostly with my friend who knew the city well. One of my favorite trips was to the Cineteca Nacional, an expansive, lively, and new campus-like movie theater that showed art films and documentaries. On the last day of my trip, I explored by myself.
I realize now I've been without an iPhone for almost three months. And it's been about a month since I haven't had a phone at all. Traveling alone in a foreign city without a phone made the fact much more poignant.
When I lost my iPhone back in February, I couldn't bring myself to replace it exactly as before. Instead I opted for an iPod Touch paired with a basic brick phone, using them in tandem. I figured the brick would be more for emergencies, or for when someone really wanted to talk to me and was willing to speak in the luxury of realtime. And the iPod I could basically use like my iPhone ... simply without the phone part.
But then my brick phone died in April. I was officially phoneless with just a funny blue iPod. I've been waiting for this "Zanco Tiny Phone" (a basic T9 phone the size of a thumb) to come in the mail, but it hasn't arrived yet. But I also haven't checked on its status. I'm happily in between.
I started reading "DIVING INTO THE WRECK," the Fall 2017 reader for the Critical Practices class at the Yale School of Art lead by Dean Marta Kuzma. The reader's introduction explains, "This course borrows its title from Adrienne Rich's poem written in 1973 at the beginning of the second wave of feminism, in the wake of the civil rights movement, amid the student protests against the Vietnam War, and in reflection of the author's own process of self-discovery and personal emancipation. As a work that focuses on the isolation of life as it does on a sense of shared community, Rich's poem brings forth a perspective that there can be no understanding of the 'wreck' without becoming one with the wreck."
In the past year, I've been trying to figure out my relationship to the wreck. Last year I had to take a break from swimming around in it to "survive modern life" for a while. I admit—the break has been helpful. But I'm not divorcing the grid or trying to become a calm guru forever. I wonder: will we each find a comfortable in our relationship to technology? And why does it always feel like such a lonely, personal journey? Is it that technology and the internet is still in its teenage years, so it's just chaotic by default? And we haven't made sense of it together as a society? Are we just tweaking our preferences until we die?
If technology contributes to, well probably fuels, this wreck, it makes sense a comfortable spot may be ephemeral or even pointless to seek out. I keep turning over my pillow to experience the cold side for a beautiful microsecond only to realize it's still hot from my brain thinking too much.
A line keeps echoing back to me. Artist Sara Magenheimer, who I interviewed for The Creative Independent earlier this year, says "Allow contradiction and permit multiples." Perhaps I can sleep easy now, the wreck inside each of us too.