Existing In Many Places: Telephone As Consolation

"It's The Next Best Thing To Being There."

Warning: This post is a bummer.

My sister Bibi once told me about an article in The New Yorker about a village, somewhere in the Middle East, where they got a telephone, and it ruined them. It broke down time, space, locality, and they began to fracture. I don’t remember the details.

But this is the problem that I see no solution to, at the moment, though we can try to counter it.

When I get a “text” it is happening in a separate time and place from where I am and where my mind is, but I can tend to it in a new moment, separate from the sender’s moment. We’re designed to interact in the same moment as one another, in person. Everything else feels like a kind of melancholy abandonment. You get an electronic piece of a person. They get an electronic piece of you.

But the great separator is time, which itself is an illusion. Not “what?” but “when?”

Atomized, we swarm in a cloud, seeking reunion, seeking wholeness, to return to a there-ness, in time and space, experiencing the fragmentation as biological melancholy, though we compensate best we can. The electronic haze tells us only that we got separated from our tribe. What had we done? The biological human can’t overcome it by understanding with our rational minds.

A persistent ache in the heart, a distant memory of not always being alone, left with only electronic means of “reaching” people.

I remember the beginning of “answering machines.” People left messages when we weren’t there. We called back.

I don’t know what to do about all of this.

But suddenly I see this well designed Henry Dreyfuss telephone (industrial designer who cared about the shape of the human head, and the shape of the receiver) as a kind of monster.

And yet, hearing voices on the telephone is comforting and good. How else would we hear any voices, how else would we speak to people?

At the same time, this ad introduces an alien concept: “You can telephone all over the world.”

Who in their right mind wanted to do that?

In Sweden in our kitchen we had a red cobra phone. On this phone, maybe once a month, we placed calls via an operator in the US to our father in New York. We sat waiting as the operator found out if he was available, then called back, and either told us he was unreachable or put the call through.

Since we had to argue about money, since I was bad at it, I dreaded the times the operator said he had been reached. Now I had to perform, and act mad.

Wracked with shame from head to toe, speaking from an invented child that did not exist, who was super clear about the family finances and all we lacked, adopting outrage I did not feel, watching my mother’s face for an approving smile. These must be some of the reasons I am hostile to the Telephone.