3am, the Telephone Disease
Kurt Vonnegut has a great few pages—in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, I think—where he talks about his late-night dialing disease. He describes draining a bottle of wine or so, late at night when everyone else is sleeping, and he describes how against his better judgment his hands begin to dance on the telephone dial, and how they summon the operator, and how he gives the operator names of people he hasn’t spoken to in years, wishing and hoping that she will have the oracular power to put him through, to convey to him the voices from a lost world.
There is something quaint about this vision, something telephone-age—and yes, we still use them, but it is hard to imagine someone sitting up late with a telephone as I imagine Kurt Vonnegut sitting, half-drunk in a pool of lamplight, in eerie cricket-punctuated silence, calling the operator with hope and trepidation, like a fisherman casting a net into the deep and hoping to bring up something good.
We don’t use the telephone for that anymore, we use computers; but I’m thinking, as I sit here in a pool of lamplight, with the quiet of 3am outside my bedroom window, that Vonnegut’s wistful, half-wild nostalgic feeling is still possible, and also that for all computers give us, for all they put us in control so we no longer have to rely on the connecting Sibyl at the other end of the line, they don’t give us everything.
To wit: I’m trying to find someone who can’t be found. Really, really can’t. My dance through the internets turns up pieces of things I already know: co-authorship of a scientific paper in 2001, the names of relatives, a list of places lived, the towns and phone numbers of other people with the same and similar names. Offers of more detailed reports for $7.95, $39.95, an extra $20 for “rush delivery”; I find the traces of an industry devoted to late-night tappers at keyboards, an industry growing rich or at least making a living off the human inclination to suddenly, urgently miss someone, late at night.
But I don’t find what I’m looking for. A person whose subsequent history seems likely to hold inchoate clues and messages that are necessary to make sense of the world, RIGHT NOW. A person who disappeared. A person who had the audacity to so something as old-fashioned and in fact, I’d come naively to believe impossible, as disappearing.
There is something quaint about this vision, something telephone-age—and yes, we still use them, but it is hard to imagine someone sitting up late with a telephone as I imagine Kurt Vonnegut sitting, half-drunk in a pool of lamplight, in eerie cricket-punctuated silence, calling the operator with hope and trepidation, like a fisherman casting a net into the deep and hoping to bring up something good.
We don’t use the telephone for that anymore, we use computers; but I’m thinking, as I sit here in a pool of lamplight, with the quiet of 3am outside my bedroom window, that Vonnegut’s wistful, half-wild nostalgic feeling is still possible, and also that for all computers give us, for all they put us in control so we no longer have to rely on the connecting Sibyl at the other end of the line, they don’t give us everything.
To wit: I’m trying to find someone who can’t be found. Really, really can’t. My dance through the internets turns up pieces of things I already know: co-authorship of a scientific paper in 2001, the names of relatives, a list of places lived, the towns and phone numbers of other people with the same and similar names. Offers of more detailed reports for $7.95, $39.95, an extra $20 for “rush delivery”; I find the traces of an industry devoted to late-night tappers at keyboards, an industry growing rich or at least making a living off the human inclination to suddenly, urgently miss someone, late at night.
But I don’t find what I’m looking for. A person whose subsequent history seems likely to hold inchoate clues and messages that are necessary to make sense of the world, RIGHT NOW. A person who disappeared. A person who had the audacity to so something as old-fashioned and in fact, I’d come naively to believe impossible, as disappearing.
posted by katherine | 3:27 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home