Tuesday, October 18, 2005
I have been getting cryptic emails recently. There is a peculiar quirk in one of my email accounts, where it lists all the incoming messages marked as junk. I can see within the list of messages marked for deletion who has written me junk, and what subject heading they have masked the junk under, but filling the rest of the space allotted for each email is a list of random words. They seem like code for something, like crop circles. They dare me to open them up, to read them and figure out their mysterious puzzles. They know I am a problem solver. I click on one such email, sent by someone named Gerardo Vickers.
"Tomb Raider cookie recipies which one?" he asks me. I stare at the kitchen for a few moments before I continue. "Asian Verizon strike in 1839 investigated blackouts as far as I know, blame Telletubbies Paris. Movies? I'm terribly sorry, don't go that way internet, I'll call back. Cheer up! Moon Landing Harley Davidson New Year Winamp."
Cheer up.
Now I am not technologically savvy, but neither am I too out-of-touch to guess that these messages are not secret communications. I have a rational, boring, drably-dressed voice in my head that tells me quite clearly that this is computer-generated text designed to fill in space for whatever reason that space might need to be filled in random unsolicited mass-distribution emails. It seems logical; efficient minds produce these things, computer minds. Space must be filled.
I also have a rational, drably-dressed roommate who tinkers with computers and who delights in my inability to add footnotes to my papers, or to program my web browser to block pop-up advertisements. I am sure he understands these email codes, and I am also sure that he wants me to understand them too. I can imagine the sound of his tongue clicking wetly against the roof of his mouth as he describes the logic behind the seemingly illogical, explaining away the gaps in my understanding and with them the shadowy recesses where my imagination germinates.
I want to be my father, frustratingly dense and mashing computer keys in some secret retaliation against the world for knowing more than he does about internet search engines. I want to play the part of the superstitious native, whose curiosity allows him to construct meaning where his own mind exceeds its reach and bumps against the horrible and wildly exciting void. I want these codes to confuse even their makers in their own complexity – a code within a code, discovered and deduced by a naïve, procrastinating nobody. I’ve heard that the power of faith only works for the true believers, even if that faith involves a religious likeness on the concrete wall of a highway abutment. Whether or not those who flock to the Fullerton Avenue underpass to see the Virgin Mary honestly expect that doing so will bring them health or blessing, I cannot fairly say, but the great thing about this belief is that there are great wide gaps between it and the cold, functional world. Across these gaps swim the un-constrainable human mind, and with it swim possibility, chance, and the mathematics of coincidence so that perhaps one visitor may drive home from that highway overpass and wake up the next day with her problems solved. It is in that stretch of her mind that she has found meaning in what passing motorists do not, and it is in that stretch that I chose to place my faith. To call it anything but faith diminishes not the power of belief, but the power of imagination in the face of true adversity.I know it is impossible, but yet still I can picture a tired, neon-lit Mr. Vickers hunching down in front of his computer screen, his eyes open wide with the rapture of success as he reads aloud to the empty corners of his lonely room what I have finally written back to him.
He spent eighteen years in front of the piano. I would sit beside him and play through the pages, my notes staggering and adolescent between his low tones. His music sheets were foreign script, code that kept me at arm’s length while his fingers danced through hardwood and ivory shadows, to places I could not imagine.
