We used to rent one another’s voices in a patchwork of yarn. Holding engines to our cheeks, a filament’s tension separated us and sustained the pauses in our conversation. The sound of one’s breathing, a troubadour of static. Now, fragmentation is a requirement, as is the migration and transitivity of homing pigeons, and the mediation of the subnet mask. As planets avoid collisions, the haecceity of a package depends upon its relations. Lanterns of interference fade into latency. Against cylinders and the coiling of copper, modems, and the entelechy of a monad. Against the switching of circuits, parcels.
2
Byzantine generals on ridges above the city, calculating to avoid syncopation. Their buffers are bloated with vagaries of small-talk, as some have passed corrupted or stale arguments. We don’t have telepathy or luminiferous ether. We have the confetti of our incomplete sentences, the belatedness of information theory, and a protocol. Decentralization knits a sweater of our beliefs. Why are we fighting? Why despoil? We must break the symmetry of this haunted waltz, and pepper our frail exchange with redundancy, or with the magnetic convection of iron.
3
Gottfried, you had more than datagrams and sockets. You never threw a busy signal. I’m texting you from this hot air balloon, representing the axiomatic plenitude in unicode strings. The repeating figure of a sawtooth distributes a particular type of nostalgia, the unrecoverable wholeness of your ear. Cast out, between articulations of the commonplace, an exponential back-off in our connection. All terrestrial communication seems a form of prayer, a dilation of the rift between essence and accident. The glimmer of a delicate thread pulses in time, a particle of language, a transmission.