Internet

Iso-mandala No. 177 (October 2020)

Each person their own internet. Sometimes I wonder about my internet. My little corner of the internet, I mean. Not that it’s a corner, given my reach extends in seconds to all the world’s “imagined corners”. The only corner in this exchange is the corner where I am found at the time, in home, library, fast-moving Mitsubishi. Surfing like a Californian, objects pop up in my path, products I lack interest in, reminders I long since chose to forget. Waves may be a long read, idle interruptions, a mean meme dumper that tempts me to shut down. My path is dripping with clicks, but to what extent this is my act of will, or the waves’, it’s a matter of guesswork, of calculated chance. My invisible path closes over each time, like a lost line of Keats. My internet was a sandpit, before it became a desert; a paddle pool in the days before it was tsunamis. It’s a relief to meet someone who has never used a computer. I try talking about my internet in the third person. His internet is a dragon that daily may flaunt colours extravagant, or then breathe a fire of dismay. His internet is a toy, a dream, a rest, it will bury him in images, or weary him unaccountably with geometric melancholia. It's useless keeping these grammar games going when war breaks out into my internet. Live updates turn events into sports coverage, as each news flash corrodes my hardy emotions. Dozens of reactions to updates by friended friends lend to the corrode, as I effortfully try to meet them halfway. The corner of the screen is the centre of my minute-long attention as I try to think of what to say next. War is over, if want it. Left to its own devices it would become more storage. It takes me to make it get up and out in the morning. When the power zeroes, when servers crash, when I’m feeling bereft, I simply remember my favourite sites and then I don’t feel so what do I feel but the blank screen and the view outside my Windows 10, the common explanations that my internet calls home. My internet is but the everlasting threads that trace from thereabouts, home. The giddy bytes that bring transitory luxury, a plethora of postcards, will turn to rust. My internet seems so transfixed by selfish motives, could it ever be reduced to selfless giving? A huddled attention-seeker seeking what I might give, is it much more than a tireless exposé of directions home? If home is the comforts we find each day where we belong, now? Or the day of the plug arrives, the day when the plug is the server serving up this multiverse of imagined corners, the plug pulled on my little corner of the internet too, as it happens, so that home must be found somewhere else, beyond my Windows, the upgrades of my Apple, somewhere that is there anyway, having been so before my internet was ever tiptoed into, as if by some accident.