LETTERS FROM HOME: MESSAGES TO THE WORLD ABOUT THE WORLD FROM THE WORLD

May 22, 1997

Dear Jay,

It was a surprise and pleasure to receive your two recent e-mail messages. Though aware that everyone here has been given an e-mail address, it hadn't yet registered with me that someone might actually send a message.

Missives from Heidi and from a stranger in Wisconsin had also arrived. Heidi's living it up in Florida, learning from a tough ex-Detroit editor. The Wisconsonite used to live in Perry County and still keeps up with the local news. She just wanted to say hello.

In some ways, e-mail is better than the telephone because there are no busy signals, no message machines, no unanswered ringing, no awkward silences when nobody knows what to say.

The intriguing thing to me is the ability to send almost anyone a message instantly. Cutting out the U.S. Postal Service, fast becoming as outdated as the Pony Express. Communicating yes, no, maybe as quickly as the impulse arises, before your self-censor thinks of something else it would rather you do.

But the Mencken in me says these are not really letters. They exist only in Cyberspace. I can print them out but cannot sense the presence of the writer's palm as it guided the pen along the page, cannot love the Xed-out words my friend David used to fill his single-spaced letters with. Another friend, C.C. Fish, decorates the margins of her letters with drawings that say as much as her words.

A letter is a letter. E-mail is electronic conversation.

I also question whether e-mail is conducive to poetry. "Writing a poem is like making an artifact," Galway Kinnell says. "It is making something physical out of words."

A poem can be sent via e-mail but e-mail wasn't meant for writing one. Poetry communicates an awareness of the moment. E-mail seizes the moment to communicate.

Jean Bell Mosley recently wrote beautifully about the need all beings have to be given attention. Her words made me more receptive when I read these by Thomas Berry: "Our deepest desire is to share our riches, and this desire is rooted in the dynamics of the cosmos. What began as an outward expansion of the universe in the fireball ripens into your desire to flood all things with goodness. Whenever you are filled with a desire to fling your gifts into the world, you have become this cosmic dynamic of celebration, feeling its urgency to pour forth just as the stars felt the same urgency to pour themselves out."

If e-mail increases the flinging of attention and gifts into the world, it is the boon of the century.

Recently the newspaper reported the arrest of a man for manufacturing drugs. His address looked awfully familiar. The same address is on the letters that arrive at our house.

The guy's actual residence is exactly a block away. We traced this unfortunate typographical error to his arrest warrant. The correction was published, the jokes have been made.

Last week, after some guys decided to hold an impromptu keg party on our front yard, DC and I began wondering if all sorts of new friends might begin showing up at our front door now that we're living in a mistakenly known alleged drug house. Or whether mysterious packages without return addresses might begin arriving.

Having an address in Cyberspace suddenly sounds perfect.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.