JCK-at-large SITE

Alas, our best friend turns out to be the enemy.  Just when we were getting to enjoy videoconferencing with Zoom and the like, with all their miraculous instant connectivity, people are finding them too much of a good thing. 

Speaking from Covid isolation, Jeremy Ballenson writes: “There is little doubt the software is helping us through this crisis. But many of us are getting mentally exhausted from videoconferencing—whether for a work meeting or an online dance class…. We are experiencing nonverbal overload. With Zoom, a ten-person meeting is often set up so that each person stares right at you for the entire meeting. This has advantages… but it is also draining” (WSJ, April 3, 2020).”  

The Harvard Business Review calls it “Zoom Fatigue” and says, “Constant videoconferencing has impacted the brain in complicated ways and taken a toll…. making us uncomfortable and tired. The intense focus on words and sustained eye contact can become exhausting” (Family Med, Dec 7, 2020).

Yet “Zoom fatigue” only touches the surface of the problem.  The really destructive side of ZoomConferencing is more sinister, the one thing that immediacy in communication cannot avoid: ZoomConferencing always destroys absence.  

Nor is this a small loss.  When you destroy absence, you destroy longing.  When you destroy longing, you destroy the greatest love poetry and half the songs of an entire civilisation.

Think about it.  Could Kathleen Ferrier ever have composed and recorded “Blow the Wind Southerly,” if she knew full well that a Zoom call could blow her lover into sight faster than the wind?

“They told me last night there were ships in the offing

And I hurried down to the deep rolling sea

But my eye could not see it wherever might be it

The bark that is bringing my lover to me…

Blow the wind southerly, southerly southerly

Blow bonnie breeze bring my lover to me.”

Such a timeless song!  Yet it simply sinks in the rolling sea, without absence.  

For that matter, how do you sing, “In the wee small hours of the morning” with a Zoom invitation at your fingertips?

“In the wee small hours of the morning, when the whole wide world is fast asleep, 

You lie awake and think about the girl… and never ever think of counting sheep…. 

In the wee small hours of the morning, that’s the time you miss her most of all.”

I say it’s destructive. It strikes at the heart of our finest, most florid moments. How could Robert Browning even begin to imagine the seaside scene of “Two Hearts Beating as One?” without the distance between them? The whole poem throbs with an absence which has made hearts grow fonder:

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,

Then the two hearts beating each to each!

Speaking of hearts, what heart could be so calloused as not to be moved by the speaker’s sigh in Tennyson’s “Break, Break Break:”   

“But O for the touch of a vanished hand, 

And the sound of a voice that is still!…. 

The tender grace of a day that is dead, 

Will never come back to me.”

Of course Shakespeare wins the day for turning longing into lyric:  

How like a winter hath my absence been

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!

What old December’s bareness everywhere …

But longing and absence are not confined to the literary classics.  Goodness, where would Country Music be these their staples? 

Your smile lights up the room like a candle in the dark.

It warms me through and through.

I guess that I had dreamed that we would never be apart.

But that dream did not come true.

Missing you is just a part of living, Missing you feels like a way of life….

And what about Vince Gill with his, “Nobody Answers When I Call Your Name?” 

Oh the lonely sound of my voice calling is driving me insane

And just like rain the tears keep falling, nobody answers when I call your name.

In short, we need longing.  These days, it seems we must rise to its defence.  Longing is the font from which all blessings flow.  Even the psalmist concurs: “He satisfies the longing soul” — and that is a much larger topic.

Yet quality longing we shall never have without absence.  This we must find a way to protect.  Pristine absence, whole, intact and uncompromised, is under attack by a ruthless horde of “cloud platforms” promising immediacy-at-your-fingertips anytime, anywhere.  Indeed, Zoom Conferencing is just one of a legion of instant-communication demons that threaten to destroy our private lives.    

It will take a voice of great authority to send this Gadarene herd into the deep.