Middle Ground

Inspired by Mr. Sherlock Holmes herself.

Communication

There is too much silence in life. Sure, we’ve got Twitter and Facebook and WordPress and other modes of communication and platforms for “free speech”, but how much of that speech is useful? How much of it is said for the right reasons? To the right people?

Most of what is said turns into background noise for all the words and questions we turn over in our heads. Half-baked ideas that get pushed aside for some “how do you do? The weather is great today, isnt it?”, questions that get smothered by the repetition of to-do lists, things that need to be screamed out and arent, simply because we forgo quality for quantity, authenticity for some nice warm fuzzy feeling that we get inside by looking at the number of “friends” we’ve got on our “friends list” or contacts on our mobile phone, or views on our blog.

How much of what we say goes to waste? And where does all this lost energy go?

Is this what communication has come to?

I just finished watching Blood Diamond. You know, that film about how diamonds are forcibly mined, smuggled and bought buy people all over the world? The one which ends with a guy finally getting his family together from a diamond he hid. That leaves you with the quote “there are still 200,000 child soldiers in Africa”. Fuck knows, there may be a couple thousand more. And for every child there’s a mother, father and sibblings that’re grieving. But you know what the problem is? The problem is – movies like that, articles like that, books like that…they might make someone cry for a minute, or write a cheque (as the movie aptly points out)…but then what? Then you feed your cat, lock the doors and blog about it.

Can you tell me how it made sense to you

dearest,

to sift through the sands that blew upon you

in heaps, mountains now; Can you tell me

how it made sense

to pick out grains from crumbling sea-shore castles

and hour-glasses and shells?

(Your fingers were dry when they found you,

the sand had caked about your fingernails.

There were traces of sand in the crease of your lips,

but they say it was an errant nail that finally did you in -

cut you up from the inside just the way you would have liked,

after the bath there was not a mark on your body

nothing to tell us you died fishing the grains from the mountain you were buried in)