the analog sea
When I am active online but inactive on my blog for extended periods of time, I return to it remembering why I felt the need for a digital garden to begin with. No images leave me in peace: they all want something from me.
My May has been online. With exams over and my remote job ensuring I never leave the house ever, I haven’t seen much of the outside world these past few weeks. Though I had assumed when I worked in the office that working from home would allot me more time to create, I’ve found more than anything that the usual daily inspirations have run dry. Though I try writing about the weather or the beauty of the world outside my window, I can’t seem to put pen to paper the way I could sitting on outside on campus (or even at my office desk, which sat in a hallway outside a bustling block of cubicles). My real life has become an interruption between screens in which I am left gasping for air. I haven’t written anything of substance in weeks.
Enter The Analog Sea Review: An Offline Journal. Grasping at reality-shaped straws during a recent interruption, I wandered the periodical section of my local independent bookstore looking for something to sink my teeth into. Just as I find most of my books, I reached for the prettiest cover I could find and flipped to the first page of the delicate hardcover: ”The question is no longer whether our future is digital but to what degree we want it to remain human.” I closed the book and hurriedly purchased two volumes.
In the car examining my treasure, a photograph slid out of one of the volumes I had purchased. It was a black and white photograph of a landscape with a message on the back encouraging me to write them a letter1. I appreciated it. I appreciated its ornateness, the element of surprise, and their request for mail (I love sending letters).
The volume I read that night spanned the offline conversational spectrum in a stream-of-consciousness style (which made it hard to put down). I felt my senses altered (or heightened) with every turn of the page. Everything the internet had dulled in me, every impulse I gave to something or someone else, every moment I spent entertained with a false reality spurred in me in an instant. I felt compelled to write. I felt the call to creative work. I felt real again.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe a book isn’t capable of all of this rousing of feeling, if something clicked in me that had nothing to do with the essays nor the poems nor the paintings. Then again, I remember why I felt the need for a digital garden in the first place: because there is no questioning that our future is digital, but I would like for the internet I am forced to live in (through work and school and life) to remind me of myself, to be escapable, and to remain human. So, yes, it seems a book is capable of changing me. And I, human, plant it here.