...mail

So I saw something tonight that’s in development (am I allowed to be blogging about this? I will be judicious.) And it was awesome, even in its un-doneness. Writer-director-guru Aya Ogawa and tech-arts-guru Irwin Chen workshopped an early (and very unfinished) version of a theater show tentatively titled “Artifact” as a part of CUNY’s Prelude Festival. I will disclose few relative details—what do they matter anyway when they are subject to change—but this show did inspire me to think about email communication in the present age.

It’s funny. Email is generally perceived as the most off-hand, causal of forms, and yet, with its cursory computer-based text format, it’s more prone to revision than say… a handwritten letter. Maybe this just hit home for me tonight because I’m presently keeping a (handwritten) journal that will be reviewed by someone not myself, and I’m actually fretting about the spelling of those stupid words I can never spell correctly, but it was incredibly impactful to watch someone who you don’t even know (and can’t even see, really, their back is to you) to struggle to type out a letter that is… important to them.

In the way of salutations, in the way of how letters expressed real sentiment. But typed. They wrote, spontaneously. They paused, and reread. They deleated, by highlight. Other times, it was by cursor backspace.

We’ve all had those emails that are important, (emails that are letters?), where you edit yourself, because you can. That scene left me wondering, where do those feelings/ that initial sentiment/ go? It can’t just disappear. Energy expended only changes forms. What if… all of that energy we put into our super-composed emails… that form that is supposed to be so freehand… what if those original feelings are still, somehow, imbedded in the spaces in between?