There is a Gap between the digital space of technology and the erotic field of fleshy engagement between self and other, a fleshy entanglement with all its ambiguities and mess, with all its spoken and unspoken gestured desires and appeals, where all the follies and absurdities of trying to say what one means and to mean what one says is nakedly there impregnating the other, where the lies of a hidden mind betray themselves on the face? What are words spoken at the terminal when they are no longer inscribed within the gestures of the flesh?
Where is the sky in the digital world? Where is the earth, the flesh of nature? Where is the depth of this space? Its vertically has been usurped by the horizontality of an infinite expanse that eclipses or nearly so the human scale of time and space. And where is the other, the community of others when we meet at and through the terminal, where each and all of us now have a terminal identity, an image presence on a screen that has no haptic sense, a space then where we are quite specifically out of touch with each other, a disembodied image, which not weighted with flesh can float free and be anywhere in the digital world, a spectacle of a disembodied self? There are no kisses in this terminal world.
(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?
(ee.cummings)
There are no kisses in this terminal world!
