Artifice in Recollection

I am struck by how available technology proposes to make the people I miss.
I can re-experience my times with them, their expressions and excitement. The things that I have loved; the time I treasure most for their presence. I have greater access to exact reproduction of the past than ever before.
And yet, it’s striking how unfulfilling, overall, the experience of going thru such exact recollection is.
I don’t miss these people or my life any less thru this voyeuristic reliving of my past.
I can’t talk with them or see their faces in motion.
What is striking is not so much that this is the case… (I don’t believe technology ever promised as good or better experience of others) but rather how in certain situations (in my own situation) this artifice seems to make being with out them worse; seems to make it more painful.

I recall being in Arizona during Americorps. Sitting out in the Pika bread hut, writing letters; I missed those I reached out to, but I was not overwhelmed by it.
The strength of my inner recollection was all I had to rely on and since my day to day experience always maintained a more powerful set of contexts than my distant memories, it was easier to miss people. It was fun even to take the time to dig thru old memories; To follow one person from experience to event, from event to moment, from moment to idea and back again.
Those memories were never as real as the ache in my arms from the day’s work; never as real as the tiredness that crept into my bones as I prepared for bed. Sleep was peaceful because that day’s reality overwhelmed any that came before.

But being able to dig thru my old recollections in the kind of minute detail afforded by digital photo sharing…it allows a visceral experience that is fully engrossing. That can overwhelm my current context. That can overwhelm the memories of the current day. And so I don’t just miss them. I re-experience being with them and wake to find myself without…

Perhaps worse is the capability of seeing their present without me.

All this up to date, day by day, minute by minute information about what all these people are doing…where they are and who they are with – and LOOK! More photos! Photos of them without you! Photos of them different than they were!

I find myself as a missing spectator in the back of all these pictures.

I more than recollect myself with them before, I imagine myself where they are now. I imagine if I could have been there when THAT occurred. When that picture was taken…when those people were there. And my present seems emptier for the absence of these imagined events and people.

Masterbation is the closest analogy I can think of. I go thru my photos and other’s photos because I yearn for the real thing. Because I want more than anything else to enjoy their real presence. But the inherent falsity of the experience…the fact that it cannot equal the full reality of being there only ends by making the pretending cheaper and the reality more idyllic.

I suppose also that my life now is rather empty. That these memories are all the more striking because of how far away a life so full and vibrant seems to me here.

Tonight was a night home. I work now 7 days a week. Doubles 4 days out of 7. And I don’t mind. Indeed, if I couldn’t come home and have a drink or two and turn on some movie I’ve already seen, being here would have the same sort of sensation as waiting in line at the post office.
Potentially endless and quietly infuriating.
And its not this place. Its my own placement in it. It’s the world I have created and how I am being in it.
Yet I can’t escape that this is how I feel.

It’s striking too how difficult reflection is. I need it. I feel better with it. It makes a tremendous difference to me to sit down and write things out, but I seldom make time to do so.

Life is easy here. I am competent at the tasks that face me on a day to day basis. There is no demand too great for my capabilities. And so there is no pressing need for a time to step back and figure out how to solve anything.

Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

I leave May 22nd.
…

I suppose I should post also my potential schedule for the trip prior to Peace Corps Training:

May 13th: Drive from Chicago
14th: Arrive at Wesleyan in PM
15th: Wes
16th: Wes
17th: Wes/ PM to NYC
18th: NYC
19th: NYC
20th: NYC/ PM to DC
21st: DC