The West Hartford Reservoir, Connecticut

by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

Peter Sellers' last and funniest(?) movie is "Being There," a political satire based on mistaken identity. In it, Shirley MacLaine in a black negligee, frustrated in her attempts to seduce Sellers, asks, so, so willing to comply, "What do you like?", to which Sellers replies, misunderstood again, "I like to watch."

Misunderstood myself, I like to listen. Previously and for decades, I made great use of a Walkman device that I plugged into my computer, receiving battery charge and content therefrom. Thanks to LibriVox, a massive online library of recorded books, I would listen to the classics while I did my extended sessions of yoga, twice a day. Finally, that small, slim workhorse gave up the ghost.

Now, with so many hours staring at this screen, and my eyesight declining, my new best friend is the app that reads the screen aloud to me. Much of my work, somewhat repetitive, affords me the opportunity to listen to things while I'm performing the routine. The job often requiring less than 100% of my concentration, I am able to listen to things that require less than 100% of my concentration. When the article (or Youtube video) to which I am listening makes a particularly interesting point, or my work requires all of my attention for a moment, I just stop and rewind the audio.

Recently encouraged by my daughter, I started using my New Orleans library card to check out audiobooks online. Very recently I finished listening to my first selection, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, laughing along with it while I rode my stationary cycle, washed my dishes, swept my floor, worked on my computer... I next listened to a collection of Gore Vidal's essays The Last Empire. Then, just last night (Tuesday) I began Steinbeck's Travels with Charley.

The West Hartford Reservoir, Connecticut
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Before I gave up on it later in the evening, last night, when Steinbeck was still driving his camper truck up through New England, my WhatsApp beeped, and, seeing that it was a message from my N., ex-wife, I paused the author in his uninspired travels.

N., who like my daughter also lives in New Orleans, sent me a message along with three photos of a winter's night view across a frozen reservoir with which I am very familiar, testifying that the Northern Lights were visible in West Hartford, Connecticut, where I grew up and we were married.

Doubtful, I suspected that the photos were AI forgeries. So many are these days. I was especially disbelieving as the view was not to the north, but eastward; atypical in itself, but in this specific instance a direction in which the lights of the city of Hartford should have largely obscured the Aurora Borealis. No, my ex assured me, it had been reported on the news.

Now convinced, I expressed my surprise, stating that as a Connecticut resident for over half a century, I had never seen the Northern Lights there. Then responding to her lament that she would love to see them, I recounted, in a series of voice messages, the once, or maybe twice, that I in fact had, far up in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.

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My first and verified sighting happened while attending dinner at the former commune and now land trust just down the mountain a short ways from my place high up in the woods. I was with a few friends at a pondside barbecue, venison cooked over applewood, when someone announced excitedly, "The Northern Lights!" The rest of us shifted 20 yards to where the treeline did not block our view, and there they were; whispy, sometimes green, sometimes purple celestial theater curtains, shimmering, moving as if being gently blown by some celestial breeze.

The other time that I may have seen the Lights I was farther up the mountain in the four-acre meadow in front of my house walking at night with my cousin Larry. The meadow was full of fireflies in that season. Clouds of them, with the benefit of proximity, performed, at least as impressively as the starry heavens in that remote, light-free night. In their larval form the species also expresses its luminosity along the ground. When, during that enchanted stroll, Cousin Larry asked me what was glowing in the grass around us, I answered, "Those are the fairies." Doubting my response, when he then bent down and picked up a glowing grub, I remonstrated with him, "Please don't pick the fairies."

On that same walk, looking at the sky over and behind the ridge that marked the eastern boundary of my property, I saw an indistinct yet well-defined narrow column of light, stretching upward from behind the ridge, a subtle dusky purple against the night's black. Not entirely trusting my eyes, I asked Larry to look in that direction and tell me if he saw anything. "Yes," he replied. "What?" I asked. "I see a column of purple light." Again, as with the Lights last night in Connecticut, the column was in the east, not north.

All that relayed by voicemail to my ex-wife in New Orleans, our exchange concluded, I went back to Steinbeck and my work on the computer. Not ten minutes later, while Steinbeck was still in Vermont, he recounted seeing the Aurora Borealis himself, using the same analogy that I had used, that of a theatrical curtain; an interesting coincidence that gets better.

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Shortly before my exchange with my ex, before I started listening to Travels with Charley, when I was listening to one of the final essays of Vidal's The Last Empire, I was preparing for publication the latest installment of Charles Miller's wonderful series "The Computer Corner." The piece, "A Message in a Bottle," explains the unreliability of text messages, the lower priority those written messages receive from cell phone carriers, how sometimes they are not sent, or at least not successfully received. Having just finished the coding and posted Charles' article to a page, the narrator of the audiobook recited the title of the next essay by Vidal, a piece written to the president-elect in the year 2000, "A Letter Unsent."

The word "coincidence" has assumed a pejorative connotation; "That's just a coincidence." Jung introduced a positively-valued alternative term for two things that happen at the same time, "synchronicity."

Shakespeare sometimes includes plays within his plays. Similarly, if you will permit me the comparison to the Bard, last night for me contained a synchronicity within a synchronicity, or, at least, a compounding of coincidences.

Life, we are told, is what you make it. What then do I make, what meaning do I attribute to last night's pair of synchronicities? Regarding the first, without, I think, stretching the point too far, I can say that I also have messages that are not getting through, or only imperfectly so; I too am sending out messages in a bottle.

This morning, while listening to an article, I learned that the solar storm that descended on us last night was the largest in 35 years, creating a magnificent Aurora Borealis as far south as Southern California. This brilliantly illustrates my conviction that there are unseen forces (in this case charged solar particles) influencing our lives, that there is another world below and above this world of appearances. I believe that synchronicities are signs of this web of meaning behind our seemingly random physicality. Like a gambler gets on a lucky roll, synchronicities occur to tell us something.

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Decades ago, I heard someone observe, "I stopped watching my favorite soap-opera for a year, and when I tuned back in, nothing had changed, everything was the same." I feel similarly about the political podcasts that for a while were part of my listening diet. I listened to both sides, observing that both were ugly and divisive. My politics is neither left nor right, but local.

Our societal decline, recently precipitous, seems due to social media. Since people are unlikely to abandon their screens, the solution, it seems to me, is healthier, non-partisan, social media. That, in my reading, is community-based internet. Lokkal is local internet, the community online. If you want people to behave more civilly, provide them with more civil, community-moderated internet.

I don't want to say anything to jinx it, but lately Lokkal seems to be on a roll; people are lighting up; things are falling into place. With a bit of luck, and a few more synchronicities, soon my message may be received; Lokkal's vision will get through; the yet otherworldly will soon be made brilliantly visible, like the Northern Lights, shimmering across the sky for anyone with eyes to see.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, public internet, building community, strengthening the local economy. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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