Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
Steve Jobs, the inventor of Apple computers, said,
“I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.”
Six hours into my Zoom classes, my body goes upright fetal and my shoulders slouch, orphans huddled around the fake fire of the computer screen.
Remember Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave?” Remember what an apple did to Adam and Eve?
Remember the apple and Snow White?
“I ate civilization,” Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World, “and it poisoned me.”
It’s what I feel: poisoned.
I pull my spine up and back, up and back. My right side pings.
***
I love teaching. I love my students. I miss them. Zoom classes feel bloodless, lifeless.
Huddling around a computer all day feels bloodless, lifeless.
Zoombies, we call each other.
Zoom zoom, we say, like we’re going somewhere.
Funny, right?
***
Years ago, I did a different kind of work, more body than mind, more world than keyboard. I worked on an airplane, a flight attendant, a human in a human test tube, mostly that.
Turbulence was always something. Flight seems magical, out-of-body, ordinary until it’s not.
Once I was thrown mid-flight, our plane hit by lightning, then hit again by lightning. The plane dropped then steadied and I ended up five rows from where I’d been standing.
My back was a mess for a while after that. I saw a chiropractor in New York who cracked my spine so much it started to align itself like type when I stood in the shower.
I started thinking of my spine as Scrabble tiles. I started thinking of my spine as a Connect Four game.
That ping in my right side started back then and now when it surfaces, I think of it as a postcard, the way I think of scars as postcards, my body stamped with time and place and memory--I was here and here and here.
Physicality as presence. Physicality as meaning. Proof of life, maybe.
***
“Don’t you have your own seat in the back?” a passenger on that dropped plane said when I tried to buckle into a seat next to him, afraid for the next drop, and the next.
He looked at me like I might be contagious.
***
“Work gives you meaning and purpose,” the great Stephen Hawking said, “and life is empty without it.”
Stephen Hawking left his wife Jane for his nurse, who handled the work of caring for Stephen Hawking’s body so his brain could go on with its own kind of work.
When the nurse tired of it, Stephen Hawking went back to Jane, who handled the work of caring for Stephen Hawking’s body so his brain could go on with its own kind of work.
We are all contagious now.
***
Years later, when I was doing catering as a side gig, a woman, a judge whose politics were all sunshine and $200 haircuts, started to call me the help, but stopped before she could finish the word.
What came out was hel before she remembered my name, almost.
Laura, she said, and it sounded almost graceful and elegant, like a bow, like she meant it.
God, I hate that name.
***
My name is Lori, like the bird.
Lories are tiny, bright-colored. They love sugar. Lories, bird watchers say, are intense personalities, the party people of the avian kingdom. High spirited, high energy. Confetti with wings. Rainbows on meth.
Lories love nectar, which means they have mainly liquid poop, which, according to experts, Lories love to shoot great distances.
“They’re real assholes,” a woman who worked at the Pittsburgh Aviary said. “They’re pretty right up until they shit on your head.”
***
The New York chiropractor was a tiny man who climbed my back like a spider monkey and pressed his knee into my spine to get it to pop. He had a lovely assistant, a masseuse, blonde, pillow-titted, who’d hook me up to electrodes and rub me down with oils that would heat and keep heating long after the massage was done.
The airline I worked for gave me good insurance, great insurance. In the event of an incident, the benefits brochures said.
My little New York chiropractor told me stories of all the people he knew who were injured like me, but by elevators.
“Nothing so glamorous,” he said, and cracked a section of my spine he could name with a number.
***
Elevators drop a lot in New York, which is kind of like a plane dropping.
Imagine all those New Yorkers, headed to work, all those elevators going up and down all those spines of all those buildings, so many cables loose as rubber bands.
No matter what kind of work you do, maybe, the gravity of the world will hurt.
***
“It will cut,” Doug, one of the hosts of a TV show I love says, his catchphrase. The show is “Forged in Fire.”
“Forged in Fire” is a reality show where people make things—knives, mostly, but also swords and daggers. I love to watch people make things that matter. I love work that produces something tangible, even if that tangible thing is meant to kill.
Doug from “Forged in Fire” has the sweetest face. When he wields a knife or a sword to test it, he slices through bamboo and rope and bags of money. Sometimes he slices through a dummy made to bleed like a person.
When Doug slices through a dummy made to bleed like a person, he stops and smiles and changes his catchphrase.
“It will kill,” he says, and his smile is sweet as a blade of fresh grass.
***
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” Stephen Hawking said. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue torch and set the universe going.”
***
Beyond the occasional catering gig, I do not do the kind of work that makes things that can be tested. I move words around a page, creating worlds out of nothing. I teach online classes to students who sometimes turn their cameras on and sometimes are just blank, black rectangles with names. Some of my students are clever and film themselves on a loop so they seem present, forever and ever amen, Stephen Hawking’s black holes.
When I say I move words on a page, I mean on a computer. I mean my eyes hurt. I have special glasses now. They’re called Blue Lights.
***
Blue Light Specials—something from diners, way back. Something exciting from Kmart.
As a kid, I’d go with my mother to Kmart. I’d get an Icee, cherry flavored, and a soft pretzel. My mother would wait for the Blue Light Special to be announced over a loudspeaker and then we’d rush with the other shoppers toward a blue light that beamed, an alien beacon of mystery and savings, somewhere in the store.
Remember mysteries? Remember surprise? Remember believing in god and the other things of this world?
***
“When there’s no more room in hell,” Peter in the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead says, “the dead will walk the earth.”
***
At my computer, I pull my zoombie’d spine straight, shoulders back, flexing where wings might be if I had wings.
About Lories – they are social creatures. They live for the time they can spend outside their cages. Keep a Lori in a cage too long, it will start to self-mutilate.
***
I flex the muscles in my shoulders, strung tight as piano wires, and try to get my back to crack. I take my hands off the computer keyboard and crack my knuckles even though my mother warned against this.
“You’ll get man hands,” she’d say, but my hands still look pretty much like my hands. Older every day, but still.
When I worked the catering gig for the judge, I made sure to do my nails – polished, buffed pink. When I handed out appetizers, I made sure not to offend.
***
I love the way sometimes, when I’m fresh, my fingers move over the computer keyboard like a piano, the music of all those words.
***
When I was flying, we flight attendants were taught to keep our nails nice, and brace our bodies, prepare for the worst, hold our shoulders tight against our jumpseats, hands under thighs, palms up. We kept our hands under our legs to keep them from burning in the event of an incident, which is what we called such things. Our hands, we knew, were important, the tools we’d need to open an emergency exit, to lift and push, to help people.
We wanted, most of all, to help people.
***
The hel…, the judge with the lovely hideous politics said.
***
When someone at the judge’s catered party dropped a plastic fork onto the judge’s Persian rug, the entire room froze. I got down on my knees with a bottle of club soda and a rag and scrubbed and scrubbed at the spot that wasn’t there, just in case.
“In pity for my kind,” the poet James Wright said, about everyone at the party who was not the judge.
***
In Plato’s allegory, Socrates describes a group of people who have been chained to the wall of a cave. They’ve been there all their lives.
These people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire that’s burning just behind them, though the people never turn around to see it. The people give names to the shadows. The shadows become the people’s reality, though the shadows are not real at all.
The people stare and stare at the shadows, which are beautiful, the way they move and mesmorize and make the people’s eyes hurt a bit, all that play of light and dark.
The enlightened person, Socrates says, will ultimately turn to the real light. The enlightened person will break free from the chains and see light for light.
But most people, Socrates says, don’t want to leave the cave. They accept the life they’re given.
They call it real.
Jori Jakiela is the author of several books, most recently a memoir, BELIEF IS ITS OWN KIND OF TRUTH, MAYBE, which received the Saroyan Prize from Stanford University. She is a professor of English at The University of Pittsburgh's Greensburg campus. Her author website is http://lorijakiela.net.