My friend J. is looking for a girlfriend and has a profile up on match.com that I've been discussing with him during the last couple of weeks. Checking out his profile online now in a list of my "matches", I'm thinking "never again". I burned out of match.com pretty quickly last year. Post-breakup, it occurs to me that I probably wouldn't have liked M.'s profile (if he'd had one), unless he'd gone through it with the spell-checker. :-) Sometimes I am a total spelling and grammar snot. Every once in a while a profile catches my eye, though, and I think I know why.
I like action. I like pictures that show people doing things--not necessarily posing on a mountain, but ones showing someone getting caught on the face by a dog's tongue or slipping on something or laughing wildly. I like it when a camera catches people in the middle of their lives. I like it when people post those photos.
Some people create motion with their words. Sometimes, on a good day, I can too, but it doesn't come easily. A skillful writer hooks me or grabs me or just tugs my sleeve a bit, or startles me into noticing something and my mind moves the way my body would move--it stops to look, it leaps forward, it jumps wildly between associations, making me dizzy and alert when I'm trying to fall asleep or propelling me into wakefulness from a chaotic dream.
Even playing the violin is half about the motion for me. People used to say, "you like computers and music--ever combine them?" but it's the visceral sense of playing the violin that I love more than anything. The violin comes alive under my fingers, the sound literally goes into my bones. It changes me as I breathe in and send my air through the strings. What is music but motion between notes, the limitless number of ways to get from one note to the next?
And tango. Perfect motion to music, with a partner, is better than almost anything. But so much of it depends on the partner, and it's very seldom that I have a really lovely dance. That kind of motion transcends normal movement--I know my legs are moving, my feet are moving, but it feels like one of my flying dreams when I'm just floating, with no association between my feet on the floor and the rest of me. These days I sometimes get that feeling playing the violin, too, and that requires no partner. Maybe that's why I've been staying home practicing instead of going out dancing.
Real people in motion are so much better than any photograph for me. Photographs fix someone in my mind in a way I don't like; I don't want to remember a photograph, which is too easy to do. I want to relive the moment when we got sick from laughing too hard or stepped in the wasps' nest or first danced at a milonga or just lay together breathing. Which is why I'm sitting around thinking about the Internet and flickr and match.com and blogs and communication and getting all tangled up in what I think is important and "real".
I also think about MS and about being motionless again, in body or in mind, and wonder whether I'll eat these words in 5 or 10 years.