Sometimes we break. Sometimes the world around us breaks. When this happens people have a choice – stand and point at that which is broken whilst seeking to assign fault or to simply get down on our knees and help our sister or brother pick up the pieces.

he sought out the darker places
then in fear brought a little light
only to snuff it out again and again
til’ he lived in a paralyzing strobe life,
staccato pictures of good and evil
bouncing off the cave walls;
but he kept his eyes firmly shut
in a manufactured attempt at black
for fear that in opening he would face
himself

Anonymity is the myth that breeds temptation and corruption. It is the darkness within which the possibility of our uglier selves can take hold and poison the world and us with it.

What triggered this post is that recently I noticed someone had removed their Tumblr account and when asked by a friend “Why?” they responded “Too many ugly people…” 

It is a symptom of this growing sense of anonymity that is causing the ugly masses to grow and fester in the digital world of the internet. I know I am going to be unpopular for this but I think perhaps the “privacy at all costs” movement is ultimately self-destructive because one of the potential costs is our own integrity.

We are not fond of the phrase “human nature” because it suggests that there is something about us that might be beyond our own personal control…that there is a nature that can and does take hold given the circumstances.

When we are alone a part of this nature can take hold of us. It is the part that tempts us to think and act in a certain way that we would otherwise not if we were surrounded by others.

Think of the narrative of Eve in the garden. There is a reason that temptation comes upon her when she perceives herself to be alone. Adam too is isolated in the sense that he alone is without knowledge when the opportunity for it is presented.

The antidote to the poison of anonymity is community…read co-unity here. No action by a person co-united with another or others is done in anonymity or darkness. Such light introduces the idea of consequences and accountability to our thinking (neither of which we are fond of frankly). When we act in dark anonymity there is little to fear in terms of consequences (the same is true of those who act out of absolute power/authority…there is a connection between anonymity and power that is worth exploring).

What this one person discovered when they chose to eliminate their Tumblr account is that the perceived anonymity and distance created by the internet perverts people into the monsters we are all capable of becoming. This is why “Troll” is such an appropriate word for them.

In the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era there were a group of Christian monks who came to be known as the desert fathers. One of the things advocated for among them was to go into the desert and isolate in order to encounter and overcome temptation.

At the time the desert was thought to harbour demons (this is why Christ is said to have encountered Satan in the desert). The desert was where one would go to escape community and, in anonymity, confront that part of their nature which would rise up when no one was looking. The desert was where one would go to overcome themselves and in so doing come to the realization of the presence of God in their lives because they understood it was by no strength of their own that such accomplishments are done but by finally realizing that we are in communion with God in all places and so the concept of anonymity was shattered once and for all in their lives.

The internet is the desert of our age where we are confronted by every kind of demon seeking to tempt our darker natures to act as if we can never be discovered, never found out or at least cause us to believe in the mythology of apartness that teaches us we will never be held accountable for our actions. It is the place where the ugly people rise can rise up and attack a person because they lack community and the sense that they are connected to the other. 

John Donne understood this connection that we all need to feel when he wrote in 1624 – 

“No man is an island,  entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were;  any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” 

The question is not so much – is anonymity and isolation harmful as much as can we handle the burden of anonymity and isolation? Are we aware that we are “involved in mankind” or have we bought into the myth of anonymity? 

yesterday we were setting fires inside train cars
and roaming the underneaths in boots and blindness
searching for a way out in the concrete beneath our feet,
in the waters beneath our streets

now we’ve traded lost childhood kingdoms
for a different kind of solo song without any harmony
we drive the roads respectable and fully clothed
and abandoned houses are but a lost dream

no more broken windows and fistfights at night
just the softness of a pillow-top mattress
to prepare us for a rest that might never end
while the past fades fast into the distance

i hooded my eyes
like the darkened skies
rolling over overhead
waiting till the dark
had frightened the lark
and brought the rain
that fell needful upon the dry land
washed from my face by my dry hand –

clean is the promise of black clouds
that are pulled like cotton to the fields
and down upon our tired heads

you are crazy and you are insensible
when your dam breaches and the words,
they come pouring forth in drowning waves
with great rocks that would crush us all;
you want to flood the world with nonsense
of a metered, rhythmic sort of deluge
and sweep it all away leaving a blank page
that begs for another hemorrhage

yes and YES and yes again!
may i fill the empty valleys of this place,
may i anoint the empty foreheads too
with the oil of a new kind of madness…
and every man will reign as king
and every woman will reign as king
while i will dance as fool at the feet of all

if you press your hands
to the white walls of your chest
will you feel the beat beneath?

if you press your ears
to the white walls of my chest
will you hear the beat beneath?

they keep a different time;
none know which is echo
and which is the source,
they run the same carved course

 

here now is an unrung bell
left to burnish in an attentive sun
so long it forgot it had a voice
a strong tongue to pound the inside of its mouth
and let fly a peal of bronzed desire
of such a wonder that all the people’s
stopped their waste of doings
to gather and look in stunned togetherness
like some brazen miracle

the trouble with the unseen helping hand
is how it fails to take hold in a meaningful way
like a mute perfectly singing the hallelujah chorus
to a blind audience that gave up reading lips
in favour of their own wasted arms wrapped
like a comforting strangle ’round their own necks,
wondering why the air had abandoned them

in the wishful stillness
sometimes one can rise to the tops of greening trees
and still further to the sun-side of white clouds
where the flat earth beneath happily vanishes
and there is only the voice of crisp and freezing wind;
don’t we love the clarity of this desert above us
where we might empty ourselves in screams 
that get lost in the others’ abandoned echoes?
this blue that holds our poison like an embrace
until we are ready to lean back and fall like comets to the rocks below
trailing fire in our wake and landing hot as unseen love
to set fire to every resigned hallowed hand and heart…

and

when we are burnt and we are paper-light ash,
sick of the blackened crust we formed in our own image
we might might take to the currents again and rise