I was lucky enough to write a monthly newsletter, The Inner Loop, at my previous employer. It's a practice I've kept up today, but never one just for me. So that's what this is, Whiteboar, a newsletter for me and those who share enough of a Venn diagram of interests to me to find these words worth reading.
Outside the eternal companionship I feel to my wife—may she be forever blessed—I feel two impossibly strong waves in me. One is loneliness. The other is to feel misunderstood.
Consider this newsletter my own Voyager program, venturing out there into the great dark, to see if others feel and think the way I do. It will be very nerdy, but I want it to be nerdy in a way that everyone can grok.
Two years ago, I lost the 27-year-old friendship of someone I was so sure I’d know until the end of my days. 3 months ago, I lost the friendship of a woman I felt close enough to to call my sister.
It was that kind of casual drifting away that friends do, that society has determined is alright. I was never happy with that arrangement, that voiceless death.
“I can't tell you how
I knew - but I did know that I had crossed
The border. Everything I loved was lost
But no aorta could report regret.
A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;
And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.”
My wife recently shared with me a podcast on David Jay, the founder of asexuality.org. David describes how he had observed, in comings and goings of friendships, a missing expectation: “it's okay to talk about commitment with romantic partners and with sexual partners in a way that we don't have a script for talking about commitment with friends. And because we don't talk about commitments with friends, those friendships disappear, there's no promise being violated. There's no expectation that's being overcome because we don't have permission to create that expectation in the first place.”
Our friendships should be as vital to us as any relationship. So why do we keep devaluing our friendships to choose one kind of love?
The preceding quote is from Vladimir Nabokov's poem within a novel, “Pale Fire”. Ryan Gosling took it and developed it, using a technique called “dropping-in”, as a monologue for the movie, Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve.
“Dropping-in is a technique Tina and Kristin Linklater developed together in the early 1970s to create a spontaneous, emotional connection to words for Shakespearean actors.”
Denis Villeneuve is best when he allows his films to be character explorations over flashy, mind-bending set pieces. Blade Runner 2049 was more of the latter than the former, but this particular scene is a flash of genius.
“Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.”
In “Pale Fire”, the white fountain is an image that haunts the main character, a newspaper editor whose job it is to sort through poetry submissions.
I first encountered the white fountain in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, a novel in four parts. In Wolfe's novel, the white fountain is a kind of biblical, regenerative flood-device the main character must bring crashing into his planet to renew it.
My abortive attempts to be a filmmaker in art school resulted in founding a film production company, White Fountain, I used to create only one short film, Mjød.
I didn't realize it at the time, but it's kind of a lonely film.
Until next time, may you be loved in all ways.
“Beyond that orchard through a kind of smoke. I glimpsed a tall white fountain — and awoke.”