there_are_no_islands ovenbird In Matt Haig’s novel, The Life Impossible, he writes, “There are no islands. If you go far enough down everything is connected. Our minds swell into each other like a million currents at sea. We merge, we converge. Everyone flows into everyone else without even realizing…The walls between us are imaginary. The thoughts that we have that are ours are gloriously unique but also gloriously in the same continuing spectrum. Love, fear, guilt, forgiveness. These are the standards in our repertoire. These are the cover versions we get to play.” And when I read that passage I immediately thought of this place and how it reflects the concept of eternal connection. Each blathe looks like an island—a small isolated block of words from the mind of a single author. But blather was built to dispel the illusion of isolation. No blathe is an island. They are all connected to the landmass deep under water, they are all connected to something fundamentally human and enduring. We come to sing our cover songs, to put our spin on the recurring themes that emerge from being mortal on this swiftly turning planet. We are individual iterations of whatever force makes life possible. Our voices are one and many. Every red room in this vast place is connected to every other, words making passageways into other worlds so you can wander forever. I think that’s one of the things that struck me first about this place and now, nearly ten months later, it’s still one of the things that fascinates me. It’s impossible to be truly alone here because at every turn you are shown a thousand points of connection. Blather is a telepoetic space, using words on a screen to dissemble distance, to call to each other, to create digital pathways that facilitate conversation and situate voices in space, giving them form and substance. While it is not analog, it often feels that way, tying itself to pre-digital forms of communication that were dependent on spoken or written words and could not include links to anything outside of itself, or images, or sounds, or anything other than the words themselves. We have nothing but our own voices and the ongoing record of those voices and conversations, preserved on these red pages, is a book that acts as a living history, making every time simultaneously present. Matt Haig writes, “We think we are lonely because we are often blind to the connections. But to be alive is to be a life. To be life. We are LIFE. The same ever-evolving life. We need each other. We are here for each other. We need to look after each other. And when it feels like we are truly, deeply alone, that is the moment when we most need to do something in order to remember how we connect.” This is a place that allows you to remember. No word can exist in isolation. It calls to every other iteration of itself or creates a space to be filled in by the future. We are each a glowing point on a universal switchboard, and blather is the operator, connecting the infinite pathways that let us hear each other’s voices. It can show you a whole world, where you thought there was only a busy signal. 260112 what's it to you? who go blather from