TECHNOLOGY, WRITING & REALITY?: Gone

I’m sitting here contemplating the word "gone."

Gone:  absent, irrecoverable, used up, pregnant, dead, uneasy, infatuated, exhilarated.

Concentrating on absent, irrecoverable, and dead, absent doesn’t quite fit entirely; absent can reverse into present, so that irrecoverable isn’t then a suitable synonym, nor is dead when its most common antonym is living or alive.

Nor is gone relatable via an understanding of out of contact, or out of reach.  Technology has made gone meaningless.  Is someone who is out of reach–let’s, say really, out of our communication circle–truly out of reach?  One of the most obvious examples of the multilayered meaning of gone might be Lee Harvey Oswald.  He was personally gone for me before he shot Kennedy, then became available in real time television as he was led between jails.  Then Jack Ruby showed up and in that moment, Oswald was shot and killed (and, gone) before our very eyes.

Let’s take a current happening, that of the death of Anna Nicole Smith.  Certainly she is considered to be gone, and yet what difference to millions of people who have watched a clip of her, let’s say, walking into the courthouse, looking trim and beautiful and sad, when the clip was shown prior to her death or after?  Is she any more gone?  And what of space?  She certainly filled a certain space while alive, but there she is, taking up the exact same space on my tv in my living room, regardless of the fact that she’s considered gone.

We all wonder about death and most believe that the spirit of a life is eternal.  Goes to heaven, even.  Well that’s about as gone as gone can get if we’re taking it as an end to communication.  But what of the people we’ve left behind in our past who were very real and alive, yet we’ve had no communication with for decades?  They’re gone to us; Helen Drazwieczski from kindergarten is gone to me.  Would it matter in my understanding of gone if she is alive or dead now? This isn’t meant to be crude or insensitive, it’s just a trail of thought pattern in trying to logically approach a meaning. 

Is this something we all ponder… or something we mostly try to avoid?

So why do I categorize this entry under WRITING as well?  Because in thinking through a story idea that would question the ability to discern fact from fiction in the written word, I must go at it as would a child, with that curiousity that wants to believe and yet doubts what it’s being told.