KAREN SUNDE

Funny thing was, when we finally had TV again and began to watch a perfectly respectable historical documentary Tom had recorded sometime, he asked me how I liked it, and I said - you know. at first, watching this made me feel resentful. Why? Because I was suddenly so stunningly aware of how film-tv-computer visuals (none of which we'd had for five days) usurp one's life - just suck up every faculty and leave us lumps - rapt, inert, dull - like sponges with no capacity for any output. Is that extreme of me? No doubt.
But being without all the things we didn't have - having at every turn to ask myself what I could do next - how to be comfortable, content, clean, warm, fed, able to accomplish something, stimulated - under the limits of dark during the majority of hours, no heat, no electricity, no hot water, no elevator, no phone, no internet, no cell phone, no transport (and not in the mood to carry bikes down pitch black four winding flights) - All this made me hyper aware of being alive -of managing somehow to make arrangements for all those things we so automatically have and expect will be there at our disposal - how to compensate, how to re-create - what we could improvise...and the bone deep joy of simple music, the making of music, of singing, of dancing, of reading, of each other, of getting out into the air, of getting around in pitch black streets - no street lights, no traffic lights, everything shut up, dark, dead silence in the narrows of the city, and then of sleeping deep, and of waking when light comes, of solitude - with no obligations -except to somehow...live.

Now we are relieved, comfortable. recovering, but maybe perhaps, not quite so alive.