Corrals and Ranges

 “Give me land, lots of land,
Under starry skies above.
Don’t fence me in.”

—Cole Porter and Robert Fletcher

Well, maybe not.  There is something frightening about wide open ranges. Kind of intellectually agoraphobic. Especially these days when your phone, your tablet, even your watch, for God’s sake, seem to dun you with announcements, notifications, reminders, ads and “opportunities.”  I suppose we brought it on ourselves to a certain extent - the whole FOMO thing, fear of missing out. But I am beginning to find myself leaning in the opposite direction.  Having spent my life as an academic, I have always felt that information comes with obligations. To know something comes with an inherent obligation to understand it, or at least to try to understand it, and eventually to understand it, Einstein exhorts us, well enough to explain it clearly to a child.

However, life has unfolded for me recently so as to drop me down the rabbit hole of NFTs - Non-Fungible Tokens. That fact that nobody seems to understand just what they are or why people are willing to spend millions of dollars to “acquire” them, or for that matter what “acquiring” an NFT means, does nothing to ease my lingering personal anxiety. I am, or have been, for 60 or 70 years, a card-carrying intellectual. I am supposed to know, to understand, to explain. Except, I remind myself, I have retired. Which, I assert, is why it is okay to fence yourself in. Build yourself a corral.

These fences, which I am coming to admire, should not become excuses for blinders - shutting out social, political, and intellectual issues that we as a society ignore at our peril. Rather they are reminders that the world has somehow slithered beyond my ability to understand, and by implication, solve, all of the issues, problems, and concerns that my digital announcements, reminders, ads and invitations pour into my increasingly bewildered brain. “Whoa, there Nelly Bell!” say my oft maligned fences. “Art, music, friends and family. Those are your concerns. Fence them in - and in reasonable doses.”

So to take some liberties with Dean Martin’s “MyRifle, My Pony and Me,” tune:

“Purple light in the canyons

There’s where I long to be

With my three good companions

My art, friends, and family.”

—Dimitri Tiomkin / Paul Francis Webster