Texting Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin Poem by gershon hepner

Erotically, the building blocks of trust
are now achieved by use of cellphones––text
the mortar with which we cement our lust,
in search of people who’re as highly sexed
as we when contemplating all the op-
portunities for making out that we
with cellphones generate, so we can swap
the partner with whom we were glad to be
last night for one who may be more exciting
according to the text that he or she
is sending. On our screens we see the writing
like that which on a wall would once forsee
the fall of Babylon. Mene mene
tekel upharsin probably are not
the words the messenger intends to say,
but in a sense they are precisely what
the message means. Although our manual
does not explain this clearly, those of us
who read Akkadian or the Book of Daniel
know it’s true, although we won’t discuss
the matter with the person who’s just sent
the invitation that we can’t resist,
far better than good news they brought to Ghent,
as we find out as soon as we have kissed.

Inspired by an article by David Brooks in the NYT on November 3,2009 (“Cellphones, Texts and Lovers”) :
Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. There’s a laid-off banker who drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up in the beds of unfamiliar men. There’s an African-American securities trader who flies around the country on weekends to meet with couples seeking interracial sex. (He meets one Midwestern couple at a T.G.I. Friday’s.) But the most interesting part of the diaries concerns the way cellphones have influenced courtship. On nights when they are out, the diarists are often texting multiple possible partners in search of the best arrangement. As the journalist Wesley Yang notes in a very intelligent analysis in the magazine, the diarists “use their cellphones to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead.” Often the diarists will be on the verge of spending the evening with one partner, when a text arrives from another with a potentially better offer. To guard against not being chosen at all, Yang writes, “everyone is on somebody’s back-burner, and everybody has a back-burner of their own, which they maintain with open-ended texts.”…
People who send in sex diaries to a magazine are not representative of average Americans. But the interplay between technology and hook-ups will be familiar to a wide swath of young Americans. It illustrates an interesting roadblock in the country’s social evolution. Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment. Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era. So the search was on for more enlightened courtship rules. You would expect a dynamic society to come up with appropriate scripts. But technology has made this extremely difficult. Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.

11/3/09