Come Play Inside

She wanted to feel. She realized she was incapable of movement without feelings. Occasionally, someone would come along who helped her feel. It’s not that she was incapable of feeling alone, but it took an idea or energetic frequency to ignite her, which she received as an invitation and met with little bursts of sentiment.

Her life was the least conventional story not yet written. As she subtly proclaimed here and there throughout her blog, “It’s an ‘experiment,’” a philosophical experiment, still challenging after fifteen years, in asking new questions of the past, and now of herself and her long-standing corpus.

A digital mosaic of tiny, gleaming anecdotes, told with great embellishment and compression, the blog grows with the softness of manner for which she is known, but it holds deeds, lurid and terrible deeds, of tyrants. The words aren’t there, only her response: a dazzling artistic accomplishment of heart and openness, the kind of accomplishment that architects and writers display in the world’s many wonders. It holds the same spirit that inspired the brilliant clothing and conversations of court ladies who, contrary to popular belief, are not a thing of the past.

And its argument is as innovative as it is fun: Happy thoughts do travel fast. So, too, do sentiments and feelings.

To work is to toil. She did plenty of that. She generated more in a day than teams of people produced, or could keep up with, in a week, or even a month. Laden with typos, sure, but hammered out in a frenzied immersion, the kind that just keeps getting better with experience, cultivated by a mind that cannot stop.

To think broadly and widely was her uniqueness, they said. Her lack of desire for fame, whilst publicly creating, made her an anomaly. All she wanted was to create a world where travelers could enter to think, to laugh, to ponder, or to scratch their heads, leaving with the sentiment, “I can do better.”

She didn’t mind imperfections. She quite enjoyed them.

Future historians may focus on her theories, form, and method. She, by contrast, confessed that she made the background of life into the foreground of her imagination. She located the core of what enabled people to lower their defenses, which was humor, so they could rise out of the bourgeoisie or modern state, relishing the novel sense of the individual self that comes into being when attention is afforded to both the subject and object at hand.

The heart-shaped stick figures were her heroes. They were more than faceless, abstract characters. The human beingness in their lines was felt. Machines tried to replicate it, but they could not master their fluidness.

Happy Thoughts Travel Fast was her attempt to explain why and how such people had come into existence, and instead of analyzing the world they made, she simply played inside it.