Dispersals

The castaway hurls a bottle that holds a note into the sea; the United States outfits a spacecraft with a plaque depicting a man, a woman, and the place of the Earth in the solar system. Just in case, just in case: perhaps what we send away from us will fall into another's arms.

And, amazingly, it often does. Often, of course, the trajectory is intentional, if unlikely: a letter written in Portugal, in 1813, by a soldier embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars, reaches a woman's hands in Haverhill, Massachusetts. But sometimes the course is more haphazard. Marginalia jotted, in jest or in fury, in books decades old sometimes surprise us, and we become their long-awaited audience.

Technologies, of course, can play a lively role in such dispersals. Take the photo, above, as an example: if this were 1972 (or, heck, 2001), I might have snapped the picture, gotten a few hard copies made, and eventually found the time to mail one to Cleo's grandparents, who might have handled it gently, and then put it aside. As it is, though, it glows on your screen, and it may glow on others - and could always be forwarded, and downloaded, and recontextualized. Such ease of transmission, as Erin Andrews now knows, can be vexing, but it's also remarkable: the bottle we throw now floats on millions of seas.

And imagine, for a moment, the surprise that the Baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann might have felt if he'd learned that Cleo would fall asleep in the car at 4:48 this afternoon as one of his lively, sinuous trio sonatas played on the radio. He wrote, I assume, for a certain limited audience, and given his success his work often seems to have found its mark. But radio waves and automobile speakers make a new and vaster audience possible, too: Telemann's now heard by the ears of infants in a continent barely known to him.

Freud once wrote about the pleasure, for a baby, of the fort-da game: having thrown a wooden reel attached to a string away (fort is German for gone), his grandson enjoyed the reeling back, the da, of the toy. And then threw it away again - learning, in the process, Freud said, a measure of control over the occasional absence of the mother.

Perhaps. But there's also a measure of joy in the hier: in happening to be the one in whose lap the toy falls, when cast. At least I hope there is, reader, I hope there is. This is no ancient letter, no wondrous satellite, but it's sent with the same underlying optimism that somewhere there is a willing audience - and perhaps an audience that differs from what I, or Telemann, could ever imagine.