Discuss: Finding Time

A metaphysical entity in the internet has been posited.  Whether or not this is so I’m not sure.  But what is clear, is that we are all busily teaching the internet much of what we’ve come to know. Culture, contemporary and past, in symbols, signs and traces and tropes can be found, analyses appended and attached.  These, can be used to sway and motivate, coerce and convince.  Always, there is a goal.  The goal is always more, more offspring, more fertility, more activity here beneath the sun.

It has always been good to see one’s culture, with its specific description of the founding of the universe prevail.  This meant safety- not in the sense that I am safe from harm - but safe in the sense that I am near the creator and exist within a defined realm.

In our time something has slipped.  The techniques that we use to satisfy material wants have become so sufficient, so capable that the undergirding and overarching stories that once formed the matrix that the techniques served within have been supplanted by the techniques themselves.  This should not be surprising- virtuosity always dazzles. 

In part, it seems to me, we are sad because techniques cannot fill all roles in a human culture.  (Also, human culture cannot be chosen.  Unfairly, it is either inherited or not.)

So, the technophilic west has seen several cohorts inculcated in The way of The Machine. Now, the elaboration of techniques themselves and their constant evolution has come to supplant aspects of culture formerly filled with rites and practices that commemorated the origin and sought to guarantee its continuation.  Given this shift in gaze, we are left to adulate the great successes of these techniques, to which, after all, many of our relatives have contributed.

But now, we in the west have consummated our alliance with these techniques and many will wish to further the alliance.  There will be an increasing move to wed, to hybridize with, to come to embody the capacities of the techniques themselves.  Some of these neo will find in their part-human souls a wish to rehabilitate the myths, new culture heroes will have epiphanies and some will be cogent enough to become refulgent with numinous awe. A new time of Titans may be looming, hybrid machine-humans using the nearing omnipotent material means to reestablish a zone of meaning.  To rehabilitate the forms that facilitate and people dreams.

The internet may be the education of this titanic punctuation of the human equilibrium.  That we should be somewhat disoriented and uncertain seems only natural.  This is what it must feel like to be outmoded.

I have one problem with this article- I agree with the second half- but I absolutely recoil from the first.  The conclusion does not follow from Solnit’s assessment of music making in the internet.
So I feel quite mixed about the piece as a whole.  The first paragraph reminds me somewhat of Max Nordeau’s “degeneration” published at the beginning of the twentieth century: the author blamed what he considered the cultural and moral crisis at the time on the agitation of train travel and “postal intercourse”.  To speak out against new forms of artistic practice and aesthetic technologies is dangerous- even if only because of how quaint the argument will look in only a few years.  For this reason- I dismiss the second half on principal- for she has already alienated this reader.  It is a shame- because I sense there are some interesting points in there- that just need some other kind of couching. I blame couches!  We shoudl have wooden furniture. . .

There’s one thing that sticks out to me like a very sore thumb every time I read a piece by an environmentalist highlighting all the things that are wrong about our lives and attitudes, lamenting our societal disconnection from the natural world, and exhorting us all to slow down and smell the soil.

It’s this. Lamenting our societal disconnection from the natural world simply perpetuates the illusion of disconnection. The fact is, we ARE part of the natural world, whatever perceptual twists and distortions we might delude ourselves with, and as subject to its cyclical processes and trends as any other living thing. Being part of it, we can’t possibly do anything other than be part of it, doing what comes naturally. (Imagining otherwise is mostly hubris and species chauvanism.)

Rather than trying to resist by suppressing the drive, or applying it purely to self-serving ends, could we consider what our collective imperative towards speed, efficiency and urgency might be a response to? Ask the question “As I am a cell in the body of the Earth and responding to its needs, why do I have a sense of urgency and feel this drive for speed and efficiency?” The answer seems pretty obvious.

I disagree with the book editor who thinks opportunities for finding what you didn’t know what you were looking for don’t exist on the internet. Quite the opposite. I’ve found far more of what I didn’t know I was looking for on the internet in the space of 5 years than I have in a lifetime of browsing books, and to far more fruitful and productive ends.  The instant availability of so much information allows serendipity and sychronicity a far freer and more efficient hand. The poetry isn’t lost. The music isn’t lost. It’s all just changed pace, key and presentation, and we’d be unwise to mistake personal nostalgia and aversion to change for the real issues at hand.

I don’t disagree with the criticisms of soulless mindless consumerism. As far as I can see, that’s what the sense of urgency relates to.

This was elegantly stated.

Wendy says we should ask, “As I am a cell in the body of the Earth and responding to its needs, why do I have a sense of urgency and feel this drive for speed and efficiency?” And then she tells us “The answer seems pretty obvious.”

I am slow-witted; please humor me by spelling out the obvious answer.

One could say that we feel the urge to speed and efficiency because of the critical nature of the crises we face. But it appears that most people in the westernized world (judging from what is and isn’t happening) have misinterpreted what we need to be speedy and efficient about. We rush to and from work, rush at work. We hurry through meals and tasks eager to get on to the next thing too often unaware of the moments themselves. It’s not so much a slowing down physically, though with some folks it should be that as well, as it is slowing down our minds. Rushing is as much a quality of mind as it is our bodies running from place to place.

Then there are those who believe we’re feeling the urge to speed and efficiency because the vibrations of the planet and indeed the cosmos are themselves speeding up and, because we are a part of the whole we too experience the urge. Regardless, the point is the same - to slow down our minds so we have a measure of peace within. This way we become more conscious and aware of what’s to be done rather than rushing around for the sake of rushing.

Re: Wendy Howard’s statement that “Lamenting our societal disconnection from the natural world simply perpetuates the illusion of disconnection.” I understand what is meant here. I guess the challenge for those of us who use the written word (or spoken words, for that matter) to help create awareness is to find ways of expressing the reality that we are part of nature regardless of whether we feel it or not. Thing is, the so-called average person, in this country anyway and probably in most westernized nations, knows intellectually that we’re all part of the whole but doesn’t feel it in a sense of really getting it emotionally and spiritually. Until enough of us “get it” at that level it will be difficult to make the imperative transformation to a sustainable culture/economy/etc. And this is frustrating to those of us who know so much about the what’s happening, what is likely to happen, and the fact that time is, quite literally, running out on preventing the very worst of climate change.

Re: the internet. Everyone is different. In my own experience, I’ve had more ah-ha moments, and synchronicities, reading, sitting on my back porch absorbing the sights and sounds, than I have sitting in front of my computer. However, I am grateful for the internet as it makes research easy and instant, a real plus to a writer. Technology only has the power we give it, for good or ill.

I thought this week’s humor column at The Onion a delicious counterpart to this piece from the Orion: http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/slow_down_technology.

This is a lovely piece.  I recommend works by Hunnicutt on leisure.  Sadly, yesterday i heard the new french president, Sarcozy, extoll the virtues of American life, in particular its 40+ hour a week at work which, he believes , is preferable to the lazy French whose work week is 35 hours.  The idea is to sacrifice time for money and get more junk and feel good about it.