Yesterday we began, then ended up, here:
If you must begin somewhere, this will do.
Today we introduce the pruning shears:
If you must begin somewhere
You must begin somewhere
You must begin
The must becomes musty, but let’s ignore that for now. instead, let’s ask the obvious: Why? Why must you begin?
In a world saturating itself in invasive marketing and advances algorithms like a bear that has clamored into a bee’s nest and ambered itself in honey, a world in which your every sense organ is perpetually bombarded by promises threats provocations exhortations to please—no, never that civil—for Christ’s holy sake! buy this thing, where Christ and holy and eventually sake will be branded into auxiliary subcategories with their own petroleum-based polymer action figures and frozen carbohydrate likenesses, then transmogrified further into ‘ironical’ spin-off programming that will subsequently be synergistic interwoven around related auxiliary brands whose culmination will be BRAND! (all of it done wink-winkingly for those in the know: you know who you are): in that world, why write?
This is not to acknowledge either does it better. Marketing provides polished surfaces, language transformed into the slick explosiveness of action movies. While all computers can do is crunch information and follow commands: as of yet, they cannot think or feel or experience. (You may debate that latter point another time, dear tech-triumpher.)
Another question: In a world reducing itself to fragmentary video clips, why write? Why take the time to describe something that’s easier recorded and shown via the telephone in your pocket?
But what of all that cannot be shown? What about those things that elude the camera’s hungry search?
Imagine that world. We know it’s there. We feel it, if you still believe in the category.
The medium is not content to stop at being the message. Instead, the medium usurps the message until the message slinks away across the horizon and all that remains is the medium: naked, de-interiorized, holy and polished. So we try then try again to cram the un-video-clip-able into the video clip. Anything that doesn’t fit isn’t fit, and the sole cost of admission to this show is the slow but steady whittling away of your individuality. What a deal.
Room remains.
Why must you begin? Because you must.
For whom must you begin? Yourself, of course. Which is to say, the entire universe, since it’s in your head that such a place expands.
(Try that one on, tech trumpeters and poor old computers.)
Your head stands for your mind, if you’ll allow me the anachronism.
Your mind is often located in your head, but for reasons of flourishing it’s better placed in your heart.