Hidden Places

It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering. - Jaron Lanier, from “You Are Not A Gadget”

In the canyon, one shoulders the pack, and the pack contains all that’s needed. Sleeping bag and extra clothes against the cold of the night. Lamp to light the way to our sleep, and a knife to carve in elder-bark our sigils soon to be old and gone. The October days beginning the arc toward winter, the slant-light in the canyons mirrored in the waters of the last flood, the walls high and narrow, no escape here in the bowels of the earth. My woman’s legs long and arrow-like, the footsteps precise, her face tanned – altogether, above all, her form noble: homo erectus, head high, navigating by stars, and in the carefulness of the silence, setting camp between the few trees that grow on the sandbanks above where the flood ran in the dark of the canyon.

Then back to the city and the human ladder to nowhere. It is not exaggeration to remark how vaguely demented is the physical life we “professionals” lead in our working hours. Mostly this life consists of sitting at the computer, tapping at the keys, checking the e-mail, looking plaintively at the cell phone. It’s pretty undignified and kind of sad. The constant prompting of lights and flashing boxes and bells, the acceptance that one is supposed to interact with a machine as if this is quite normal and indeed how things are meant to be. If one could hover out of body over the creature bent obsequiously to the manipulation of the flashing boxes, one would ask: What kind of a man is this? Has he lost all self-respect? Is he insane?

Or here behold, on a city street, the creature walking head-down with PDA or cell phone or iPhone or iPod or whatever will be next marketed for the improvement of the species. Always the electro-plastic appendage demanding service. It rings, it cajoles, it buzzes and blinks in blues and yellows – it screams, it must be answered, fidgeted with, and, after, gripped the more so in expectation. Even if this means walking into lightpoles, falling down manholes, running into parked cars; a daily recurrence, reported in every city in the world. I see the infant with his rattle: On a subway to Brooklyn, all eyes bowed to the techno-toys, all else is out of focus. I remember when I was 20 I gave up walking around with a Walkman. It seemed a thing of childishness, to be encased in the music of self when the noise of the world in its actuality called out. There was a crushing aloneness in the Walkman.

http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham03192010.html