For some inexorable amount of time, my girlfriend’s alarm would be that of birdsong. Innocent enough it remained, at first presenting itself as nothing but another unremarkable sound that awoke, let her snooze, and awoke again, the sleeping beauty that drifted in limbo across the fluid border between dream and reality.
After many such weeks of routine limbo, she became so accustomed to the sound of mechanical birds that when real birds, natural-born fluff planes, would begin to squeeze out their first song at the crack of dawn, she would awake— bamboozled by the seminal noise that shook her out of nocturnal merriment.
Myself, usually punching words into a flat-nosed keyboard while she dozed, noticed one day the softly disturbing, innocuous dystopia that this predicament presented. To confuse an alarm, that of mechanical, manufactured bird squeaks, with the natural sound of real birds seemed to me a microcosm of a shadowy truth in our society.
This confusion which entangles itself in greater complexity every day around the pinky of our technologically enamoured culture, so intoxicated, so in love with our shiny tech,— erases, in quiet desperation, the inherent wisdom of human ingenuity.
Now listen, I don’t think this forgetfulness is intentional. The semblance of control over our reality is one of mankind’s greatest follies, an idea that keeps us rooted, monkey-minded, to the earth which birthed us, knuckle scraping at the head of Darwin’s evolutionary queue. But let me ask you this,
Does the caterpillar know what it's doing as it begins to spin its cocoon?
Does it act only on instinct, or does it ponder the inside of its minuscule mind as it begins to itch into pre-natal metamorphosis?
Can it grasp the importance of the moment as it happens?
Deep down, I feel that our development into technological all encompassment erases, in slow and aching brushstrokes, like blotting out the Mona Lisa over many years— some long-developed, important part of our human story. It slowly eliminates all traces of the inner power that developed inside of us during the longest constant in human history: our time as hunter-gatherers, and that this human power now cloaks and compresses itself, into the most far-flung of activities.
An intimate connection with a tribe member condenses into a well-meant emoji whooshed across to a colleague at lunch. A mystical connection with nature moulds into an opportunity for golden hour to bless a selfie that blooms perhaps, into rotten fruits of algorithmic dopamine.
I saw a ten-year-old boy the other day, secluded at the edge of the park, his hand straddled between the knotted gate, chin on chest, as he rocked back and forth almost falling! into the glass teat encircled in his other hand. Completely oblivious to me walking passed, see-sawing near the borders of his screen, the magnanimous summer sunshine dulled to nothing but a faded speck on his childhood. I shivered in existential dread.
It's difficult to grasp the importance of a moment before its passed. In the immediacy of now— instinct rises above demeanour, subconsciousness pulls the strings, and only in hindsight are we left to pick up the pieces. In a moment of reflection, we psychoanalyse, expand, straighten out, the creases that have worked their way into the fabric of our reality, as if to lay it all out like an old map, convinced that if we were to see all of our actions and motives at once, the entire picture would gain clarity and that life would make sense.
It's difficult to grasp the importance of a moment before it’s passed, yet I still try, picking up a kilometre-long sail as I attempt to iron out the creases, unsure if I'm starting at the right end, or even if I’m holding it up the right way around. It’s difficult to grasp the moment before it’s passed, like smoke slipping between your fingers, like a tear sliding off a lover's cheek, like a mother's smile that eases after a long, long day.
It’s difficult to grasp the moment before it's passed and the more I fling this sail one way and then another the more wearisome I become. I flatten out this thought and that truth, this great intention and that mismatched action. I realise this sail which holds not just the memories of my own tumbling-on life, but of all the lives I've encountered, seen from afar, or interacted with up close— like some grand tapestry, didactically weaving into a truth which I try to figure out, which I must figure out, my not-enough-hands pulling left then right at the never-ending fabric until I collapse on the sorry sail. The complexity and depth of the truth that unfolds itself before me is simply too much. The sail whimpers in the wind and grows longer with every passing second, and the moment— so difficult to grasp before it’s passed,— passes, like everything does.
I feel us slipping now,—so slow that it almost feels like a figment of my imagination.
They say things go wrong slowly, and then all at once. It feels as if we are at the precipice of a technological revolution1, so close to the waterfall's edge that we’ve trusted the routine rhythm of the bobbing lifeboat and have become deaf to the exponentially increasing, rapidly approaching sound of thunderous volumes of water crashing down onto sharp rocks below.
When I tell my friends about this, the response is a mixed bag. One friend whispers to me under his breath, hoping his phone won't hear the fantasies he entertains about divorcing his rectangular teat2, paranoid to receive tantalising ads that tickle his desire to escape instead, into reclusive, off-grid-lands, raising chickens, tending to the soil. If it sounds vague, it’s because it is. To him, the idea of it means more than the truth that is packed in the muddy earth that lives beyond his screen.
Another friend is in direct opposition. He’s all in, investing greedy-eyed into cryptocurrency, the latest and greatest tech adorning itself around his body like some kind of new-age fashion. He dreams of polishing his ‘personal brand’ and posting his life into digital nomad paradise. His phone acts like an adult pacifier that lulls him to sleep at night the way the most patient mother would, stroking blue light across his sleeping brow.
Meanwhile, I iron out the crease in my forehead with the back of my hand, thinking, does it have to be so extreme? In such a rapidly changing world, what’s the point of pursuing art, when the half-life of a creative piece lives for a day or a week on the virtual thresholds of social media? Why does anything matter?
What we don’t use, we lose. A consistent reliance on technology decreases our reliance on one another. So perhaps this ‘fading power’ is mixed up with the dissolve of empathy for one another, perhaps this ancient, peripheral, vital reliance on each other is transforming into convenient kindness and opportune charity.
I shake myself out of it. Regardless of not knowing the truth of our future, we always have an opportunity to shape it. Cynicism is a dangerous game to play, “Cynicism is a safety blanket. A preemptive strike against a perceived threat. The cope is framing hope as pathetic and optimism as delusional.”3
As artists, we must do what we’ve always done. Instead of focusing on what we cannot control, we should focus on what we can create. We must transcend the fear in our mind, and trust the dreams in our hearts.
“We must orient ourselves with upward aim, to straddle the line between order and chaos for things to become maximally meaningful.”
— Dr Jordan B. Peterson
So if you are still with me here, dear reader— allow me to speak directly to you for a moment. If you live with a deep urge to create not just out of desire, but out of necessity to live, then with all your might, hold onto the throbbing intuition that pulses in you, and trust it above any voice that comes at you from the vortex of pixels that encircles us from all angles.
Hold onto the wisdom found within you and realise its value is greater than any upgrade that’s birthed out of our perpetually pregnant, innovation-obsessed society. The greatest innovation occurs always, from within. Hold onto your intuition like it is an ancient relic, a philosopher’s stone, like it's everything you've got, and trust it, for God's sake, trust it.
-IL
Thank you for reading — Bluezone {Philosophical Musings On Artistic Pursuit}
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Till next time.
-IL
The second time I’ve referenced the brilliant short story by
— sorry Will your writing is too good not to mention it!Quote by Chris Williamson
Loved this post! Thanks for the shout out! #rectangularteats