Just stumbled upon this one…after 4 or more years! Thought I’d share, it made me smile:
Dennis Janet and Marianne
Tag: relationships
Interconnection and Autonomy
a personal note
I have long disliked and had an intense aversion to telephone calls. Like televisions transmitting in shared or public spaces, they present inescapable interruption and intrusion. One could be in thought, repose, intimacy, conversation, activity — in fact, whatever one is about when one is not on the telephone – and then suddenly must react to a demand. A call. But WHO is calling? WHY? Why now? When my attention is demanded through interruption or intrusion, my body anticipates emergency.
Disembodied conversation shifts the burden of dialogue to the voice. Therefore the natural indicators for “I’m thinking…” or “give me a moment,” nods, smiles, frowns or gestures that flow in face-to-face interaction, offering wholistic responses, are all pressured onto the mind and voice – forcing incessant reports and the trickiness and difficulty of translating bodily experience into language. I require time to listen, consider, and respond. Movement. Silence. Whether it’s a simple invitation, business matter, question or request – it always emerges as demand on the telephone. Respond to this NOW. (public or shared-space televisions – SEE this NOW). You cannot escape, select, regulate or direct such importunities.
Global Communication Technologies, – our networks, internetworks and their myriad machines and devices – have provided some enormous benefits toward expanding our social lives outside of limited demographics and cultures, opening realms of activities and artifacts, information and resources that in any other time-period we may never have known about or encountered. As these technologies proliferate into internets of things, ubiquitous (or pervasive / invasive) computing, and manifest the inherently linked realities of our world…simultaneously providing ambient findability (all of these terms and phrases as easily interpreted as violence or intrusion as well as opportunities or boon).
I’ve long preferred face-to-face interaction (in spare doses, they are taxing & rewarding) and textual communications (obviously, but also texting, emails, postal correspondence), because in the F2F we are offered and allowed appropriate cues to follow and respond to one another, and in textual discourse we are allowed the time and distance to craft and dictate our translations of experience, messaging intentions, and terminological tones.
Of late, however, I have noted a convergence of Call-Anxiety and Pervasive-Communications. And am wondering about our levels of autonomy (if there even is such a thing for the human) or self-direction, any amount of governance we might preserve over our lives and activities and choices in a world populated with linked devices?
How much of our days – work time, supposedly “personal”/private time, play time, labor time, interpersonal time, family time, meal-times, chore-times, reading times, creative times, necessity times, and so on…- are steered and directed, controlled and dictated by the consistent, persistent, pervasive and invasive thoroughfare of MESSAGES from OUTSIDE? If we consult our devices upon waking – how often are that day’s events passively designed around what we receive? If we respond to text vibrations / updates / posts / SMS or IMs / emails – how much are they eroding self-governance and discipline or choice and instead simply ANNOUNCING (demanding?) direction and response?
How many swerves do we make in our causeways of living by our over-saturation with “friends,” our communicative reach far beyond our communities, our global information system versus our local work offices or families or few (actual) friends? There have been plenty of studies from nearly every field of inquiry reporting that our safe or thrivable social capacities are quite limited – most studies indicate humans do best in consistent contact with 30 or less others. Proffering sufficient opportunities to know, understand, interact and relate. Yet any given Facebooker or tweeter or snappy-chatter may have exponentially larger engagements nearly every minute of their lives.
How different would my relationships with co-workers, children, family, friends, BE if we weren’t including thousands of others in remote places, professional connections throughout the world, images and language and emotional reports and happenstances flooding like telephone calls and tele-visions and noise into our domains, habitats, domiciles, studies? What might i NOT buy if it weren’t so easy? How differently might I know books, movies, music, animals, persons – if they weren’t in virtually infinite supply?Do we preserve moments of choice and connection, safe from Call-demands or Pervasive/Invasive-communication-technologies? Or do we simply escape or take breaks from time to time? Going for a walk or having a dinner, camping, hiking or traveling once in a while without our devices? What would it be like to lose them? What would we know? What kinds of knowing would we produce? What sorts of makings? What might be drawn or composed, felt or engaged, seen or heard if we were DISconnected to the hive of activity and input? How might we relate to those around us? Where might we go? Who might we be?
Well, that’s what I’m thinking about. Pondering. Wondering. Queries of value and quality and meaning. Stress-levels, anxiety, physical wear of being “on alert,” alarm, reactive, responsive to ubiquitous “Calls.” Demands. Invasions.
What if we saved intrusions for emergencies? Took time to send only specific, relational-oriented, relevant and appropriate information to one another? Thought critically? Reflected? Looked, touched, listened, and managed more wholistic presence with our immediate surrounds?
I don’t know. I’m just wondering.
[The lucky piece for us at present is that, like pulling the phone line from the wall, our technologies are remarkably easy to dismantle and turn OFF, should we CHOOSE to]
“Machines alone have realized that sleep is no longer permitted”
“machines alone have realized that sleep is no longer permitted”
– W. G. Sebald –
I haven’t slept.
Sometimes, in a dream, it feels like “it occurs to me.”
Trying to create a lesson plan for graduate students in the College of Education, I want to tell them why internet research / database searching / source evaluation seems so complex. I take a hammer, a wrench, a tomahawk. I bring a plow, a harness, a sewing machine. I show a steam engine, a telegraph. I think about them.
Hold them. Turn them about. Consider what you can do with them (if you know how). Surmise what you can do with them (if you don’t know how). Lots of things.
Humans devise stuff in concord with their environment. Stones to stumble on, to throw, to hunt with, to pound. Sticks to slap, clack, burn, poke. Maybe carve. Maybe paint. Maybe write.
What we devise have certain rules, operations, constraints. Remember the first time you wielded a hammer? Learned to turn a doorknob? Fitted a screwdriver to screw?
There’s a learning curve. Adaptation. Practice. Change.
Try archery. A piano. Knit something.
Simple tools. Fire. Rock. Wood.
Mud. Sand. Clay.
Try them.
So we figure out things that might be done with them. Things to do, make, say, or think. Certain things are more efficient. Certain ways. Certain hows.
We practice and experiment. Devise.
I am 45. Until I was in my teens, my fingers had not touched a lettered keyboard. In high school I had a class for typing (on manual typewriters). As a pianist I excelled. My homework depended on the legibility of my handwriting through graduate school. By 1993 there were computers in the “typing room.”
You don’t have to know how to write now.
I watch the pencil or pen move along lined paper. What do I have to know in order to do this? How can I make the marks turn out like this? Dexterity, control, care, effort.
Alphabetic literacy, knowledge, craft, semantics, semiotics, grammar and so forth…
Turn the hammer in your hand. Tighten the wrench. Use a pushpin. Take up a fork. Operate a knife with steak. Raise the glass.
“Tools,” perhaps, technologies – technics and techniques – with their own sets of rules for our cognizant bodies.
Pull out your phone. A swipe, some taps, a certain way of holding. Understanding icons, visual literacies, kinetic craft, operational knowledge. Know-how. Complex. Astounding. Dexterous. Intelligent. Think of all the things you need to know to work that small device.
We devise.
And then adapt.
Diagram the innards of a personal computer, a Smartphone, a tablet, a scanner. Imagine the adaptation required to operate that machine.
Think networked information. Big Data. If all our images, texts, conversations, correspondences, budgets, ledgers, laws, entertainments, plans, designs, models, experiments, applications, programs, art…(and so on) are DIGITAL / digitized… then algorithm’d and interfaced, softwared and connected… NONE OF US KNOW WHAT IS THERE.
The machines to which we dump, turn-over, DEVISE, inform, enTRUST – the artifacts of our living – because it is too much – no ONE (person or institution) catalogs, lists, calculates, organizes, arranges, assigns – THE MACHINES MUST DO IT BECAUSE OF THE SCALE and PACE…
NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IS THERE
Stacked algorithms and protocols select relevancy and value; similarity and related; significance and import; primacy and rank. We operate. And barely. How do we guess the coding of its imputing? How do we wrangle the keywords? Information coming from anywhere at anytime into any port…what are the techniques, dexterity, knowledge, grammars, semantics, decoding, crafts – analytics?? – (at least as complex as the machine we diagrammed – times powers of 10 for all the machines involved!!) in order to locate our NEED; QUALITY; ESSENTIAL…?
In other words – we turn over. We devise these concords of things – and revise ourselves according to them.
Internet map
You’re guess may be as good as mine. What is in there, where it is, and how to access it. We use a Smartphone for many more things (at once) than a hammer or pen – while we and it are being used by systems larger than any of us altogether.
Systems of devised systems – we have no hope of controlling. NONE of us. Nor all of us. We are entangled: mutually dependent – and subordinate. We DON’T KNOW. We DON’T KNOW. We don’t know. We’re IN the weather completely.
This is rough, when you also have a propensity, passion, or interest to know. Subordinating oneself to a system is hard with a developed desire for autonomy, freedom, liberty. As far as I know, at the mercy of was not a Sapient evolutionary goal. Yet here we are.
How shall we adapt to these devices?
How shall we then live?
from the Ruled Writing Tablet
Interstitial
Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone. Suspect I can’t believe them. I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that. Won’t even attempt ‘within reason.’ Suggest.
There’s no “let me explain.”
– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly.”
Exactly the point, I would say, or nearly precise – that there isn’t. I don’t know. But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) we’re dismissed. Or not-missed – how to say it?
There’s a meeting. It seems. In a margin or more.
*
Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap?
I don’t know. I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer. Longer. It’s a fight against death, that small word. Simply, longer. With you.
*
Am I clear? Making any sense? I don’t know.
– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying,” she says “near ‘exactly.’”
I don’t know. It’s unwise.
And I hum when the words sound just so.
– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.
Interaction. Locution. Between (I am thinking).
“Interstitial,” I say. Interstitially? How could I know. It’s all susceptible to the mark. The mark of the question. I think of changing my own name. Have before. I like titles. It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music. I would be Mark, Remarking. The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved with a point…on everything = ?
“My point exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark. (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind, anything).
It’s okay. I’m familiar. Not that you worried. There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction. It’s just so (so it seems). “Just-So Stories” he wrote, long ago, they’re alike and akin, episodic. We describe.
Neither here and/nor there. Interstitial. In-between. What I wanted to tell her, to say. And I would have, had I known.
– “Known what, exactly?” she once said, and I stopped, for the meaning was lost, nonexistent. Just so.
“That’s just how it is” I had said. And don’t know, was surmising. The world hypothetical and inspired ( I thought, at the time ) – simply possible. I was wrong (perhaps). But she stayed (temporarily). The words lose their meanings.
*
I hum. To myself.
*
I write: “This is what I wanted to do.”
What a Story Looks Like to Me
The Trouble Is
He feels slow, tectonic, deeply submerged even, unable to act, not able to speak, disabled (apparently) to respond, incapable even of processing. Something seems to have happened.
She – is confused and confounded – experiencing a complex cocktail of distress and depression, pointless and pointed-out, sludged, sloughed and slathered, comatose and doomed, sad and angry in equal measures. A compound. A compound problem.
But she’s not. And he can.
And they will.
The trouble is.
Yes, the trouble is.
Not easily fitted. Because it is this time. Again, it is now. And now, again. The words were made from before, or for some last time, some other. Something foreign. Along with the categories, analysands and diagnoses. Along with the remedies: all for a potential future or other distinctively past.
But it is now. Yes, the trouble is. Is now.
Words of others. Ideas, aspects.
Always malappropriate and inadequate. Words are not it. Words are something else.
This is not discrete or verifiable. Simple. Is. Trouble.
Yes, the trouble is.
And the trouble is now.
She collapses. He freezes again. And this frozen is yearning. Something excruciating. Like her. Like where she is, now collapsing. Collapsible. Collapsed. That’s the trouble.
The trouble is.
He wishes and fumbles, at light-year’s remove, another era, disabled, catatonic, all too aware.
She breaks in and through her fall. He hitches and constricts.
She gurgles a sound, a horrible mutable sound, hardly audible in her destruction and dismantling, her infolding and coming undone. And he cries, cries out, a sort of bellow and howl of noiseless emission, helpless to keep up with time, incapable of presenting, shaped and occurring like shore-stones and wheat-seed.
She is done. He has yet to arrive. He will not get there. Too far ahead and far too behind, and she is in trouble, and the trouble is.
Yes, the trouble is. It is now.
Something has happened.
Tyranny of Transition
Greetings all – I wanted to apologize for the sloppy frenzy of disregulated writings I’ve been releasing with little meditation or editing of late. “In the midst of things…” somewhere near the crossover looping of composition, storage, digestion, excretion, and growing…I’ve found it somewhat difficult to know what it is I am doing aside from what must be done.
Feeling change,
an entering of halves and fractions
tired and ecstatic
sad and delighted
moving on and along.
Having lost and lost and lost
while ever continuing to gain,
such simple equations
of little sense
yet filled with meaning
a meager promise
and maximal joy.
Left to Say
What she said was.
And there was so much – too much – movement in the still place.
What she said was
I…
To piece together, pull apart was far too much, was overbearing.
Even I’d be overwhelmed. Why with the even?
What she said was
It is too much.
I…
But I could neither find, nor could I follow, there the thread.
Of what she was saying, is saying, which was…
I cannot.
.
Think of where that leads!
She said
She cannot think of where it goes, where it comes from.
I cannot.
Is what she said.
She says.
I listen like a camera.
I record.
Her stillness moves too much.
Is unbearable, she says, to be unable, to I cannot.
I don’t believe her, though I see it with my ears.
.
She says it is too much, I will not try.
But I am trying.
Which does not change.
Birds are caught in all their movement – silent blur.
She can’t decipher.
What it is.
She will not say. Says I cannot.
I, pressing buttons, click the shutter, press record.
(Depress, record).
She will not can.
I take a picture.
It does not hear.
.
And what she says is
There’s too much for me to wager on a word
Even in flocks
Even in dialogue, or forms of living movement,
Even in swarms.
I blink.
I snap the shutters.
She has said nothing
She will not say
I hold the stillness, how it flutters.
Silence seems.
Seems only.
But what she says is
She cannot.
.
The birds swoop past
And there is nothing
Left to say.
Interstice – 6: the coupling
– 6 –
And then the narrative runs away. Nearly ever a mix of caffeinated alcohol, the disaster of stories unfolds. We yield them occurrence in time. Over time. Across locations. We do not make them this way, or rather, the making falsifies them so. Their occurrence is now. The moment of happen. And the telling is here just as well. The moment: reflect and create, concoct and remember. The moment of happen, and never “again.” “Re-“ is convenient, untrue.
Yet sometimes the rowdiness settles. We arrange as a movement, install, and be/have. Construct forms to obey. She stumbled, or stuttered. Appeared in a robe. When it opened, she stayed. For a while, as a present, be-coming, bright way.
Not undone. No undoing – just fall shy. Language requires alive telling, there to mean – intersection, Interstice: a coupling, a groove and a rhythm. An inexact mirror, a multi-frame change. She (you) and he (I), it (us). Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.
See the couple coupling. A gruff and clumsy wrangle and tussle. Huffs and spurts and clawing. The heaving bodies appear to be taking, eyes lolling back in themselves – the necessary separateness, retaliation toward pleasure. Bodies in command. It’s grotesque. Whoever’s on top is the rider, begun in devotion, become animal. She seeks to please, retreats and surrenders, gives up and in to his thrusting. He becomes tool for her desire, working herself to a frenzy he fears its hiatus, self-conscious, stripped of his surging in fear of mistake. They work it out – a to and fro – back and forth – moving in, leaning back – never quite mated in psyche.
From inches of distance the movements are grueling. A repetitive taking advantage. These bodies have each other, these bodies desire, lust, demand, these bodies know what they want, what they need. The fish flaps on dry ground. In a terror. A panic afraid that relief will not come. Release. In order to experience it fully, each gathers and turns in interior worlds – “this is happening, now – to me, to my body – I must be there for it to occur – entirely.” But there is an other. He/she senses the lover’s retreat. The moment of most coveted convergence, conjunction. They depart to their bodies while they clutch in their rigor. Asynchrony. What needs, needs its doing, is done. Syncopated Interstice of the guttural grotesque…
From one angle.
See the couple coupling as animals. The dog, the bear, the wolf. The bird or bee or dragonfly. The distance. The unawares. What if the lion leaned into the neck? What if the squirrel caressed? If the snakes lay entangled. The cats licking flanks. The stories would pour into morphing. What have we seen? During thrusts and grunts and contorted visage, he melted his nose in her hair, he inhaled and received. Her hand trailed down his back, not in clenching but care, some tender aware, some giving. His palms opened hot on each angle and curve, of the shoulder, the buttocks, the spine. Knee kissed, ankle read by the fingers, mouths meeting again and again. In the angelic grotesque of the bodies is consistently sewn something else. Animals humping and huffing, not by instinct alone, something more. Intercourse – intersection – aural and visual, scent taste and touch.
In distinction, then, from the buffalo that he appeared to be. From the feline receiving her guest. There is more taking place through the need. The senses talk back, they converse – speak and answer, and whisper / respond. Bodies converging in dialogue. Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange. Suddenly the gruff and the klutzy seem streaming with gift and create. The blind lust is perceiving; the grasp also heals; the smother mingles embrace. What’s engulfed is also what’s offered.
We muster. We glyph. We resolve. And solve again without solution.
Tangling a language of bodies – a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.
The narrative runs, a disaster of stories, the moment of happen is now.
Interstices…continuing…
earlier portions of this can be found HERE
– 5 –
Narrative seeming regurgitant, redundant, and indulged…yet as it occurred it was quite dramatic. A vibrant life of tragic deaths and violent love. The kind of loving one imagines as a lion gutting prey. That ferocity and devouring.
Language always there, most assuredly, in circularity and dismay, its hesitant encumberance. Its dance of waltz with tango, its distance from its cause. We were ravenous for life, steeled in healing, shriveling seeds immersed in waters. An obsessive metaphor.
She came.
From where? Like lamps at sea. Inside of windows, inside of houses, nonexistent. The sea is no foundation in its turbulence, its depths. I never charted. But there she shone. And there I strove, even while she drifted toward me.
The sky is murky. A sound of panting. My memories faint. I grabbed her collar and held her still, bent down, like that, spread open (in my dreams). They feed, they lion. The forms reverse.
Talking a mean streak. Accidental – no, – unavoidable or some inevitable undoing that I do. I won’t stop speaking, but go on. When I shouldn’t, when I can’t, when I do. I am.
What I say (I said) goes like this, or would have, but the force, the draw, consumption – I speak in digits, speak in code, I squeeze pronouncing. I will not say. What I am saying, if I would not, would have been as it were love. Instead I feed.
And she retracts and she releases, she relents but won’t rely. We’re frightened beings, gorging beasts, so here it is – the valiant story, the fragile lines, the treacherous risk.
I engulf her. Still she comes.
She feasts and I retreat.
The battles rage, my hair grows wild (she makes it so), her full of bruising, fully of greed – my want, my spunk. Our torsos open. We choose withdrawal along with weapons for attack. I bare my teeth and force her hand while she recoils, she hits, she sneaks.
We die away. I have remorse, and so I speak: again, again. Say “what I meant” I do not mean. Say wonder why. She will not speak.
There’s never truce but we find trust, a glyph we muster, when we must, because we want (for something), want (for edges), want (for love).
She says my name. Says “you remember!” And I don’t. Says work from there. My body rotted, her blackened breasts, her flesh unwilling, still we progress. We feed and lion.
A torturous joy. An adumbration.. Spiraled mind and twisting body. And there we are beneath a flow I cannot cease, my acrid words, my oily blunder. Why should I think, and what? While she moves thunder.
With firm resolve. And solve again without solution.
Then here screes the story wrenched of life – away and from – she drains a bank I cannot fill, I rob her purchase. We are one.
The scene begins.
All my Words are Silent 