Ed Curtin
There was a time when time was time and space and speed had some human significance, for individuals lived within the limits of the natural world of which they belonged.
As Albert Camus said, “In our madness, we press back the everlasting limitations, and at the same time dark Furies swoop down upon us to damage.”
The damage is now upon us.
In former days you could cross over to other people’s lives and come back with a different point of view, knowing what was obvious held true which to exist meant to be made up of flesh and blood like all the others in various places and to be bound by the natural cycles of life and death, spring and fall, summertime and winter season.
There were limitations then, on the land, water, and even in the sky, where area too had measurements and the stars and planets weren’t fictional landing strips for mad researchers and their partners in celluloid fantasies.
Because quickly disappearing world where individuals felt situated in space and time, life was not yet a holographic spectacle of recurring images and words, a pseudo-world of shadowy figures engaging in pseudo-debates on electronic screens with individuals taking a trip from one place to another just to find that they never ever left house.
When the mind is homeless and the grey magic of digital propaganda is its component, life becomes a huge circinate roaming to nowhere. The experience of taking a trip thousands of miles just to see the same chain of stores lining the same roads in the same towns across a nation where the same people live with their very same makers and very same thoughts in their same lives in their exact same clothing.
A mass society of mass minds in the hive developed by mobile phone and measured in nanoseconds where the choices are the freedom to select what is always the same within a cage of categories meant to render all reality a “mediated reality.”
Without roots we are like Sisyphus pushing his rock not up the hill however in circles, just to reach what we believe is the end is the beginning again. Runners in the circle video game.
People’s roots were what as soon as provided difference, a place to stand against the liquid circulation of modernity and its disillusionments. These roots were cultural and geographical, product and spiritual. They went deep.
Such rootedness was not a remedy, merely a location to take a stand. It gave a little bit of stability, the sense of genuine existing people with identities, histories, ground under their feet.
It was possible to satisfy others as different but similarly human in spite of their different roots, and to grasp our common truth. It was the antithesis of globalization, of sameness. It was variety before there was fake variety.
The idea of roots has become much more complex because Simone Weil composed her widely known book, The Required for Roots, in 1943. Even then she admitted this:
To be rooted is maybe the most crucial and least recognized requirement of the human soul. It is among the hardest to specify.
So I will not try to do so. Thus much in life, it’s reality includes both a yes and a no, like our relationship to time.
For we have actually constantly been time-bound creatures, captured in its secret, and we always will be. This held true prior to the development of clocks, although the clock introduced a technological revolution from which we’ve never recalled. Most people are now on speed going no place.
I recently recalled at a series of photos that my parents had taken of me when I had to do with 2 years old. They were contended our house by an expert photographer and got me considering 3 styles that have always captivated me and which lie at the center of our world today: cams, clocks, and mirrors. Each plays a significant part in what Guy Debord called The Society of the Phenomenon:
In societies dominated by modern-day conditions of production, life is presented as a tremendous accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has actually declined into a representation … The more he relates to the dominant pictures of requirement, the less he comprehends his own life and his own desires. The phenomenon’s estrangement from the acting topic is expressed by the fact that the person’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of another person who represents them to him.
I, the only boy with 7 sisters, was dressed for the celebration in shorts and a golf shirt with suspenders. Like a little design. A star on a stage, a gamer in the spectacle prior to the phenomenon became all-consuming. Some of the images were of me standing on a sofa in front of a large mirror, double images, some with me averting and others checking out the mirror. Two young boys in a mirror world. Images.
A couple of recorded me ending up a metal mechanical toy soldier so he could march across the flooring to war. Others were of me looking up at a grandfather clock, concentrated on the time I couldn’t have actually comprehended; seeing the hands of time I couldn’t inform.
Those photos froze me in time as they were suggested to do. They lie prior to me now as afterimages of my earliest memories and my later concerns. Time will decompose the paper they are printed on, just as my memories will disappear with my last journey.
I compose these words from the 3rd flooring of the old Rogues Harbor Inn to anchor my sojourner’s passage through the mists of time. The old clocks throughout this ancient hotel are all stopped. It is and is not reassuring. Yet these words move as I compose them however stop when I’m done. They too are a double-edged sword.
We wish to stop time’s passage but to live as well, and you can’t have both all at once. Possibly words are edible, and as soon as they are written they should be consumed. Then they are gone.
After fifty years I have actually gone back to Ithaca, New york city for three days and nights. Everything has altered, changed utterly. When I initially showed up here half a century ago, I came to invest a couple of days with Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J. on my exit from the Militaries Corps and my rejecting of the mechanical soldier’s life. I had to move out of the photos.
The boats are still anchored in the sea-like Cayuga Lake along whose west side lies the towns of Ovid and Ulysses through which we passed to taste the red wine pressed from the vines whose roots sink deep into this earth. To imbibe the fruit of these vines on a lovely day is to rejoice. The names stimulate the traditions of classical Greece and Rome, but when you study history, you recognize that the soil then and now is drenched deep with the blood of innocents.
Walking through the ancient deep canyon that results in the gorgeous Taughannock Falls, the highest free-falling waterfall east of the Mississippi River at 66 meters, appeal dominates your mind. However when you comprehend the history of how the native Iroquois people were massacred right here by the European settlers who drove them from their roots in this land, the natural charm turns a darker shade of red. Your mind turns.
Is there is any put on this blood-soaked earth where a semi-conscious individual can rest easy? For charm is the beginning of horror, is it not, the awful realization that, as Rilke stated, “every angel is horrible”? And we are the dreadful angels, exulting in beauty and typically loving life a lot that it brings us to tears, for we know it will end, and so we kill others to extend our lives, thinking it will bring us peace, even as we wrongly sob peace, peace, when there is no peace.
If we think significantly and go to the roots (Latin, radix) of human existence, we reveal, our double-consciousness, the tragicomic state of laughter and anguish, suffering and joy that has no end. There is no escape for mortals, although history is brimming with so many failed efforts to transcend the limits of the possible.
The contemporary task to accomplish excellence and total control is a technological Faustian effort to transcend our humanity, now with artificial intelligence, digital dementia, and the marriage of the human to the machine. This mad quest goes by many names (Lewis Mumford presciently called it The Misconception of the Device), however it is always directed by ruling elites to gather more power to themselves.
Today it is called the Great Reset, utilizing medical technology and “vaccines” as the leading edge of its spear to disembowel our humankind. It might be successful since so many individuals have lost a rootedness in the lived spiritual experience of a spiritual vision of an escape from our enigma. With this loss, they have lost the utopian vision that motivates hope when there is no hope.
The much-maligned English writer, D. H. Lawrence, understood this in the years after the mass insanity of World War I when he wrote:
We are all spectres … spectres to one another … abstracted truth … Shadow you are even to yourself … abstracted truth … We are hollow. We don’t live in the flesh. Our instincts and instincts are dead, we live injury round with the winding-sheet of abstraction. And the touch of anything strong hurts us. For our instincts and instincts which are our feelers of touch and knowing through touch, they are dead, cut off. We stroll and talk and consume and copulate and evacuate covered in our winding-sheets, all the time wrapped in our winding-sheets.
There’s a male I understand extremely well, who, when his brother-in-law passed away, was provided one of his watches. The brother-in-law had actually been an accounting professional who saved whatever that went through his hands, from ticket stubs to scraps of notes and old pens and fashion jewelry that his mom had actually worn eighty years in the past, consisting of many of her watches. Everything.
His passion to save was countered by his speed at getting to the finish line. He was a champion runner, who had actually matured in the Depression and his moms and dads were immigrants who worked hard to make it through. The watch had actually never been used. It was a beautiful wind-up watch the male had won as part of a college four-man two-mile relay track group that had set a world record at a major track fulfill.
The male had, through grit and perseverance, won a track scholarship to this distinguished university where he had excelled at running really quick. The back of the watch was inscribed from the Meet Committee with the date, location, and record time.
My good friend used the watch routinely, winding it every early morning. It ran a few minutes slow every day, insulting the fleet feet of his brother-in-law, who obviously was Greek. One day, while winding the watch, the guy dropped it and it stopped. The jeweler said it would be very pricey to fix, so the guy chose to set it at 12:00 and leave it at that stop-time.
He kept using it and when anybody asked him for the time, he ‘d reveal it to them, stating it was midday or midnight at the oasis, or, if they chose, NOW. Naturally this was gotten with quizzical appearances.
This constantly made him cry prior to he laughed.