26 January 2011

Pixel Dancing

Inveighing against this modern conception of "world" must be my calling (as a digital friend might say of me...)

But see the world around you...what has your attention? What has your interest? What do you spend your money on outside your necessities? I'll leave you to that for the moment but ask you to come back to it on your own.

We propose to be expansionist thinkers--we extend our eyesight as we gaze upward and as equally as we gaze inward. We see the stars as we search for quarks. These are intermingled and we imagine the confluence of the two are signs of TRUTH.

However we, and by this we I mean the smaller sense--the I and the Thou attending to our toilette, contrasted with the "we" previous representing our abstractions of human "progress"--you and I are offered a viewfinder to the stars and quarks and "popular" science writing to give these abstractions meaning. You and I are seated and sated by pixels and we really see and know very little. And yet we believe.

Our vision narrows to a pinpoint.

Having gone from an animal mind to the mindful animal we now want to disconnect our fate from our "sleep in the dust" and so "embody" our "I" in another vessel--to denature our selves. We believe in this; we dream it; we yearn for it. We digitize ourselves daily. We sit and stare (as I do now) and type or, perhaps with even less consciousness, we upload our captured digitized dancing ghosts.

Here is your new philosophy, Horatio: How many pixels can dance on the head of a pin?

2 comments:

  1. what am i thinking? good thoughts today, as I continue to connect with people digitally. it's imperfect, but i have expanded to find others online who share my take on shared subjects and challenge me, too. how many pixels on my pin? infinite.

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  2. uplifting thinking, J-Sound. I think what I mean to say is just what you're saying...what is important is a connection. And we so much now seem to seek it somewhat "onanistically"--spewing forth via a machine as intermediary to my self. I'm not sure how qualitatively different it is from Whitman's spewing forth into his book (except that he was poet of great genius!). Are we simply singing ourselves here?

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