[W]hatever the possibilities of achieving political harmony at an institutional level, I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing.
Put an image to that — the mental frontier as, say, a rocky mountain pass or meadow — and tell me it doesn’t meliorate a harsh, divided, unforgiving thought-life.
But I think there’s even more to it — something that gets at why that physical image is so mentally helpful. The very real act of physically walking that frontier, just walking around and being in the physical world, is part of that melioration. The image helps because it brings you back to what life is really like.
To be online — and, admittedly, though in a very different way, even to be in books — is to be in a thought-world, one that cannot help but continuously divide and extend itself. It’s good and even fun to divide and extend ourselves, to challenge our thinking and grow our understanding. But this is meant to be done a) for bracketed amounts of time, or b) as that perpetual background noise of the conscious and sentient beings-in-the-world that we are.
Books are easy to put down, partly because they are physically put down. Through their narrative — whether fiction or non-fiction — they are also as likely to thrust us, mentally and physically, back into the real world. Books can go wrong, and so can reading them, but they bear this earth-loving propensity. Every minute spent online, however, bears the opposite propensity — it takes you further and further out from the world that houses it.
It seems so simple to say it, but the more that we are online, the less grounded we are or even can be — and the more that that online world will reflect its own reality distinct from the world it started in, the real one it was meant to (constantly) reflect and return to. Instead of reflecting and returning to that real world, more and more we simply occupy one and not the other. And what time we do spend in the real one tends to get short shrift, since the constant thought of what to write or post or react to in that other world is not much better than if we never left it. (Again, books have a decidedly different and positive effect when they are put down.)
There’s a theory about dreams that says that their purpose is connected to neuroplasticity. Put simply, the brain rewires itself too quickly to take eight hours off every day. By keeping our most important senses active while we sleep, it keeps those neurons active as well. For most of us, that means the neurons in the visual cortex. In a way, dreaming keeps the sense perceptions we value most from being hijacked while we’re asleep.
But what if we were capability of hijacking our own visual cortex while we’re awake? And what if we’re increasingly making a world that encourages us to do this? And not just with our sense of “sight,” but our entire sense of “attention”?
Compare the average day of “I wonder what’s going on on the internet” (it would help if you actually called it that, because that’s what it is) to what Mark Doty said after staring at a painting at The Met, a still-life of “a wedge of lemon, four oysters, a half-glass of wine, a cluster of green grapes with a few curling leaves still attached to their stem”:
And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.
Again, this seems painfully, ridiculously obvious, but the longer this live cultural experiment goes on, the more I am convinced that one of the most important things people can do — the most meaningful thing to improve our lives — is to spend more and more time away from those “devices” that transport us out of the only world we evolved to occupy, the only places we were made to be.
Something I read from Kay Ryan this afternoon (09/02):
I do think that people can get very stuck in detail if their memories are too accurate or, alternatively, they can live in an adolescent misty supercharged half-realm if their memories are not accurate but nonetheless intense, memories which have so ambered with repeated rememberings that they have become simplified, enlarged, and stylized (usually in the directions of Good and Evil).
This “supercharged half-realm” sounds to me like a description of the way that all too many people are walking around the world without really walking around the world. We’re so often supercharging, simplifying, enlarging, and stylizing our opinions without knowing how far off the ground we are.