Most kids know how to ignite sparks but they’re not too good at stoking the flames.
In a digital world in which fads come and go and trends change like the Scottish weather, in a society which seems to resist any kind of fixity, stoking flames is a hard task indeed. Communications technology means we can be everywhere and nowhere at once and the heat of small fires can often be felt to radiate across the entire globe; yet it’s a strange, diaphanous sort of heat—could it ever really burn?
Messages it seems, travel faster and faster every day; the speed at which information circulates approaches the speed of light, the speed at which colours disappear altogether, leaving us with a greyscale copy of a world which never truly existed, or at least not in the physical sense. We are fast becoming citizens of an optical world complete with cosy digital neighbourhoods and communities whose inverse confines non-participants to the isolation of the global scrap heap: the outcasts of a new global elite, the savages in our Brave New World.
In Huxely’s novel, it was the savage who was the last vestige of humanity, the dying breed of a homo-corporalis, the last inhabitant of a smooth space which was free from the rules, protocols and mediums which saturate our own. While such advances in technology undoubtedly bring us closer together on the optical level, they also serve to enact a series of striations which separate us on the physical. In a vicious circle of unhappiness, the safe sex of separation supposed to leave us free to pursue our individual desires, unchecked by risks of physical contact and emotional attachment, instead leaves us unfulfilled and empty, yearning for the kind of primitive intimacy that exists only in the physical world, the rawness of a touch.
The savage may well have seemed uncouth and barbaric, yet he was capable of reaching out and confronting the objects around him: he lived with the imperfections of the physical world; he lived with the cold and dark of the winters and the warmth and light of the summers; he lived with the earth, undivorced from nature and her seasons; he lived as part of a society, as a father and as a brother, as a son and as a husband. He lived, and perhaps because of this, he learned to tolerate the imperfections that are an integral part of the physical world: he learned to love.
That some of us we have partially succeeded in reducing our life’s experiences to strings of 140 ‘characters’—the word itself seems to have become something of an anachronism—is a sign of the times and it remains to be seen whether we will find a way to reconcile the potential of this optical brave new world with the physical one we inhabit in our rawest most primitive condition as savages. Can it really enrich our lives, or is it merely the manifestation of a civilization that has already reached its apogee and started its descent into decadence?
When the sparks of yesteryear caught light, they grew into bold and rich fires which nourished us and kept us warm. Today we’re lucky if they grow at all: electric fires of thin, pallid flames which burn lean and leave us feeling cold and hungry, hungry for something that we lose touch with at our peril.
Sparks and flames
In a digital world in which fads come and go and trends change like the Scottish weather, in a society which seems to resist any kind of fixity, stoking flames is a hard task indeed. Communications technology means we can be everywhere and nowhere at once and the heat of small fires can often be felt to radiate across the entire globe; yet it’s a strange, diaphanous sort of heat—could it ever really burn?
Messages it seems, travel faster and faster every day; the speed at which information circulates approaches the speed of light, the speed at which colours disappear altogether, leaving us with a greyscale copy of a world which never truly existed, or at least not in the physical sense. We are fast becoming citizens of an optical world complete with cosy digital neighbourhoods and communities whose inverse confines non-participants to the isolation of the global scrap heap: the outcasts of a new global elite, the savages in our Brave New World.
In Huxely’s novel, it was the savage who was the last vestige of humanity, the dying breed of a homo-corporalis, the last inhabitant of a smooth space which was free from the rules, protocols and mediums which saturate our own. While such advances in technology undoubtedly bring us closer together on the optical level, they also serve to enact a series of striations which separate us on the physical. In a vicious circle of unhappiness, the safe sex of separation supposed to leave us free to pursue our individual desires, unchecked by risks of physical contact and emotional attachment, instead leaves us unfulfilled and empty, yearning for the kind of primitive intimacy that exists only in the physical world, the rawness of a touch.
The savage may well have seemed uncouth and barbaric, yet he was capable of reaching out and confronting the objects around him: he lived with the imperfections of the physical world; he lived with the cold and dark of the winters and the warmth and light of the summers; he lived with the earth, undivorced from nature and her seasons; he lived as part of a society, as a father and as a brother, as a son and as a husband. He lived, and perhaps because of this, he learned to tolerate the imperfections that are an integral part of the physical world: he learned to love.
That some of us we have partially succeeded in reducing our life’s experiences to strings of 140 ‘characters’—the word itself seems to have become something of an anachronism—is a sign of the times and it remains to be seen whether we will find a way to reconcile the potential of this optical brave new world with the physical one we inhabit in our rawest most primitive condition as savages. Can it really enrich our lives, or is it merely the manifestation of a civilization that has already reached its apogee and started its descent into decadence?
When the sparks of yesteryear caught light, they grew into bold and rich fires which nourished us and kept us warm. Today we’re lucky if they grow at all: electric fires of thin, pallid flames which burn lean and leave us feeling cold and hungry, hungry for something that we lose touch with at our peril.
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