Day: November 21, 2011

My Muse’s ideas remain mute to the world until given voice by the poet who courts her.  For this I use my mouth, my tongue, my teeth, and my lungs. As I inhale and prepare to name the world, it dawns on me that I have lost the ability to tell the difference between my thinking and my words.

A problematic statement: Thinking itself, the I behind the me I “use” language to call myself, cannot be written.

But then what did I just say? If my I cannot be predicated, if nothing at all can be said about it but what it says of itself as me, then what relation does my I bear to its body, other bodies, and the world?

An important confession: I cannot but think in media res. I am a bodying, a worlding. My thoughts are always already events in the world.

Language cannot be “used” like some kind of tool, because the me that is supposed to employ it is in fact (re)constructed in the act of speaking. Language is a technology, but in the ancient sense of techne, a craftwork or artwork, rather than the modern sense of tool or machine.

Is not language the Archetype itself most fully incarnated into the material dimension, the Word become almost fully flesh and bone? I speak, therefore I am, and in speaking I become mediated, my consciousness awakened from the dream of solipsism into the pulsing, breading, bleeding matrices of inter-bodily co-existence.

Because of a series of technological “advancements” and economic “developments,” I can now type my thinking into a laptop, which then teleports it around the world in an instant. Miniaturized by my laptop is the alphabet, an ancient technology still every bit as essential to our kind of consciousness as neurons and microchips. My mind accesses the meaning of this screen through the symbolic sounds my fingers have learned to play on the keyboard. My alphabetic computer becomes the condition for my thinking being heard (by myself and others). I think with it, and so my identity has hybridized with it. We are/I am a cyborg.

Whatever the Internet “is,” I think we can say with some assurance that it is already sutured into the human nervous system, and the planetary ecosystem, at a very deep level, so deep as to have fundamentally transformed what it means, materially and spiritually, to be an earthling. There is a computer consciousness binding the world together in an electrical co-presencing of faces and words, a digital concrescence of souls. Problem is these techno-human lines of communication are completely out of rhythm with the rest of the earthly and cosmic lines of force. Industrial civilization has turned up the volume of our technosphere’s speakers so loud, and so brightened the bulbs that light it, that the rest of the gaian ecosystem and galactic community can hardly be seen or heard anywhere on earth. At least not by human ears.

We are embedded, creatures within creation, each an individualized organ of world-perception, another unique example of the Cosmic Psyche’s desire to see deeper into a universe in which there is always more to see.

Think with the heart of the world, or there will be no earth worth living in.