"Lyin',
cheatin', hurtin'—that's
all you seem to do..."
- Led
Zeppelin, Your Time is Gonna Come
"Daddy
is he a goodie or a baddie
Daddy can I be a warrior
Once upon a
time there were cannibals
Now there are no cannibals any more"
- Mark Knopfler, Cannibals
I started this essay two hours ago, on paper, with four different quotations: The Moody Blues, EJ Pratt, Scott Merrit, Willie P Bennett. It's so easy to touch the subject of conscience!
But what does the digital have to do with conscience?
Well, it's handy to characterize our era as digital, for obvious reasons—pretty well any discussion, inquiry or debate these days can be settled with a quick browse on the net. On the other hand, conscience is universal in human development. If conscience is not currently something we bring to mind on a daily basis—if it’s too often “off”—then the juxtaposition of the digital with conscience may be fruitful, even meaningful!
In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom waxes gloomy over the threat of a pending Theocratic Age in literature (literature is “where cognition, perception, and sensation cannot be wholly disentangled.”1) C’est la vie, eh!? If religion helps us stay mindful of our conscience, theocracy may be a method of coping with the usurpation of universal, real conscience by digital conscience. If that makes you wince, be soothed by the wisdom of the Koran: “There is no compulsion in matters of faith.”
It’s time to get ready for lunch—lucky me!
Toronto
May
12, 2007
1 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), page 441.
- 30 -
II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.
Excerpt from “Six Significant Landscapes” by Wallace Stevens
A fine snow fell yesterday. A gibbous moon (waxing) is perfectly positioned for eloquent interaction with scudding or hazy clouds just when we’re scuttling home for dinner.
Jeff Warren (The Head Trip) teaches that we dream constantly and speculates the concomitantMwe’re also conscious as we dream. “Thus water flows over weeds.”
Are we not created to create and thence to have a constant communal colloquy of consciousness? “Let your conscience be your guide!”
Toronto
Dawn,
November 17, 2007
"I have my books and my poetry to protect me..."
- "I am a Rock", Simon & Garfunkel
Listening to the quiet discussion of the elders sitting in the next room, around the dinner table—two married couples, relaxing before bed, keeping company til the last one finishes her bath—is calming. Such effortless attention to one another in this shelter from the cold and wet outdoors, such accustomed civility rewards the respectful listener with awareness of the possibility of future peace.
And where does the discussion lead? Laughter, tonight; memories later; a tendency to tolerate when fear threatens, perhaps. In using channels—body language, a look, a tone, aural magnetism—the channels are deepened, the connections established. See the towers straddling the valley, ask how the first wire was drawn across the gap!
My brain is failing with age: it often takes so long to think of a word as I speak that I have time to remind myself not to fret but instead to be grateful that the words come at all. This is my best excuse for the inordinate amount of time I spend looking for the right version of the song in my head, the song I want to add to the growing list of favourites I put on my YouTube channel. I feel as though I have grown up developing a playlist for my YouTube channel and I have a little time to pick them before I forget them forever.
Jane Jacobs must have had fun writing Dark Age Ahead: nobody would call her, even her—she who was so devastatingly detailed in her reckoning—to account for not making her last book longer with more evidence of mass folly, like conspicuous consumption and a naive fondness for the convenient. She'd be preaching to the converted.
"And for all the little piggies, life is getting worse."
- Piggies, The Beatles
A good sleep and pre-dawn meditation bring the sweet rejoinder: "Kiss the joy as it flies!" (Nin?)
Ichinomiya, Japan
February 14, 2010