Passing in the night
Feb. 2nd, 2004 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaneramosCross-posted to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
free_write (10 minutes)
We are all moving along the highway at a deadly speed. When you see how quickly the cars and trucks come up the other side, or an embankment in the median, you realize death is flying around us every moment. There is no more than a thin veil hanging between us and catastrophe. We're moving together in this inexorable flow, and yet we are all alone in the river. A transport edges towards my lane. I recoil anxiously in my mind, rigidly hold my place, afraid to move.
When you talk on a cell phone, the electrical impulses of that call must go flying everywhere. Everywhere in the world really, at least everywhere that another cell phone might pick it up. For me to talk to someone in Mankato, Minnesota, my cell phone impulses would also have to fly through the air in Somerville, Massachusetts, otherwise cell phones simply wouldn't work. We're all lying in this radio soup, the energy of hundreds of millions of voices embroiling us. I don't have a cell phone. I can't bear the thought of my conversations passing through millions of skulls at once, resonating....
Perhaps this is the collective unconscious, becoming. We're supposed to have this headspace connecting us all, this nether world in which we have all our wires crossed. I don't really believe it, but it's becoming true. Indeed, we do have all these conversations flowing under and around us, caressing us when we lie naked in bed, creeping under the bathroom door when we stand aching and groaning in the shower. We can't get away from it.
Well, we can. We have to go far away. Lake Fletcher doesn't have cell service yet. I should just go there to escape from the meshing network of consciousness. Humanity really is like a cancer, a vast blister spreading across the skin of nature.
But I was talking about rivers, highways, flows, moving thing. Information highways. I was thinking about cyberspace, how our ideas flow along these wires. Fibre optic cables would be more to the point. This flow of ideas, this river, this sea. Glaciers are coming down from the high arctic, bringing a chill to our shared ideas. Where did that come from, glaciers? What are they? Most of the ice is hidden underwater. We're talking about hidden things, the kind of obstacle our species could grind up against suddenly in the night without knowing, then sink in a matter of hours. All the most magnificent things we build, the things we call unsinkable, turn into the worst of tragedies.
I'm afraid the United States is going to be like that.
free_write (10 minutes)We are all moving along the highway at a deadly speed. When you see how quickly the cars and trucks come up the other side, or an embankment in the median, you realize death is flying around us every moment. There is no more than a thin veil hanging between us and catastrophe. We're moving together in this inexorable flow, and yet we are all alone in the river. A transport edges towards my lane. I recoil anxiously in my mind, rigidly hold my place, afraid to move.
When you talk on a cell phone, the electrical impulses of that call must go flying everywhere. Everywhere in the world really, at least everywhere that another cell phone might pick it up. For me to talk to someone in Mankato, Minnesota, my cell phone impulses would also have to fly through the air in Somerville, Massachusetts, otherwise cell phones simply wouldn't work. We're all lying in this radio soup, the energy of hundreds of millions of voices embroiling us. I don't have a cell phone. I can't bear the thought of my conversations passing through millions of skulls at once, resonating....
Perhaps this is the collective unconscious, becoming. We're supposed to have this headspace connecting us all, this nether world in which we have all our wires crossed. I don't really believe it, but it's becoming true. Indeed, we do have all these conversations flowing under and around us, caressing us when we lie naked in bed, creeping under the bathroom door when we stand aching and groaning in the shower. We can't get away from it.
Well, we can. We have to go far away. Lake Fletcher doesn't have cell service yet. I should just go there to escape from the meshing network of consciousness. Humanity really is like a cancer, a vast blister spreading across the skin of nature.
But I was talking about rivers, highways, flows, moving thing. Information highways. I was thinking about cyberspace, how our ideas flow along these wires. Fibre optic cables would be more to the point. This flow of ideas, this river, this sea. Glaciers are coming down from the high arctic, bringing a chill to our shared ideas. Where did that come from, glaciers? What are they? Most of the ice is hidden underwater. We're talking about hidden things, the kind of obstacle our species could grind up against suddenly in the night without knowing, then sink in a matter of hours. All the most magnificent things we build, the things we call unsinkable, turn into the worst of tragedies.
I'm afraid the United States is going to be like that.
