Or, as some wag once said, “in the most carefully constructed experiment under the most carefully controlled conditions, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases.”
A few months ago, I spoke to some art students, and we talked about the internet and its effects. It appears that the cool thing now for arty kids in their early 20s is to go offline. They spoke happily of closing their Facebook accounts and giving up Twitter. The internet, they suggested, has become a bit of a Dad thing. They seemed to me to be much less excited about it than my own generation is. It was as boring to them as television was to me when I was in my 20s – I just wasn’t arsed about it; it was what middle-aged people did – and I wonder now if the coming multitudes might not be so bad after all.
Yoga is not about doing…it is about being. The most important thing to remember is that you have everything you need right in you. Enter every practice without expectation or judgement. Enter every pose as if it were the very first time. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Don’t worry if you are stronger on the right than on the left. Don’t worry if you could do a pose yesterday that you can’t do today. You are exactly where you are meant to be…right here in this moment. Take the first step, and let yoga do the rest.
Everything you need to know about the connections between humans and demi-gods is down there in the subconscious – this is my cut-price Jungian theory. And writing is the sort of process that brings out those connections. With the conscious application of craft, things just pop up. It is like solving a cryptic-crossword clue.
In a recent email newsletter, David Byrne summed it up well:
I also have a funny feeling that, like much of our world that is disappearing onto servers and clouds, eBooks will become ephemeral. I have a sneaking feeling that like lost languages and manuscripts, most digital information will be lost to random glitches and changing formats. Much of our world will become unretrievable—like the wooden houses, music, and knowledge of our ancient predecessors. I have a few physical books that are 100 years old. Will we be able to read our eBooks in 100 years? Really?
We know the past from literature only the way astronomers know distant galaxies: not directly, but by correcting for what we know to be distortions.
Restored Radios exhibit
Durham is growing its own crop of local businesses — not just local artists and boutique eateries, but also a love of handmade crafts and the pleasure of both making and admiring objects that, as William Morris might say, are both useful and beautiful.
The Horse & Buggy Press, a local letterpress, has some wonderful pictures for its Restored Radios exhibit, displaying American radios from the 1930s-50s restored by Asheboro resident Bob Gordon, age 81.
I know these radios were probably mass-manufactured, but damn — just look at them and marvel at their decoration, their style, their solidity.
Forty years after Alvin Toffler popularised the term “information overload”, we might as well admit this: our efforts to fight it have failed. Unless you’re willing to be radical – to give up the internet completely, say – the recommended cures don’t work.
Resolve to check your email twice daily, and you’ll find many more messages waiting when you do. Go on an “information diet”, and it’s likely to end like any other diet: you’ll succumb and consume the bad stuff, with extra guilt.
So maybe we need to reframe things. The real problem isn’t too much information: it’s the feeling of being out of control. Why not focus, then, on finding ways to feel more in control – even if that’s based, in part, on self-deception?
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