As I wait for it I'm not sure if I welcome being online during a walk but I want to experience it - perhaps just this once. I like being alone when walking, and especially when in the city forest - but I've been imagining for decades an accord that may exist between electronics and forests... and yes it was in forests in France (and while visiting prehistoric cave art) that I found myself writing on a handheld the notes that became this digitized diary!
At that moment a cat that I've never seen here before jumped down from a wall onto the paving beside me. People, cats, handheld computers, mobile phones, clear winter skies and city forests - as usual the act of listing the ingredients of a situation reveals the poetic of nature, of - everything.
...I drink up the tea that's now cold and look up to see a single bird flying high in the pale blue sky towards Ken Wood. All the trees are still. A man and a woman share a prolonged kiss and a man with a shaved head reads a newspaper.
...As I make another call, nine military aircraft in tight formation fly low overhead - and they are gone, over the horizon in seconds. Strange - the military usually keep out of sight in London... I guess that they also constitute a datacloud, one that can become lethal in microseconds...
...and then, as I fail to recover the missed message, a fierce dogfight begins behind me - a young Alsatian dog and a smaller black one get their teeth into each other as their owners pull and shout and fail to get them apart for a noisy minute or two... Eventually each owner is on the ground holding down a still angry dog and trying to pacify and to attach a lead to it... This too is I suppose a datacloud, not of electronics but of the sounds and smells and body language of animals and people, ever-poised for fight or affection.
Yes, our modern marvels are not yet of the subtlety, complexity and effectiveness of the perceptions, skills and evolved behaviours of ourselves as animals - and as people-in-cultures...
Again and again I return to such thoughts as I look in vain for the self-awareness of all this that could enable us to see machines not as threats but as self-extensions to beings that are far greater than we presently imagine ourselves to be - yes every one of us !
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