online: 3 november 2009 modified: 15 october 2009 15 october 2009 seeking the new
in the present
...at the edge the cityforest:
just go there (said an inner voice) immediately, to begin this in situ... the new kind of society or cyberculture... which today (as so often throughout my life) i've been attempting to seek out or to realise...
...and i find myself sitting by the pond at The Vale of Health... two swans move slowly over the sunlit water surface most of which is hidden behind birch trees... a grey squirrel runs quickly over the grass and the sky is pale blue with no clouds... the cyberculture so called is evident only in the presence of this handheld computer and perhaps in the fact of my writing these words (or any others) as results or extensions of nature and what we call mind or even thinking... or people... that word which refers to ourselves not some other species...
...a streetlight that stands here to provide night guidance and security for the residents of this village (of 50 houses or fewer?) is already lit in the sunlight and to me it embodies our somewhat thoughtless presence as collective beings... as a unity depending on electrics and electronics and many other such extensions of ourselves not as things or as stuff or any such disparaging nameings...
...it's the words we have to watch and to care for in this searching for ways to react rightly to what we are doing here in wild nature and tamed artifice (or vice versa?)...
...part of the bench beside me has been burnt into charcoal for a third of it's thickness and two leaves fall from somewhere above me to the grass at my feet... and these phenomena are all parts of our presence... but today i don't attempt to explore or explain them... for i'm supposed to be describing the cyberculture... or any other name for our presence as the part of nature that thinks or believes or disputes and spoils everything...
...now i've left the heath for a bus stop where people sit waiting for a bus in a stream of crawling traffic... in that acceptance of our self-created problems which to me is a near fatal acquiescence in what is wrong with all this and yet we seem helpless to alter it (for that is always someone else's business, or livelihood, i only work here, or worse i am only the consumer)... but here's the bus, late or soon, are we going to get on it, for the experts are helpless and waiting...
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