"Electronic Mankind"

At 80 you have to doubt your memory sometimes, and I seem to remember having mentioned a man named John Stiles and his odyssey trip around the U.S. with a team of donkeys and mules recently (?). Forgive me if there is some redundancy here. His classic statement about "electronic mankind" having begun to live in a "global concentration camp," would seem to be the utterance of the ultimate luddite.

His feeling is that "nobody is questioning if we should be doing all this. The only question being asked is can we? And without your bar-code microchip laser beam tattooed implant and your holy trinity of personal computer, cable TV, and telephone, you won't be able to participate in the system at all." (This is from the book "Home Work - Hand Built Shelter" by Lloyd Kahn). The "trinity" is kind of quaint, but instructive.

How do we proceed? Well, as an octogenarian I know that my own options are considerably lessened since I am less and less comfortable with the trinities and the communication assumptions/options. Undoubtedly there are people older than I am who are totally conversant and operational within the electronic grid and hemisphere. I know my younger wife is dealing with an educational system which is making it harder and harder just to function with a MacIntosh computer. Where do we go from here, and how will the built-in obsolescence of electronic devices play out with a population which is sinking quickly into poverty. Upgrades, off the grid, anyone?

Ineffable

Poets, musicians, writers of all kinds take on the ineffable. Just now I'm thinking about Henry Miller's clown character in "Smile at the Foot of the Ladder," that is, perhaps, where I first saw the word in print (?). Right now reading a biography of the great, great Wisconsin poet, "Lorine Niedecker; A Poet's Life," I am constantly reminded of how poets go within this area of description by the poems given in the text.

So much of life is indescribable, and yet we have to try to describe. Looking up at the clear, winter night sky last night I was completely dumbfounded by what I saw. Describe it? I might have to be a Lorine Niedecker or Henry Miller to pull that off. But then it needn't be described, perhaps just pointed to. Luckily we had the electric coop take our the yard light a few years ago, and so the so-called "stars" are there.

The sad fact of our lives is that so much in our media/electronic world view is not ineffable, is all too commercial, literal, "in your face." Sometimes on PBS the indescribable is present and much appreciated. Scientists too appreciate it and present it in their programs. May I suggest that you share your appreciation of it with young people and children, so that they will pass on this appreciation to those to come. Thank you.