June 2015
The engineering of physical contact seems a dead art. The replacement of cause and effect physics with vast systemic surrogations, becoming events with no classic denouement- no place where the wheels hit the road, the tape hits the magnet, the mechanical hammer hits the alarm bells. Everything needs to boot up- gas pumps, phones, audio devices, and the victim is in the language of the environmental gesture. Such as turning an angry exit into a instant package of revving engine, tire squeals and blasting 8-track that roars the instant the current hits the coil. Not really up for misinterpretation. Slamming the phone down is similarly distant. As is running out of cash on a Saturday night.
There is an infuriating nonchalance now in the digital periphery, things are brought into existence and snuffed out with a thumbflex, which is not nearly enough physical exertion to sustain a moment, or to manufacture any poetry there. Everything is available. The risk horizon is in the code itself, not any traditional physical landscape.
Don DeLillo has mentioned the answering machine ruining the poetry of nobody home, and the loss seems compounded with each technological step. Obviously I do this thought little justice in the cursory kvetching herein, but such bitching does sometimes seem like a generational obligation. Might future generations find poetry in the by-then-archaic text message, when the interface might then be prefrontal, and patently inescapable?
*Don DeLillo Mao II