I'm really not a true Luddite. I like the dishwasher. I like air conditioning. I like TV and CDs and DVDs. However, I think that it's a mistake to just accept technology wholesale, as we have done.
Most things that come with memory chips assume that you are an idiot. And while this might be true, I've found that in most cases it's not. I mean think about it. How many items do we deal with every day that attack our memory? There's speed dial, there's the thing in Windows that remembers all your IDs and Passwords. There's the favorites menu. (I've reached a point in which I can barely remember what most of the things on my "Favorites" are!) There are reminders and ticklers and alarms. There are PDAs. And memory, unfortunately, must be used, like a muscle, or it begins to atrophy. We remember less and so become more dependent on the machine.
My wife and I were having a discussion this morning about the influence of spreadsheets. Ask anybody. What's the best thing about them? They do the math for you. Again, math is good for the brain, and yet most people (myself included) will rely on a calculator or Excel if we want to add up a simple column of numbers. We calculate less and so become more dependent on the machine.
Quite often, high technology is a drug, and we have become a nation of addicts. Again, I'm no Luddite who wishes to wipe away all traces of technology. However, I think it would behoove us to be less accepting of all technology and to try being a bit more choosy in terms of what we rely on and what we don't.
I think another way to look at things is that having low tech alternatives is good for the national defense. I can tell you from personal experience that a manual typewriter keeps working even when the grid goes down. And don't even get me started on the pencil!
6 comments:
You favor Eric Gill, eh? Sounds fishy to me. Actually, I have a lot of respect for Eric Gill. Brendan Gill is the one who gets on my wick. I don't have any opinion about Gil Scott Heron, although I have this vague feeling that I ought to.
And there are machines that I like. The lever, for example. I guess it all comes down to the quote that Marshall McCluhan used: "First man makes the machine and then the machine makes man." And I just wonder what the current crop of machines are making us into.
Gil O. Teen
I'm pretty much a pacifist in the whole Luddite movement, although there is a little voice inside that asks if "we can't just take on a couple of toasters." It's such a strange world with all the blinking and the beeping. To quote Homer J. Simpson, I feel like "I'm living inside a cuckoo clock." Bill Gates and his cohorts took over the world in such a short amount of time! Now people my age hardly remember the lowly typewriter when that's what they all banged out their college papers on. I can remember visiting somebody back in 1985 who had a PC at home. How strange it seemed. Why do you need that to keep your recipes on? What's wrong with a pencil and an index card? And now it's all this. The Infotainment Superspeedway. Which I invented, by the way. Al Gore had nothing to do with it. He was in a whole other part of the house at the time.
Now, when you're talking about Master Chuang, you are talking about my man! I became acquainted with him through the Modern Library version of the Tao Teh Ching translated by Lin Yutang in which he used selections from Chuang as commentaries on Lao Tse's work. The version of the Chuang Tse I currently have is one translated by Martin Palmer with Elizabeth Breuilly. I got it at a discount bookstore, the kind that sells remaindered books. I'm not thrilled with it; it lacks the infectious good humor that Chuang's writing's have. Therefore, I will pick up one or both of your suggestions soon. (There's a bookstore trip in the offing. We've had to go without one for a couple of weeks and my wife's getting the shakes.) Thanks.
I'm also interested in reading Dylan's book, although my book funds for this week are already committed to obtaining a volume by a certain ancient Chinese sage who will remain anonymous. Dylan, of course, is a great enigma, which is part of the fun and part of the point. I have a feeling that his tome is revealing in ways that the gossip crowd are incapable of grasping. Besides, I understand he wrote it using a manual typewriter, so I'm honor bound to support another member of the fellowship.
My favorite Dylan quote come from an interview he did in which he was asked about the "Self Portrait" album. After Dylan explained that he purposely made a bad record because he felt that he was getting too popular, the interviewer asked him why he had released it as a double album. And Dylan replied, "If you're going to do crap, you might as well really load it up." As always, levels of thinking and wisdom that just resonate endlessly.
Well, Borders didn't have any Chuang Tzu, so yesterday I bought the B. Dylan book instead. Robert, after your analysis of it, I feel like my reaction to it is to say in a flat Appalachian accent, "I like books. They's purty."
It's a fascinating book, so far. (I've got another 240 or so pages to go.) Impressionistic and evocative, it is truly a memoir, snatches of memory of places and times and an individual experience of them. To some extent, he seems an enigma because (as is demonstrated in an early scene in the book in which a record company PR guy interviews him) he disdains show business. He just wants to write songs and sing songs. Why should anybody care about anything else.
Back in the '50s sometime, a young Japanese man sent a fan letter to the Swiss/German author Hermann Hesse. In the letter the young man told Hesse that his work was a mirror to the young man's life. Hesse responded by saying that artists are not mirrors, but windows that allow us to see through to ourselves. (I'm not sure if I got all that exactly right; I'm working from memory. But the jist is correct.) This is part of Dylan's dilemma. He's constantly being told that he's a mirror and he always having to try to get people to understand his works as a series of windows.
If I were to try to form some sort of artistic mission statement for myself, it would be similar to what I'm taking away from Dylan in this memoir. The artistic struggle is not something that occurs on a grand scale, but is intensely individual. The artist cannot lead a generation. He or she can only hope that that they open a little light in the soul of an individual, just as other artists have opened a little light in theirs.
I know that Dylan has done this for me.
There's a scene in "John Lennon: Imagine" in which some guy is found living in John's garden and has been brought up to the main house. The guy says that the lyric in one of the Beatles's songs told him to come to see John. John starts out by telling him that Paul wrote the song in question, and then goes on to explain that he is merely writing about what his day is like, that he's not trying to communicate with anyone in the way that you would with a telephone. He's just trying to say, "Well, here's what it's like for me, being here, trapped in space and time. Does this jibe with what your experience is?"
The Beatles, of course, faced the same sort of things that Dylan did, however, what he challenged with derision, they avoided with cheekiness. I read a quote from George Harrison last week in which he said that he was not Beatle George and that Beatle George seemed to him like a costume he had worn a long time before.
Fame is such a strange thing, not to be sought for its own sake. I agree with you, though, I think Dylan had a pretty clear-eyed view of things from a very early age, and that he understood fame as being an inevitable byproduct of his successful pursuit of his art.
By the way, on "CBS Sunday Morning" yesterday, they did a piece on Dylan as potential Nobel laureate. One of the experts descibed him as "after Robert Frost, America's poet." Not bad for a kid from Hibbing , MN.
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