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Wednesday, 31 July 2013
Two Poems
Where To?
With our new technologies,
awareness of the pitfalls
of attempts to re-tune nature,
new understandings
of the ways that nature works,
we should be heading for
a new age of enlightenment.
I do not think we are.
I think we're heading for a new dark age
and taking all our gadgets with us --
which will make the new dark age
much darker the old.
Special Delivery
Delivered just this morning
by courier
(Stork Logistics Inc)
a wooden crate
stuffed with straw:
the very latest
new idea.
Not in solid form,
no clever
shiny
artefact
but
the newest of ideas
still at its inception,
lost among the straw.
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12 comments:
First poem
Yes - do you think that there is any aspect of technology that will lead us to enlightenment?
Second poem
I am mulling this one over and look forward to reading others' comments.
ha. love that second one...now to find it in the hay stack you know...guess you have to know what one looks like to find it eh? smiles.
i think we are heading to a very similar place as well...
Wouldn't doubt that a new dark age might be on the horizon.
Love the special delivery by stork. There is always rebirth even in the darkest of times!
Good ones today, Dave.
I hope you are not correct, but the science fiction dramas all seem to be coming reality.
This is a nice pairing. I like the second the best but the first resonated the most. There’s a film I watched a while back called Idiocracy. It’s not the greatest of films but the idea is: a future where, because of technology, everyone’s forgotten everything. They don’t have to think for themselves anymore and so they don’t. I feel it even now. I blame my inability to remember stuff on the sheer amount of stuff I try to absorb daily. Absorption takes time and when you’re already full—albeit full of froth—all the new stuff can do is spill over and all you get to do is glimpse it sliding down the side of the glass. I remember a scripture that talked about reading the scriptures “in an undertone” day and night. That expression often gets translated as “meditate”. When was the last time you meditated on anything, meditated as in deep thinking? I can still remember stuff I learned by rote at school but not what I read last week.
Nothing is ever quite as it seems...neither is anything seen ever forgotten, even if it does sometimes change form.
Much food for thought here, Dave...and hopefully light at the bottom of this long dark spiral we find ourselves descending!
Poems that are great warnings and meditations.
The second one has got a "Biennale spirit", I am referring to works of art, some I often very much appreciate, at the various Biennale pavilions here in Venice.
Cait
What a lovely idea: a little bit of technology that would lead us to enlightenment, not away from it! I'd like a bit of that!
Brian
That's always been my prob. - not knowing what a good idea looks like!
Mary
Good point made there: that rebirth is always just around the corner.
Tabor
Alas, yes, I fear...
Jim
You remind me of Plato'd dictum:
“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”
Ygraine
Thanks for this,you too have given food for thought.
Tommaso
Much thanks for saying. I like the idea of the The Biennale spirit!
Yes, all these lovely gadgets may indeed be our downfall.
Takes much time & patience to wade through all that packing straw, and then (if you're me, that is) you wind up missing the idea or worse, throwing it out...
I do not think we are either. There are many claims to high purposes, but I don't see the actual high purposes. ~Mary
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