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| Time Traveler (M.A. Reilly, 2012) |
I. That Which Is Ending
Where is the dwelling place of light?
And where is the house of darkness?
Go about; walk the limits of the land.
Do you know a path between them?
- Job 38:19-20Finding that path by following is wasteful. Making that path is another story--one worth naming.
The last decade in eduction has been more about following, less about making.
It is time to make, yes?
II. Imagining a Near Future
Imagining near futures requires letting go of certainties, wrestling with doubts, especially self-doubts, and embracing ambiguities. This brief video from Corning reminds me that the future is not set, open to possibility. The way we have conjured school as the singular place of formal learning is being rewritten. Technologies allow for new ways of co-joining, communicating, contextualizing. What we make of it is in our hands.
Dear Mary,
ReplyDeleteI love your photography and art--the diffusion of edges allows the organic (in the biological sense) to flow out of the frames. The photo that greets your readers to your blog (stop sign/fire lane sign next to a puddle) accentuates the stuff of the living (leaf debris, twigs) amid the artificial limits humans create.
I love your choice of Job, a wise book rendered less wise but the tacky ending added long after the original story left Job hanging, a good man plagued for unknowable reasons, with no promise of justice, because in a world of leviathans, no justice is ever promised.
Artists and poets are meant to jar us our of our cocoons, our places of safety, and you do that.
And here I am stunned by the Corning video, but maybe not the way intended. It felt like the negatives I used to look at back when I still developed film and made prints.
Trapped in an all human world, so aptly titled "A Day Made of Glass"--every moment connected to noise. People talking to people in glass, but ignoring someone next to you at a bus stop.
Scares me, not because I am afraid of change--I am not. We are both old enough to know the most profound changes, the loss of loved ones, are inevitable.
I want to break the glass, smash the glass, and sit by your puddle in your photo--water, earth, sky, and life.
Not sure I should even share this aloud, but you're an artist, and your post smacked me around (as they often do--why else visit?) I was curious as to your views of the video.
Thanks Michael for your comments.
DeleteThe video disturbed me and offers a cautionary tale in so much as what it means to be human is connected most keenly to consumption. I did not want to comment on it first, but did want to offer it as it is packaged.
It is full of light. The edge between light and dark remains constant and yet which is good becomes less certain.
Technologies remain a constant too, as every human made thing beyond our physical selves (and here too that distinction of human vs technology becomes less certain) is a technology. We will ring in the new. What that means in a world of glass and light and consumption is edgy.