Nothing is fixed.
I know that now.
I interviewed him twice
Before the shift began.
The first time
he told me he had created
his own complicated religion
out of ancient myths,
postmodern detritus
and private dreams.
He called it terminal pragmatism.
He showed me the altar he had constructed
in the living room of his family home.
It was made out of safety pins,
small, sharp pointed rocks,
and bits of glass.
A few years later
these altars began showing up
in living rooms, schools and playgrounds
all over the world.
Scientists called it behavioral contagion.
By calling it something
they thought they could exert control
over this developing phenomenon.
But they were as helpless
As the rest of us.
During the second interview
he told me what he now understood
more clearly than ever before:
“There is no natural state of man
there never was.
We’re always changing and adapting,
evolving in unpredictable directions.
We take fragments borrowed from
stories, tv shows, friends, movies
and we emerge half formed,
a living collage
in a permanent state of incompletion.
History is a sequence of collisions and miscommunications.
The patterns that make us
often spread in much the same way
as a disease does
through webs of interconnection.
The deeper the network of multiple connections
The faster a pattern can spread.”
I tried to talk to him a third time
but his family stopped me
before I could get anywhere close to him.
(By that point, they knew.)
What he was doing,
what he had done
was well beyond words.
I had come to understand this.
But I still felt the urge to ask him questions.
I wanted him to present me
with that certain something
that clear and final key
that was impossible to know.
In the days that followed
I became aware of the changes
all around me,
outside in the streets
and in my own behavior.
I made a weak attempt to stop it
but it was too late.
Too late for the scientists
Too late for the kids
Too late for me.
“Freedom is the ability to be anything,
to become anything
at any time.
Freedom includes the ability
to transcend what you are
what you think you are.”
When I tried to talk to myself
I became aware
That I was speaking to two different people
and one of them was fading away
very fast
a faint shadow
fading under the sun.
The last thing he said to me:
“humans are temporary artifacts
unafraid of destroying themselves
once online
and then again in real life…”
I know that now.
I interviewed him twice
Before the shift began.
The first time
he told me he had created
his own complicated religion
out of ancient myths,
postmodern detritus
and private dreams.
He called it terminal pragmatism.
He showed me the altar he had constructed
in the living room of his family home.
It was made out of safety pins,
small, sharp pointed rocks,
and bits of glass.
A few years later
these altars began showing up
in living rooms, schools and playgrounds
all over the world.
Scientists called it behavioral contagion.
By calling it something
they thought they could exert control
over this developing phenomenon.
But they were as helpless
As the rest of us.
During the second interview
he told me what he now understood
more clearly than ever before:
“There is no natural state of man
there never was.
We’re always changing and adapting,
evolving in unpredictable directions.
We take fragments borrowed from
stories, tv shows, friends, movies
and we emerge half formed,
a living collage
in a permanent state of incompletion.
History is a sequence of collisions and miscommunications.
The patterns that make us
often spread in much the same way
as a disease does
through webs of interconnection.
The deeper the network of multiple connections
The faster a pattern can spread.”
I tried to talk to him a third time
but his family stopped me
before I could get anywhere close to him.
(By that point, they knew.)
What he was doing,
what he had done
was well beyond words.
I had come to understand this.
But I still felt the urge to ask him questions.
I wanted him to present me
with that certain something
that clear and final key
that was impossible to know.
In the days that followed
I became aware of the changes
all around me,
outside in the streets
and in my own behavior.
I made a weak attempt to stop it
but it was too late.
Too late for the scientists
Too late for the kids
Too late for me.
“Freedom is the ability to be anything,
to become anything
at any time.
Freedom includes the ability
to transcend what you are
what you think you are.”
When I tried to talk to myself
I became aware
That I was speaking to two different people
and one of them was fading away
very fast
a faint shadow
fading under the sun.
The last thing he said to me:
“humans are temporary artifacts
unafraid of destroying themselves
once online
and then again in real life…”
No comments:
Post a Comment