01.10.19

I woke up this morning with one poignant thought: "No more city water" and hopped on the bicycle to find something from a spring in a glass container that didn't taste dead. Something I read about in the post-hike blogs is that smells and sensations can easily send you into overload back in society. I suppose a form of the adverse is true as well. I've never felt more inundated with media and people talking about media, news, music, art, and general monotone gibberish but I've also missed things that I just can't get as easily...like water that tastes like there's still oxygen in it. I wrote about the blue-what I call 'oxygen blue', which is very deep sky blue and shows up at an alpine level so rich and pure the ponds and snow banks seem to glow with it. The high mountains are always in flux, always in motion; desolate timberlines where it would appear very little occurs save the occasional rock spill and avalanche. These are the frozen incubators of a process that takes years, decades, eons to take shape in a way we've got words for. Down here in the city I notice ever more: The simulation. The idea of movement. The substitutions. The copies. The currents of water dragged about, bleached, and pasteurized, forced into metal pipes and shot out through kitchen sinks, shower heads, lost down toilets and taken away as if it never existed. I wonder what level of control we're supposed to have. What level of integration into the natural world constitutes a workable balance? The quick response is to say "Yes, but look what we've done! Global communication, agriculture, running water, satellites in space!" Surely this is all good and in no way indicative of mass psychosis. Surely no man should be expected live without a permanent radiative bug in his pocket wherein he's tracked like an animal and harassed by his own custom ringtone whenever something 'interesting' might or might not occur. Surely there's nothing Pavlovian about this, because progress is now Progress with a capital P. Innovation is the only merit by which a technocracy holds its head up and the applications are only vaguely more intrusive and militaristic by the week. In 1993, the last year before email entered our rural home, I had no idea that something as square as Compuserve had any potential of  marking a path that held any significance in my life. I was 13 and I liked bicycles. What difference did it make? I've felt increasingly since the trail that there's something profoundly lacking in this setup, but it's all context. When I owned a phone I had no idea I was in lack of a wireless phone and when the phones went wireless I didn't realize I was in lack of a cell phone...and when I had a cell phone I didn't realize I was in lack of a touch-screen robot that tracked my every movement down to 10 square feet and processed my inclinations in great algorithms through servers on the other side of the world. Coming full circle: We have been fed this idea of progress in successive stages to the point where we've conceded nearly every aspect of dignity that used to constitute self-hood. Children stare at these machines looking at one-dimensional digital copies of impressions and shapes that are categorically less real than their own imaginations and their energy is slowly siphoned outward, repeatedly prompted by another algorithm to simulate dialogue with a machine. Had I written this in 1989 Isaac Asimov would have been the only one not laughing. So what about my precious water? I don't know...it's a matter of what proxies I'm willing to compulsively plug into until it makes me feel odd. It's subjective chunks of accumulated patterning that suddenly seems conspicuous. I've used machines for more than 2/3 of my life to create music which is a strange thing. I considered the compromise and felt like I had the upper hand but I'm not so sure anymore. I graduated from one program to another, evolved with the technology, watched the bit-rates go up and the latency go down, but how many sunsets did I miss editing in the artificial light of a flat screen? The key word is program; and how many of us are now programmed to sit in front of these ridiculous little boxes like they matter? Someone once asked me how far we'd go technologically this century and I've never hesitated in this opinion: It doesn't matter how far man goes with codes and machines, whether he creates a cyborg genetic interface with any level of the existing biome. He'll never apprehend  causality and therefore never come within infinite light years of the characteristics of a single blade of grass. There's simply no code (measure) for it and a crude simulation is as far as he'll ever come to approximate one miracle growing out of a sidewalk, let alone the quadrillions of quantifiable processes therein. This constitutes a large portion of the Gnostic worldview which holds matter itself to be a sort of prison and a mere simulation of existing spiritual laws that we've unwittingly entered into and begun to worship. I don't know how far I'd take it though. My standards can be at once unattainable and full of childish blind-spots...I'll take fresh water for now.