The third pathway is intimately tied to a question I've wondered about for a long time:
Can a person remain unified to themselves as they make their way across a discontinuous, disembodied digital landscape?
Even as I type, this device’s many and varied connections to different times, places, and people builds a tension within. It brings about the feeling of not being fully who I'm meant to be. Of not engaging the whole of my body through the fluttering of my fingers across the keyboard. Of not witnessing to the unity of the mind in the disparate searches and commands I make across the web, within platforms, and over messages. Of never finding a place for my soul to rest because it knows that this technological world is not its home and can never be.
Our musing, our exploration of this idea will have imminent applicability to our lives. It will require we ask the question of what it means to be truly human and to think deeply about how our participation online effects that definition. It requires that we reckon with the idea that living in the West today might not be possible outside of servitude to the machine. It most likely has to meet the fact head on that we have been shaped more than we know by our use of technology.
For me, as a writer, it requires an uninterrupted and deeply sacred process of exploring the mountains and valleys of these questions. The literal and material form with which I choose to write this pathway must take a new shape.
I've thought about how I would tackle this problem for a long time not wanting to be so swayed by the romanticism in the Luddite’s form of technological monasticism while also being honest about the fact that this question may be unanswerable within certain mediums and information environments.
Truth is confirmed by the form that it takes. Both in its final state and the method by which it was found. Truth provides a light on a spectrum made up of the colors it once encountered. To paint with a pallet of unknown origins is to allow the production of our art to be co-opted by uncertain forces.
As one philosopher says, “All who bear a message, all poets, all seekers also and those who are on the alert to pick up the truths that lie scattered round us, must plunge deep into the vast emptiness which is plenitude.”
Esoteric balderdash or limitless reality? I'll let you think on it.
I, in the meantime, will be writing.
