I got a flash last night of why it is that this new Internet age is so separating us from the young. There was an announcement that a new app-- the very word offends me, word that it really isn't-- will answer needs before they are expressed e-wise: that is to say that all your apps, talking to each other, will determine from another app where the traffic is too heavy, for instance, and notify your GPS(huh?) to send you on another, route, anticipating your not wanting to get where it is heavily congested,
Well, what is heavily congested by all this new shit(my word for app,) is the spirit. When I examined what I wrote the other day about my darling friend Pam, and our losing each other because she was so tuned in to the net, to its near psychotic immediacy, that she simply could not understand or tolerate the truth that I couldn't keep up, bright as I was once rumored to be, and, I pray, undiminished by time as I still am, at least mentally. And not being able to keep up in that instance was because I have usually taken time to think about what it was I was addressing, in the way of a challenge, in a hope, even, as some will do of a pensive evening, a prayer. I'm not talking religion here, but the reaching out we all have to do when there is something we long for, in the way of getting through to somebody, or, if it should be out there for someone besides George Lucas, a Force.
Then last night I passed my new neighbor, a lovely young newlywed who just moved in, having come to LA and taken a job marketing for a game company. And as she tried to explain exactly what it was to me, I understood it was part of this Today world, where young people don't see or want to see the same movies we did, the ones with characters in them, with longings, and a story that didn't just zap. And I said to her, understanding in a flash as you sometimes can, that what today is giving us is NO TIME TO REFLECT. That's it. Everything is connected to immediacy. Instant feedback from the computer, about to be upgraded, supposedly, into anticipating what you might have wanted to ask, where you might have wanted to go, to eat, to... everything but dream.
Dreaming is food for the soul. And the tragedy of today is that, as Mame said, Most poor suckers are starving to death. Reflection is digesting what you are taking in. To have no time for it, or inclination, with everything being Instant, with Immediate Feedback, diminishes our capacity to feel on the deepest level. What would Thoreau do, I asked myself last night, as I put a copy of WALDEN on the table by my bed.
Well, for sure he would have been too smart to tune in to any of this shit. Forgive me: apps.
