It so happened that the man at the head of the auditorium told us that we were all fools and that we were being killed by technology.
And it just so happened that I raised my hand and asked him how he’d come here, by what means had he made his way.
“By train, of course,” he said.
And I asked him how he could sleep with himself as the train was just as likely a technology as electronic text readers and weblogs.
“We’ve been sucked in by the dream of technology,” he said. “We are dependent.”
I raised my hand. He called on me reluctantly. I said, “But for how long? Would you take away a Macaque’s stone?”
“The amount, sir,” he said. “It’s the amount.”
I thought about machines. I remembered a television program about a man who lived his life one day ahead, knowing the future from a newspaper he received a day prior to everyone else. With such an advantage, imagine the riches, the schemes, the good things you could do for your fellow creatures. This is the future knowledge machine, a machine of anticipation, a new machine for thinking not about the future but about the present.
We had dinner, the speaker and I, and we continued our discussion. I asked him to consider poetry as a machine. “Consider these lines from two separate works,” I said (1, 2):
reflecting my own shining face
back at me. sometimes i feel
and (I could only recite bits and pieces)
I heal, how I deal, I shuffle my stuff
His response was to smile.
The “shining face” could be the moon or the glimmer of the surface of a fish, I said, and the second is really a song, a beat, a means of remembering the motions of things that accumulate. I asked him to consider the photograph of a foot, which is really about the act of forcing something open and to keep it open, a metaphor of locomotion, and with this foot we open the exit and the young ones escape into the freedom of open country. “Cervantes is in that photograph,” I said, “Ovid in the poetry.”
He appeared confused. So I told him about the filmmaker and a film entitled in passing.
“That film records instances of infinite, conjectural narrative,” I said. “Nevertheless, the film alters the past, as what we consider the past is merely an act of the motion of the present moment. Read those poems, study the photograph, watch the film. I urge it. But know that you will be doing it at a moment called now and when you remember their instances in a future present, when you record in your own way the woman, who forgot her hat, and the man to whom she’s speaking (or imagining as a horse), we don’t know his name, but he may be hungry or he himself may be remembering the taste of corn or fish or he may be thinking “what the hell am I doing here,” know that they persist. In the poem, the poem’s speaker will always “sometimes feel” and the other voice will always be at the art of shuffling and that foot in the photograph will always be wedged into a corner, opening the door for all those trapped children, who long for the daylight or the infinity of darkness. And that woman taking pictures in the film, will always be present. She’s trapped in the film. Watch it and you’ll see her there, trapped forever by the camera.”
By this time the speaker was weeping. I hadn’t expected that from this discussion he would develop a new terror of poetry, photography, and film, a new terror of technology, such as chalk and shoelaces.
Many of the people (conference goers) who had attended the morning talk were also having dinner in the hall. The speaker stood up. He called out, “We must burn all the books, all the cameras, and all the keyboards. Every book is a trap, every film and photograph, a prison.”
I tried to calm him. “That wasn’t my point,” I said. “Recall what the poet said:
tethered, i feel,
is a good word;
or painting promoting the art of good fortune.”
But he pushed me away. He lifted a camera out of his jacket pocket. He let it fall to the floor where he crushed it under his shoe.
