Greetings...again. After a long time away from the blog and most writing (other than comments on student pages), I'm back and hoping to focus on developing the craft and shaping the form.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Hello? Is there anybody out there?

Greetings...again. After a long time away from the blog and most writing (other than comments on student pages), I'm back and hoping to focus on developing the craft and shaping the form.

Not having written in so long has led to me feeling out of shape and out of practice but has also provided more time for reflection and more time for reading...and certainly more time to learn (in a coming post, I'll reflect on some of the things that I learned since August 2011 when I began teaching high school). But now, back to practice:

"On the Human Condition"

My last post to the blog was August 23, 2011. Most of the time between then and now has been spent at high school, teaching high schoolers, learning from high schoolers, thinking about high school, and thinking like high schoolers.

In April, I decided to resign from my position at my former high school where I was teaching Juniors English, American History, and Journalism and coaching seventh grade girl's basketball and high school boy's baseball. It was a difficult decision--one that I am yet to discover if it was ill- or well-conceived--and a scary one because it meant that I was going to eliminate excuses about writing. Since school has let out for the summer and I'm away from the daily contact with my former students and unemployed, I find myself very alone. At this time last year, I had just graduated college but still lived in the university-centered town, surrounded by other writing students, feeling well centered and insulated by a community of writers, or at least hope-to-be writers.

Now I'm forced to create the voices of my friends and colleagues in my own head--What would Nicole say?--or imagine the sounds of their voices when we occasionally chat online. Without the supporting community, doubts and fears emerge. When the fear of failure begins to mount before the first key is struck and word typed or sentence written, I have to listen to the voice in the back of my head reminding me of the mantra word--"confidence."

Write confidently and one writes believably...

The fear is natural because it stems from uncertainty. In addition to leaving my employment, I am also leaving the state in which I have resided my entire life to live in Arizona for an undetermined length of time. While the current education politics in Arizona is unsettling, the weather is not.

The landscape also seems right for re-entering a writing mindset free(er) from distractions and focused on the central nerve and pulse. The land is vast--just under 14,000 square miles--and sparsely populated with 57 people per square mile (ranked 33rd in population density in the United States).

There is a sense of the western isolation.



Of course, this is the romantic notion of the West--man in the wild, the wide-open spaces accommodating America's "land of plenty" image and dreamy mindscape, the answer for frustrations borne of society. It is the combination of mountains and deserts, lofty ambitions and the ability to seemingly see great distances what lies ahead, even if only a mirage. I feel a need to go some place where I do not know anyone, where I am isolated, where I can clear my mind and forge ahead with a fresh set of eyes for the world.

In her story, "The Human Mind," Angela Woodward traces the existence and development of 'the human mind' through several distinct time periods,images, and feelings. She writes
It was in 1956 that the human mind became a parking lot, at that time the most beautiful of structures. Ideas slotted into neat stalls, where the sun reflected off their shiny hoods. The equality and unanimity of it was glorious, the rows and columns of vehicles, the suppleness of their curving fenders, the power promised by their long, lean hoods. Though you might suppose that every one of these machines had a driver, the drivers were never evident. They had left in the early hours to do assorted things in a nondescript building.
Woodward's metaphor is exceptional. The parking lot mind as representative of the 1950s, a decade noted for the rapid increase in commercial choices, i.e. car makes and models, and consumer conscious; conformity in the face of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the Red Scare--a period of stagnated thought in many cases; and the memorable time spent in the car parked somewhere. In addition to the parking lot, Woodward describes the human mind in 1870 as "something like a rainy street, foggy, dark, a narrow cobbled passage traveled by men in long raincoats" and later at the outset of civilization, presumably in the Garden of Eden, as "a moth, a luminous night insect, clinging to the trunk of an enormous tree." In each of her snapshots of the human mind, Woodward manages to illustrate the state of humanity, society, philosophy, and intellect in a primary metaphor followed by sharp, clear images.

At a point in which much of my thinking has the feel of a parking lot, I was struck by the latest commercials for the new Siri iPhone 4s with John Malkovich. Apparently, the two Malkovich commercials follow those of Samuel L. Jackson and Zooey Deschanel in Apple's new celebrity ad campaign. After watching the Jackson and Deschanel commercials online, I realized that I had, in fact, seen these ads on tv but had forgotten them and not connected them with the Malkovich commercial ads as part of the same campaign for the same product.

The reason for this disconnect is that Siri is portrayed very differently in the Malkovich commercials. In the Jackson and Deschanel ads, Siri merely performs a voice-activated search for information (like Google) and voices the results as the actors actively move around their homes and do things--the phone is merely a prop, a fancier assistive gadget. However, the entirety of both the Malkovich ads are Malkovich sitting in a chair and conversing with the phone, who/which tells jokes and expounds on the philophical aspects of life through "pretty spectacular advice," according to John Malkovich. The phone is the center, is the action, is the actor's equivalent in this case.

It seems in 2012, the human mind became an iPhone. In an age in which people have quickly seen the benefits of instantaneous long-distance communication--assumedly keeping people in touch with one another--now transforming people so out of touch with one another to the point that the phone is one of the conversers rather than the object of or means of conversation between people. Much like Woodward's unamnned cars, we have the phones and apps, devoid of human direction (but apparently with little need either)--although much of the potential of the iPhone and technological advances in general go untapped and underutilized as a result of the lacking intellectual potential of their users...the phone that can do everything and the operator that has no imagination for its use.

Is this where we're at? Talking to our phone rather than through? Nobody on the other end?

Ah, you may say, 'Well, look at you. You're going off to the desert to isolate yourself from other people. To avoid other people. Yet, you condemn others for their isolation.'

True. Though I am leaving to try to improve my means of communication with people, which means working dearly to produce writing that is worthy of publication and readers, so that there is purpose and communication, and so that what I say is received by someone else and not lost on something else in the annals of cyberspace, that art masterpiece of technology that, unfortunately, cannot respond with emotion and cognizant comment.

Am I going insane? Talking to a computer? Is there anybody else out there?

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