Getting in touch with reality: Part 1: The Digital World

For this, for everything, we are out of tune

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. - Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. 
          -William Wordsworth

A while ago my dear friend Lucy paid me the enormous compliment of reading my post “Unpinterested” and telling me that it reminded her of this poem - “The world is too much with us.” Upon reading it, I resonated with it immediately. Besides Wordsworth’s gorgeous language, words set in arrangements I never expected to read (“The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;” “A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn”), the poem lays bare, in mystical ways, despair that humanity has become numb to the beauty of the natural world, and with it, lost touch with our heritage, lost sight of the divine. If Wordsworth felt so strongly about our disconnection with nature then, how much more would he feel now! 

Phones and tablets, browsers and QR codes, are changing our world. It’s hard for me to be more specific than that, because I’ve been born into this change; I didn’t actually see it happen. I’ve always been familiar with TV or YouTube as a means of instant entertainment, or with Siri as a means to answer questions, or with phones as a way to converse with nearly anyone, nearly anywhere. Granted, I didn’t have a phone until high school, but as a child I remember jealously clinging to my dad’s phone, texting my routinely-absent sister as we drove to pick her up from the airport, or clutching it to my ear, stumbling through a conversation with some aunt or grandparent several states away. 

One implication of this technological interconnectedness - as I’ve recently been learning - is that space matters less. Living in the same town is no longer the prerequisite for keeping in frequent touch with a friend. I can message her on Discord. It’s not even the prerequisite for having shared experiences - we can hop on a call and watch YouTube together, or play a video game. 

Motion matters less. If a classmate pulls up to give me a ride, there’s no longer any necessity of getting out of the car, proceeding up our acorn-spattered front walk, and bruising his knuckles on the door. I can receive his text, grab my bags, and like a leaf pushed by the wind, propelled by some invisible impulse, announce to my parents that now, I am leaving. My waiting driver will see me suddenly appear on the front step, a specter unbidden, ungreeted, as if the whole encounter was coincidental. 

Time matters less, too - as my theology teacher once put it, we are time travelers. We have sped up our passage through the ordinary order of events. Gone are the days of girls agonizing at the mailbox for a word from their far-off sweethearts. With texts or calls, the experiences of each individual can be shared immediately, almost in real time. The heart-stretching waits between moments of contact are (at least in theory) no longer necessary. They are at least much shorter. The absent sweetheart need not be very absent at all. 

Now, I’m not convinced that all these changes - in how we treat space, motion, time - can be entirely bad. Humans can’t help developing technology and making use of what we know to make life better for ourselves. Invention is perhaps our most innate impulse, the desire breathed into us in the garden. It is the manifestation of God’s image in us. Whether it’s sculpting, or or writing, or engineering, or teaching, we can’t help making more, going farther, building and refining and searching for solutions - it’s our nature. The bewildering thing is how those same brilliant creations that improve our lives and confirm our humanity also seem to take something away, every time; and the thing being taken is something larger than us that we cannot quite recreate: like space, motion, or time - like clean water, clean air, and healthy food. Maybe we are not using our creative ingenuity well enough, if all our solutions thus backfire. Maybe we have a misguided idea of what would make for an improvement on our current state. Or maybe it’s not our creative nature that’s the problem, but our moral nature, how we carry out our ideas and what limits we place, or don’t place, upon them, and upon ourselves. In Wendell Berry’s “Two Economies” (which I’ve posted about before), he describes the limits necessary for humanity in building an economy that honors God’s limits: “We build soil by knowing what to do but also by knowing what not to do and by knowing when to stop. Both kinds of knowledge are necessary because invariably, at some point, the reach of human comprehension becomes too short, and at that point the work of the human economy must end in absolute deference to the working of the Great Economy…To push our work beyond that point, invading the Great Economy, is to become guilty of hubris, of presuming to be greater than we are” (195). Perhaps Wendell Berry’s ideas would be relevant to the technological world today as well as the agrarian world.

~~~

The exact ethics of human innovation and subsequent creation of technology are too much for me to comprehend for right now, though. What matters to me is how I respond to this lessening of space, motion, time, and everything else. What concerns me is how my mind, my heart, are being affected by constantly living in the clean, easy digital world.

The sleekness of our technologies’ user interface is one of the most distressing things to me. I think it is the quality through which those losses I previously described are best expressed. In losing space, motion, and time, we lose also texture, adventure, detail, personhood, sensory reality. Words lose their tone. Colors are manipulated through filters or arranged into perfect schemes. The senses of taste, smell, and touch are absent from the digital world altogether. We navigate Discord, YouTube, Google and all our other apps pressing buttons with rounded edges, surveying perfectly aligned columns of text, triggering bursts of sparkles when clicking a like button, hearing pleasant dings when receiving a message, reading and interpreting the code of perfectly condensed icons, differentiating for us where to find our power points, documents, emails, and pictures. These things are not bad in themselves, but to be immersed in such an impeccably organized, perfectly understandable world for so many hours a day threatens some kind of corruption for the soul.

In the real world, whether that’s the abstract world of truths, desires, and emotions, or the physical world of forests, flowers, mountains, and cities, life is complicated and bit more difficult to navigate. The world that truly needs us and cries out for our attention is not compact, obligingly organizing itself into neat boxes. If we think it will be so, we are deluded.

These, rather, are the kinds of things you encounter in a real, human, mortal life: that last bit of egg stuck to the pan that will take some extra scrubbing to remove. The ritual dance of embarrassment when two people are headed the opposite direction and each tries to move out of the way. The fact that one eye seems slightly smaller than the other, which my science teacher says is because we all have one side we always sleep on and that squishes the side of our face. The foam gathering in irregular pools on the inside of a beer glass, the stickiness of sap gathering on our car parked under the oak tree, the lisp of a wide-eyed little girl singing to herself on a long flight, flys left unzipped and skirts with the edge wrinkled upwards, the variety of leaves on a tree, every one formed slightly differently, curling at a different angle. Real life is a curved rock slope with uncertain footholds, not a staircase. It more resembles a wooden pencil, requiring carving and scraping and asking for a sharpener, than a mechanical one, in which led shoots out ready-made. 

That is the life that is coming for us whether we want it or not. Paradoxically, it will at least come to us in the form of death. (I don’t have much experience with death, it’s true, but I feel sure that there’s nothing digital about it). It is also the life that we must engage with if we want to truly satisfy that creative impulse that caused the problem in the first place. This is important for artists in particular, for novelists, painters, and poets, because without the physical world and the spiritual world - if hypothetically we were reduced to only the digital -  we would have much less to make art about. Sven Birkerts lays out this idea in his essay “On or About”, in which he suggests that our interconnected technological world could lead to a decline in artistic imagination: “Our mediated and completely reconfigured reality simply resists being used as the material for creative transformation; that its increasingly elusive, media-centric nature simply does not lend itself to creative representation. Writers have always mapped the doings of people in the world, and until recently these have been mappable. But now most people spend large amounts of their days in front of screens, and much of their communication takes place through circuitries. It is one thing to represent this, another to create drama from it” (22). 

What then, shall we do, with this false utopia of pleasure and productivity (“Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers) beckoning to us from these shining slivers of metal? The simple answer is, “Use them less,” but of course that’s easier said than done. To really escape them and attend to a more full reality, we must replace our use of them with something else, and if that is not possible, we must at least ensure that “the real world” is not losing its magic for us. 

~~~

Of course it’s important to replace our use of technology in concrete ways. I can turn on a CD instead of Spotify, I can pull out a notebook instead of a Google doc. If I’m really feeling like a punk, I can write a letter instead of a text message. But I’ve also been trying to just slow down and pay attention, with childlike wonder, to the ordinary world outside the screen. After all, it’s for the sake of that “ordinary life” that I’m even going to all this trouble. 

And so I’ve been looking out for beauty, in the smallest of things. Travel is a good stimulus for this. I recently visited the Midwest to visit some colleges and my sister, and I’m leaving now with a small catalogue of warm, detailed memories. 

There’s me, standing in the produce section of their local grocery store, Tony’s, and delighting in the sight of all the vegetables in a way I’d never thought to before: lush reds, challenging oranges, ubiquitous and comfortable green. Cilantro dripping with cold. Zucchinis perspiring as they wait to be scooped up and tossed in a cart. Apples winking blankly in the fluorescent lights. Onions enjoying being clothed in their brown garments, until the day their skins will be rudely ripped off and they will wreak their revenge, inspiring their predator to weep. Bored yet happy, I spin around in a circle, enjoying the feel of my black shoe pushing against the floor, as if I’m seven and not seventeen. 

Or there’s me taking a shower in my sister’s house, in the dark because half the electricity mysteriously went down. Out of habit I draw hearts on the frosted window in the shower, the plume of warm water resting on my shoulder like a witch’s familiar - and then remember, with a jolt, that this is the only bathroom in the house, and I should hurry up and wash my hair. 

Or there’s me curled up on her couch, scratching the head of Ody, a lab-German shepherd mix, whose black fur is beginning to collect some gray. He snuggles down under my feet and will sit or shake at command, but like all animals his movements were ultimately unbiddable, the result of some invisible intention hidden behind those blank brown eyes. 

~~~

“For this, for everything, we are out of tune.” Not many lines of poetry come to me unbidden, but that one has, especially stuck in the tired gray world of an airplane as I am now, surrounded by people largely locked into their technology (including myself). Something in my psyche is always singing out of tune, and I hope that by lessening the digital world’s power over me, and attending instead to whatever full-blooded, uncomfortable, savory thing it is I call “the real world,” I can feel just a bit more like I’m being brought into harmony. 

~~~

I could be your world, every single dream/I’ll be your everything machine/you’ll know, you’ll know
     -“Everything Machine” by half-alive

Heaven is a moving target/Heaven is a place I’ll never know/I don’t want to sit in silence/So, plug me in/Hell is just an empty garden/A name for the place that we call home/I don’t want to sit in silence/So, plug me in, plug me in/Take me out of my head/Of my heart, of my skin/Medicine taking hold/Sinking in/Plug me in
     -“Plug Me In” by COIN, from their album “Uncanny Valley”