Wise Words: The Presence of the Past

An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naïve than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt from the laws of nature. The “modern” kind of magical thinking is characterized by the belief that repeating falsehoods like incantations can transform them into scientific truth. It is also yoked to a quasi-mystical faith in the free market, which, according to the prophets, will somehow allow us to live beyond our means indefinitely.

The problem, in essence, is that rates of technological progress far outstrip the rate at which human wisdom matures (in the same way that environmental changes outpace evolutionary adaptation in mass extinction events). Critic and author Leon Wieseltier contends that “every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences.” The rapid obsolescence of digital technologies and the cultural flotsam they deliver corrodes our respect for what lasts (“That was so five minutes ago”). And just as reliance on GPS navigation systems causes our capacity for spatial visualization to atrophy, the frictionless, atemporal instantaneity of digital communications weakens our grasp on the structure of time. Our “modern” idea that only Now is real is arguably delusional, while the medieval concept of “wyrd” [the power of the past upon the present] seems positively enlightened. And our blindness to the presence of the past in fact imperils our future.

(Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 2018, p. 164)

Connecting with Cycles

This is a study made in preparation for a larger work, complete with wonky moons and spirals. But then, I am a bit wonky myself. 

Summer is not an easy season to move through, and my energy levels have been low, so it feels good just to complete something, however wobbly it is.

Progress in my studio is slow and sporadic at present, but there are ideas a-brewing. I have also set up an artist page on Facebook, to keep things a little more seperate from my personal profile. You can follow me there if you feel so inclined.

I don’t know precisely what I want to do with my art, seeing as illness keeps me regularly fluctuating between enthusiasm and apathy, but I think it is good to be taking tiny steps towards whatever growth and change may occur.

Connecting with Cycles, felt tip pen, ink and gold paint on paper (2021)