(and there is catching up to do.)
Poetry as data. Visualise, make concordances, chew it up. Skirt sacrilege.
The obvious mental leap from the extended present is to ‘Vexations’, but it’s a different creature, counted out one bean at a time. (And I’m sure that enough has been written on Bach as an intensely Protestant musician, graphing the headspace of the listener in variation.)
There’s a meditation focused on the shape of one’s own breath, and a rarer one that seeks to discern the breath of others.
Orpheus went to hell and back, and lost what he went there for anyway.
We strive to fill the gaps of antiquity, scan palimpsests from rubbish-tips, train every fragment of the spectrum upon them. The lacunae, though, are part of the story.
What we have is what we have; what we’re given, we should be grateful for.
If you have the same history as me when it comes to this digital whatever (i.e. a Mosaic floor, in best Time Team fashion) and have the same personal investment in it, you’ll have been through your share of ‘online life crises’, manifested in discomfort, misplaced nostalgia and the desire to get off the TCP/IP grid, or at least find a remote space within it. It’s part of the territory.
The only way to cope in those moments, for me at least, is to take a mantra: this is all so very broken and it needs fixing. So: to push past King Ludd, without despairing.
Sigh. May Samantha be waiting to give you the horn.