The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

     Modern man/woman is in a predicament unlike they’ve ever been in before. I refuse to call this the “travails of the information age” because before technological advances made information as readily available as watching the evening sunset, there was still the fact of the over-abundance of image in need of processing and this feat has been no small one by any means.

      What I mean by being in an altogether new predicament comes from my belief that not only are we being given information, but the competitive human spirit is tying the assimilation of that information into our economic well-being.  The onslaught of the computer age has left most people grateful, and yet perplexed, as to not only how to use its machines but what the meaning of these machines is.

      There is no easy answer to this quandary. Man has given himself a mechanical brain, a brain that disseminates information, if not in the same way, then in a way that mimics it. This predicament, some would say, is no predicament, but a joy, a way to make it so that our own brains do not need to work harder than it has to.

      Unfortunately, our brains are also our minds and our minds continually seek, but irrationally. It does not seek to know like a computer, but to feel, to experience.

      The artist is an example of both the victim and victor over the chronological mindset of computers and the almost virile power that this heightened mechanical process can inject into the previously virgin soul.

      We are supple beings. We meld into the latest thing as if we were born ready to fall into its arms even if when we were born it had not yet existed. The utilitarian power of computers is undeniable, but can we really ask ourselves to strive towards a purely rational mode of thought when perhaps the creators of this world, its leaders, mentors, sages were among some of the most psychedelic of minds?

      Can we ask the two worlds to merge in Peoria?

      But the worlds are merging. We are becoming softened to the realities and being given a chance to say either “yes” or “no” to them via the images of internet and t.v. We have given ourselves over to the wiser powers. Those of us who want money or prestige attempt to break into the inside circle of software-creating hives where they will be accepted by a fearless leader whose original vision came anywhere and everywhere but from a computer.

     In a way we accept the “trips” that others have taken at the expense of taking our own. Timothy Leary understood the nature of computers, saying in essence that it is the new high for the coming millennium.

      But there is something false in it. Just as a word cannot be what it connotes, we, too, cannot be where we “go.” In fact, we go nowhere except into our own minds.

     True, the computer we use is our tool, where images are given to us and we grasp or duck them. The accepted images cling to us like burrs to our socks. The dreaded ones pass on only to be accepted by somebody else. When we are thus so well fed then how can we turn away from our feeder, the giver, the mother?       

There is no straight line walked simply in this world unless it is away from something. That which we accept needs be taken deeply into the soul.

     A Buddhist, when he sits, often does so facing a blank wall. A modern man needs the pictures. The artist needs the rounding out of the pictures in a search for meaning or structure.

     The philosopher needs to turn off the screen.

     I use a computer to write. I have a screenplay writing program, a graphic-design program and I have been an avid user of e-mail. This is not about using the computer. I’ve watched children stare in amazement at educational programs. I do not want to rid the world of a scourge which is not a scourge.

      My aim is to perhaps make one person who needs to, consider the nature of their modern existence. Perhaps my first concern is only for myself. When my faculties of discernment become too thinned and I insist on placing more and more food on my plate as if to devour all of the food in the world in the shortest amount of time will make me healthy, happy, wise and strong, then I am fooling myself.

      The mis-education in our society is not that we learn too little, but that we learn too much. We don’t take the time to sift through what we’ve already got and allow the natural connections to unfold in a manner that we may see.

      I don’t blame our educational system per se, for we only want what everybody else wants, teachers included, that is, to give to children the necessary tools that they need to live productive and happy lives.

     But there are too many accidents. Too many deaths. Too much violence. Too little acceptance for difference. Too much hate stemming from too much pain. There is no one panacea for our societal ills. There is no one answer. We are ill-equipped to ask the proper questions whenever two or more are gathered. One mind believes in reality as such and the other believes in a different world. All that we can ask is that “we get along” as Rodney King so poetically and simply stated it.

     We need to unplug our worlds at times and ironically enough, after we do, we then need to plug back in and take a few more strides towards the ever flowing stream of technology, political kindness which some would perhaps call an oxymoron and the rosebud, never to be picked mind you, of an infant dream where morality is as the whirlpool and our greatest feat is not to dive, but to hold sacred without knowing fully or even expecting to in this life, its answer blurred yet glistening like a diamond in a stream.