Screaming Together
I finished putting in the garden. What remains is watering, hoeing weeds as necessary, and waiting for harvest. Like raising a child once the basics are taken care of by labor, sometimes hard labor, it is best to observe with care the development of those for which one is responsible. Too much intervention, ill advised insertion of one’s own will— causes unforeseen and tragic consequences. I speak from experience.
I had the benefit of a powered roto-tiller to prepare the ground for planting. I could have done without it. But then I would have started the process in March to break up the ground with hand tools. That is how our ancestors would have prepared their garden plot and not that long ago. My grandfather and my mother walked behind a mule powered plow.
So we adopt and are adapted to technology. Nature works as she always has with sun, rain, and myriad agents of subterranean decomposition to nourish the vegetable plants to maturity and harvest. But there is change, a change in me. The more technology, the greater the abstraction of experience, the greater the distance between my soul and the soil. I cannot imagine the sensation of cultivating the soil from the cab of a GPS directed tractor. Would there be a further loss of feeling, of compassion and the attendant understanding of the living soil? I am inclined to think so.
To what god or goddess of fertility ought I to build an altar at the back of my garden—to my roto-tiller? What an absurd thought. Yet something has to fill the emptiness, the vacuum of meaning created by technology. Technology is the modern term that refers to something related to old fashioned hand tools. The difference comes in reach of the instrument, and in the raw power at the users disposal. There is a logic inscribed into all tools, from the blade of a hoe, to that of a four furrow reversible plow for use with a John Deer Tractor. The built-in logic is a feedback loop shaping, transforming the user. We assimilate to our machines, hybrids of machine and organism. The more powerful the technology, the more alienated from my work, and the greater the self-alienation.
Perhaps this explains wide spread identification with political Father-figures, and abstract ideologies that propagandistically rape the masses. The ecstasy of worship, the human response of awe is transposed into obeisance to these atavistic and faux repositories of mystery. The anarchic and the antisocial are integrated.
Or so it seems to me.
