Media and Meditation

Having sent off my article on technology and the humanities for PMLA, it was time to clean my study. Right. I am a clean desk person in an office of organized chaos. To write this essay, I surrounded myself with dozens of articles and books and, even more, downloads and print outs from myriad websites and online articles. Part of me wants to just recycle this mass of paper, stack by stack, into the shredder and then into the mulch. Isn't it always going to be available on line anyway? Well, who knows? What if the power goes out, my wireless is down, my computer fails, and I am desperate for that data-mining piece and have to have it NOW . . . And the problem with the web, for now, isn't that things go away (well, that's one problem actually), but the other one is it is sometimes hard to find things. I don't bookmark everything. I can't remember the exact site, the exact name, the author, all that. So simply tossing out the perfect blog entry doesn't work because I may not find it again when I need it. But the idea of pulling out actual physical file folders in which to put actual physical paper to be alphabetized and added to an actual physical file cabinet makes me sick. At my office, I have eight huge file drawers that I probably have not opened in the last two years. Fortunately, they are in two low, sleek, stunning torii gate red file cabinets so they make nice furniture but they aren't exactly functional except, maybe, to display my most recent and beautiful books. (I interject here that I shall always be in love with the art of book making . . . paper, bindings, print, photographs, text . . . I even like the smell: I hold no such aesthetic pleasure in website printouts). So rather than deal with this quandary, this pull between materiality and web reality, I decided to go outside, away from all technology, and think a bit. If I were more practiced and more artful and more serious, I would call it meditation. I have a place for it---quite by accident, I built a zen garden last year. In my tiny urban Durham backyard. Abutted by neighbors on all sides, a little urban rectangle of a garden. Actually, that's pretty odd to say that "I" did it. All I did was have a vision and even that was shared, with the incomparable Laurie Wolf, landscape visionary, supplying not only inspiration but a lot of sweat labor. Up went one fence. Then a smaller bamboo fence. Then Laurie brought Bob who installed a gorgeous pond (see below), a path, a lot of stone to solve a drainage issue (we have a lot of those in this part of Durham). Laurie and I spent one frantic morning, while the dump trucks were dumping several tons of stone, looking through Japanese gardening books and figuring out where to lay the special viewing stones inside the stone pathways. The dump trucks were gone in three hours. Voila, the beginnings of a zen garden. We also planted some larger, more monumental stones. We planted some plants. Now it is summer, miserably hot plus a drought, so we're not planting anything else until fall, which means, I go feed my goldfish and coi, I pull out the occasional weed, but mostly I look at the empty spaces in this garden and think about what will fill it.

OK, now it is my job, in this blog, is to make a connection between those two things: media, meditation. Filing, filling.

That's enough of one.

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