House of Devices

I live in a house of devices. The devices are tied to me as I am to them—cellphone, laptop, the world-wide web.

I’ve become reliant on the messages my devices send me. This tremendous need-to-know is like a roof over my head. But the messages I receive mostly bob on the surface, they’re mostly meaningless, meant to be destroyed, so that the process of destruction is really their meaning.

I don’t have to be interested in the art of William Kentridge. No one has asked me to be interested in William Kentridge, not even William Kentridge himself. Even if William Kentridge had asked me to be interested, I would not have been. William Kentridge is reported to be a very interesting artist, world-renowned, but I don’t find his art interesting.

1) The world is a set piece of expectation—that things, such as devices, actually work!

2) The world as I once knew it is now far beyond me.

Walking around Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park the other morning the geese looked all the same to me. There really weren’t other geese there, there was only the very same goose over and over—i.e. the same goose looked like the other same goose. There was no otherness to the geese, the geese were Duchampian duplicates.

I love my devices equally, while despising them in the back of my mind at the very same time. I can’t do without them, but I resent them just the same. With my devices, everything has become contemporary again rather than modern. The modern exists in the past to be examined by art critics who deem the modern to now be contemporary.

As I age the things I see become clearer and yet ever more difficult to see and apprehend.

For instance, I’ll often drop something, a pen, a piece of paper etc. etc. Often it feels to me as if I’m doing things twice, bending down to pick something up twice, once for me and once for the other who’s dropped something and needs me to pick it up.