imagination

The Spin.

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The world spins regardless of our human concerns, taking us back to where we were every day even as our planet travels around the sun, through space.

Mostly we don’t think about that at all because time is increasingly inconvenient for us.

People get caught up in their own pseudo-world with no time to think beyond it.

Wake up. Drive through traffic to get to work to make someone else’s dream a reality, drive back to drop onto a chair, onto a bed, and have a flat screen tell them what else is happening in their pseudo-world. Hopefully they maintain or advance their status during the day so that the evenings might be spent with a mate.

Maybe they procreate, or at least have fun trying or not trying – it’s more complicated these days. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they go out to eat. Maybe they go out and drink fermented fruits or vegetables to forget that their pseudo-world is repetitive, anesthesia for the lost. Maybe they dance.

They sleep. They wake up. And they do it all over again, except maybe on the 6th and 7th days of a 7 day week based on a calendar that the Romans came up with – or maybe some other civilization came up with. They repeat this process for decades. A half century. More.

Dare to imagine something else.

Imagination

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Having now created the God of Technology, I started perusing things related to technology and found a post on the Arts &Crafts, How-To’s, Upcycling & Repurposing blog.

“Good and Bad” is based on the a daily prompt, “What technology would you be better off without, why?”. Hidden within, Melodie writes:

…Games…. Of course we had a Nintendo and Atari. But we had what is called our “imagination “. We went outside to play, rode our bikes. Were told to come home before dark. Now a days, kids are so zoned into the tv , cell phones, Xbox or Play station...

Imagination. We all sort of understand what it is, but what is it? The first dictionary definition (Merriam Webster) of imagination is:

“the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality”.

In other words, the ability to create within the reality of our own minds, minds which are fed by the senses but not limited to the senses. In it’s own way, imagination could be considered a sense.

I don’t know that there is more or less imagination since I was a child. What I do know is that technology is constantly begging us for attention because it massages the fun bits of our brains, and maybe kids these days aren’t allowed to imagine as much because imagination always works best for me with… time.

Imagination draws from things we have experienced, both perceived and imagined – in fact, both tickle the same parts of the brain with memory and imagined. It’s why memory isn’t as trustworthy as we would like to think, and why hallucinations of artificial intelligences seem so much like the same thing.

Books, video games, movies, music, all of these things feed into what we imagine with. Like a learning model for an artificial intelligence. The more you cram in there, the more tools you have except… when you spend time considering much of the same inputs… you find that there’s more to them with a little imagination.

When I play a video game, watch a movie, etc, I’m also exploring someone else’s imagination – I’m not using my own – and maybe that’s an important part of who we are as humans.

Replacing imagination with technology doesn’t seem like a great answer.

Beached.

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This morning I was thinking about the medium and the message and it’s semantic intentionality about discussing the same things. Then I realized it’s Sunday, and I can take a break from that and think on other things.

The beach is always a bad idea for me on the weekends. The North Coast Road on the weekend is too annoying and peopley on the weekends, which means loud annoying music when I just want to hear the wind and surf.

On the weekends, the beach is a petri dish for all that annoys me, on Monday, it’s still being cleaned from their physical pollution. Local government efficiency in Trinidad and Tobago is about the same as that of the Russian war machine – nothing maintained, everything falling apart except the will to try to do something.

It’s not too different anywhere, really. The bus of government goes nowhere. The weight of the wheels defies the torque of the will of the people through government, regardless of the size of the engine.

Meanwhile, people on the bus fight for seats while the driver keeps asking for help on a broken radio as the engine idles, poisoning the world around it and the people on the bus – the windows are down, the air conditioner broken.

Something has to change. I’m not sure what it is. While not as prosey as above, part of this is what we discussed at the barber shop, openly between equals regardless of social standing. There are people thinking about these things, all with a hand on a piece of the machine and wondering what the hell it’s actually supposed to be doing.

By process of elimination, we find out what it’s not doing.

I’d rather have spent my life on the beach, a castaway, full of wonder at what could be out there but with no way of going beyond. To dream of something better, imagining a world as one would want it.

Such occasion would be nice.

Imagined Conversation.

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My Late FatherYesterday marked 12 years since my father passed away. I am reminded every year in Trinidad and Tobago only because of Emancipation Day.

To say that our relationship was complicated would make a British person cringe at such use of understatement. We rarely agreed on anything, and if we did we, as individuals, wondered what was wrong.

So I wondered how the conversation would go, so many years gone by and myself having grown entirely out from under his shadow.

I expect my father would start it off. He was good about that.

“I’ve been dead 12 years. What have you done?”
“Well, I’ve turned things around on the land. People have gotten to know me and are coming around.”
“Good. You learned how to deal with them. I didn’t think you had it in you to squeeze them.”
“Well, I didn’t squeeze them.”
“What? They’ll take advantage of you!”, growling, “You can’t be soft! They’ll walk all over you!”
“Well, they walked all over you when you were confrontational.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I have 12 years of knowing what I’m talking about. Your ashes blew away from Mosquito Creek with you not having enjoyed anything about the Estate. I tell the people who have problems with you to go down there and shout into the wind.”

He sighs, grinds his teeth and looks off.

“So, are you married yet? Children?”
“Nope.”

He sighs, grinds his teeth and looks off.

“What about your cousins? Are they dealing with their land?”
“That’s not my business.”
“So you don’t know?”
“Ask them yourself. The answer they give you may not be the answer they give me, the answers they give may not be what they are actually doing. Why waste time worrying about things like that?”

He glares at me, then sighs. “That was always the problem I faced.”

“And I don’t have that problem simply by not making it mine.”

“What happened to the workshop?”
“Oh, you’ll love this. Your sister closed it.”
“What?!”
“Yes. Your brother had a stroke, a lot of things happened afterward that boiled down to her taking control and she closed it. ”
“You were supposed to run it! Or one of your cousins!”
“Well, truth be told only one of us ever really wanted to run it and when it came down to it, he didn’t really want to either. And your sister made sure of that.”
“Hmm. Which sister, anyway?”
“What, you folks still don’t talk?”
“Don’t be a smartass, tell me which sister.”
“Does it matter?”

Again, the glare.
“No, it doesn’t.”

“See, you’re all dead but two. It’s a brave new world.”
“How is it?”
“If you were here, you’d probably die of heartbreak.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. So did you ever talk to your father like we’re doing now?”
“Many times.”
“Drove you crazy, didn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You never really got out from under his shadow, did you?”
“What?!”
“Well, the closer to death you got, the more you talked about his visions and plans.”
“I did?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t realize that. So are you trying to do the same as you get closer to death?”
“Nope. Your visions and plans are gone with you – have been for 12 years.”
“So why the HELL are you even talking to me?”
“I thought it would be interesting. I thought about how you imagined your father, and I imagined mine. And you’re here. And now… you’re gone, left as a part of my memory and imagination in a small room of my mind. I may visit you from time to time, but you are only me remembering you.”
“You always talked about shit like that. Unproductive!”
“Generally speaking, yes, this was unproductive. But it was closure.”
“What?! You little…”

And he’s gone. What’s more, I’m free of him.