An/aesthetics

I’m so fagged out I considered just blogging a picture of my dog, captioned My yoga instructor, which I posted to Flickr yesterday. Would it be unseemly and too revealing for me to say that I think I must still be suffering from the anemia my doctor diagnosed …when?, several months ago? I’ve taken my iron supplements, but while I tried to keep up with the “tiger’s milk” concoction (a past winner in keeping mineral levels, including iron, at optimum), I lapsed after only a short while because I didn’t want to drink the stuff anymore. Now I wonder whether I’ve stinted on the supplements, popping just one pill a day instead of the three suggested by the label. I’m tired, tired to the point of feeling like my head is nailed to the floor and that I’m making gigantic, if useless, efforts to pull up the floorboards with my forehead. One tries not to get depressed, but one finds it difficult at times to maintain one’s equilibrium. If this keeps up, I’ll have to fire my yoga-dog. Hot dog.

The daffodils are late this year. Crocuses are all up, ditto other smaller bulbs. My neighbour across the street has a camellia in his front yard, facing west, which gets a lot of sun; it too has begun blooming. Some ornamental-type trees are blooming — blooms still closed, but coming along. Lots of different rhododendrons are blooming, too. This is the sort of thing we Victorianites love to lord over the rest of Canada, which is more often than not chest-deep in snow right around now.

Despite all this organic bounty, a vacation is in order. The world feels like it’s getting smaller, and furthermore, the virtual world is getting shrunken down to size, shrink-wrapped in the same whizz-bang formats, to the point where everything on the computer screen suddenly starts to look the same. The world outside my front door has a texture and mouth-feel (to steal a word from the food industry) that can’t be approximated in pixels.

Technology has an unfortunate tendency to make everything the same — and I say this with all due respect. Perhaps it’s inevitable. New technologies come along, people get excited and think, “yippee, this’ll change things,” and it does. For a while. But eventually, the technology gets used in predictable ways, namely to create more of the same. Most people use things in very average, ordinary ways to create what’s familiar and comfortable. Joseph Beuys might have thought that everyone, given the tools and opportunity, is an artist, but most people at heart want what they have, preferably just more of it. Perhaps that’s why we end up using technology to create homogenised products that don’t jab anyone the wrong way, products that create the look and the reality of more of the same. The divide between art and technology will not be bridged by a virtual revolution that creates products we already have and that facilitates eliding the corporeal nature of experience. Artists are supposed to bring the body back. Aesthetics — think about it — is the opposite of anaesthetics. The latter is what you get when you need to be knocked out, when you don’t want to feel pain with your aesthetically capable body. If you look at it long enough, the web is anaesthetic.

Blink. Blink. Blink.