language of ecology

cyberspace is not a space
but the end of space
a placeless place
where anywhere is here
and anytime is now.

“We have reached the limits of our language.”
- Heisenberg

It’s been over a century since our mechanical assumptions about space, time and reality were shattered by Einstein’s daydreams of riding on a beam of light and Picasso’s desire to see and paint like a child. Today we are submerged in a cubist web of instant information that stretches over the entire planet. We live at the speed of light. And yet we still don’t have the vocabulary to make sense of our new environment.

kk says:

a “network is more a process than a thing. In the logic of the net there is a shift from nouns to verbs. …  It’s not what something is, it’s what it is connected to, what it does.”

We try to find words to make sense of our inter-dependence but English is a language of nouns … objects pulled from the flux and flow, captured and pinned down like butterflies in a case.

“Every human language secretes a kind of perceptual boundary that hovers, like a translucent veil, between those who speak that language and the sensuous terrain that they inhabit.” - David Abram

For 2000 years we’ve conquered the world
by breaking it up into p i e c e s
and every step of that journey
is embedded in our language.
English encourages us to imagine our world
of relationship and process
as a collection of fragmented bits
suspended in isolation.

But there is no me without you
no us without them
We are defined by the invisible boundaries
of what we are not.
We are nothing … but relationship.

Buckminster Fuller says:
“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not  a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process —an integral function of the universe.

God is a verb.
Our brittle language cracks
and crumbles at the thought.
(Is atheism a revolt against God,
or the unwitting protest against
god being turned into a noun?)

“The principle verb in the Navajo language is the verb “to go” and not the verb “to be,” which is the principle verb in so many other languages but is of relatively minor importance in Navajo. This seems to indicate a cosmos composed of processes and events, as opposed to a cosmos composed of facts and things.” - Gary Witherspoon

We are re-imagining our world in the image of an electric circuit:
an endless now withnobeginningmiddleorend
We are nodes in a network
and in the logic of the net
“It’s not what something is, it’s what it is connected to, what it does.”

The Internet is the new kind of awareness. It’s not something that you look at. It is the way or means through which you look at things. - Eric McLuhan

The network is lifting our perceptual veil
and revealing a universe of relationship.
Our obsession with individualism and independence
can not survive the logic of the net.

The network is urging us to embrace a new kind of awareness, like that of the Navajo and other Native Americans, who “instead of trying to emphasize their individuality and independence, … find identity and fulfillment in their vast system of interdependence and social bonds.”

This is the beginning of an intimate dance.
Our culture, our language and our technology are the dancers
and our shifting awareness
is the dancing.