The intransigence of text
Oct. 5th, 2010 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceHee. Allow me to take ruthless advantage of you, O my beloved 'earers.
I've been asked to write a brief piece of text, to go with an image in a book of art.
The image is here, since you ask.
I have written the piece herebelow: and my question is, if you haven't read the stories from which the text derives, does it still actually make sense, does it make a point worth making? It is not fiction; but is it just hot air?
THE INTRANSIGENCE OF TRAVEL
The speed of light is the speed of information. This is known, tabulated, locked. Unexceptional. It’s built into the interface, the way we negotiate the universe.
The speed of wonder is a slower thing. You have to go old-fashioned, in the body, in a ship. How many sights are worth that: the expenditure of years and decades in cold-sleep, just evading time until primitive propulsion and dull ballistics can bring your brute form into the same physical instance as something else? It all seems so ... backward-looking. More ways than one.
And yet. People do it, they still do it. People go. Cased in flesh and caged in steel, fettered and insecure, they fly blind through the empty dreamless dark, in pursuit of what is marvellous and elsewhere. It’s not about the journey, not for them. Not any more. It’s about being there, seeing, sharing something other. The inexorable tumble-and-suck of a wormhole, the dazzle of novatic flare, the sense of standing at a margin. On the verge.
The medium is the message; the fact of transit lies at the heart of what it says. About you, about us all. We are where we go, and why we go there. An out-of-body experience is just an oxymoron in the end.
I've been asked to write a brief piece of text, to go with an image in a book of art.
The image is here, since you ask.
I have written the piece herebelow: and my question is, if you haven't read the stories from which the text derives, does it still actually make sense, does it make a point worth making? It is not fiction; but is it just hot air?
THE INTRANSIGENCE OF TRAVEL
The speed of light is the speed of information. This is known, tabulated, locked. Unexceptional. It’s built into the interface, the way we negotiate the universe.
The speed of wonder is a slower thing. You have to go old-fashioned, in the body, in a ship. How many sights are worth that: the expenditure of years and decades in cold-sleep, just evading time until primitive propulsion and dull ballistics can bring your brute form into the same physical instance as something else? It all seems so ... backward-looking. More ways than one.
And yet. People do it, they still do it. People go. Cased in flesh and caged in steel, fettered and insecure, they fly blind through the empty dreamless dark, in pursuit of what is marvellous and elsewhere. It’s not about the journey, not for them. Not any more. It’s about being there, seeing, sharing something other. The inexorable tumble-and-suck of a wormhole, the dazzle of novatic flare, the sense of standing at a margin. On the verge.
The medium is the message; the fact of transit lies at the heart of what it says. About you, about us all. We are where we go, and why we go there. An out-of-body experience is just an oxymoron in the end.