by Laura K Secor

“Life in the Megacity is drowning in the Noise, the incessant flood of stimuli of the postmodern age: data feeds, neural sensations, drugs, memories, ads, all of it.  New tech changes the rules of the game faster than anyone can process, or people no longer try.  They give in to the Noise.”  (:OtherScape)

This quote is from a role-playing game set in some indefinite future when the cyber-life has taken over our society, but I can’t help but feel that we are already living in that future.  When are we not living surrounded by symbols and representations, when are we not looking at the world through a screen?  We so rarely sit in the presence of the present.  We are living a mediated life.

In 1944, Ernst Cassirer (An Essay on Man) wrote about how it all started, with the beginning of language.

“No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe.  Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe.  They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience.  We have so enveloped ourselves in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that we cannot see or know anything…. We live in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears in illusions and disillusions, in our fantasies and dreams.”

So before this cyber-life, already it started when we first began experiencing the world through language rather than direct experience.  We have this desire to label things.  It started with Aristotle, the obsessive classification of things. We encountered a “thing” and we gave it a label, and we put it in a category, and we felt that we were done with it.  How often do you go on a walk in the woods, and find yourself labeling the trees, the flowers, the animals, rather than just seeing them? 

And then, as Cassirer said, we added myths, and we started seeing the life paths of other people through the lens of myth.  We used art not to capture the world but to re-present it, to make it over to reflect our own imaginations.  Our imaginations – possibly our greatest gifts – are our biggest handicap when it comes to realizing the present world.  And today, people communicate not even with their own myths, their own art, their own language, but with the memes of Instagram, TikTok, Facebook.  

The poet of the invisible, Rainer Maria Rikle, thought deeply about these barriers.  These sections from the Eighth Duino Elegy speak to the reality humans have lost.

With all its eyes the animal world
beholds the Open.  Only ours
are as if inverted and set all around it
like traps at the doors to freedom.
What’s outside we know only from the animal’s
countenance: for almost from the first we take a child
and turn him around and force him to gaze
backward and take in structure, not the Open
that lies so deep in an animal’s face.

…

And yet, in that warm, watchful animal
lives the weight and care of an enormous sadness.
For what sometimes overwhelms us often
clings to it, too – a kind of memory that tells us
that what we’re now striving for was once
nearer and truer and attached to us
with infinite tenderness.  Here all is distance,
there it was breath. After that first home
the second seems drafty and ambiguous.

…

Who’s turned us around like this, so that
always, no matter what we do, we’re in the posture
of someone just departing? As he,
on the last hill that shows him his whole valley
one last time, turns, stops, lingers —,
we live our lives, forever taking leave.

How can we turn around and see the world the animals still see?  How can we break free of the barriers of language and myth and meme?  What does it mean to become present?  For all the years of Covid, I lived outside my body, buried in news feeds and in zoom calls.

Then menopause, and embodiment took on a new immediacy.  I was unable to concentrate on anything except my physical present moment, but that kind of focused attention does not feel like the energy of presence.  It’s miserable.  And yet.  And yet the physical misery opens a door to a new way of being.  I spent more time in yoga studios, and shevasana became my new safe haven.  After the effort to give attention to the energy body during the asana portion of the class, lying down I was able to float in that energy body, giving it my full attention in a way I hadn’t attended to anything since my baby was small.  This grounded yet floating energy, where I feel like some medieval yogi hovering three inches above the stone floor of the temple, this has become my new home.