weather

I spend the morning plunging, beginning in high contrast: a panel of bright white, a deep black beyond. This is my horizontal ritual. I cannot turn off the light. I am sustained by it, made buoyant enough to float along the river toward the setting sun. The worry is emptied out of me. The device tells me what the weather is like outside. The worry is emptied out of me. I will not leave the cave today, but at least I know what it feels like outside.

  • WEATHER IS A
  • THIRD TO
  • PLACE AND TIME1

Beyond the screen is a space without wind. Wind is the source of many frustrations, so perhaps this is a good thing. I remember the headwinds of the North American flatlands. After we had Gone To The Sun, we descended into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the Eastern side. Here, we met the wind. We came to know the wind. It wasn’t until we found the hills of New York that we said goodbye (and good riddance).

The wind moves about and turns on a whim. One moment: pressing into your face (an itchiness, a great anxious weight), suppressing your spirit; and then: singing a song that only your back can hear.

“When ‘the folk’ leave home in companies, they travel in eddies of wind.” In Scottish lore, eddy winds (or ‘the people’s puff of wind’) would lift up those traveling at night and carry them back to the place that they began from.2

“I am looking for the weather in the screen.”

Weather might help to endure the slick world made for purely rational creatures. The gales might swirl just enough to make a small hill on the surface of glass. A little shadow is cast. A place to hide or sleep, unexposed, at least for a little while. I notice some patterns of weather: the pinwheel, the throbber,3 the screensaver, the broken signal, the crash…

What does the tool become when it betrays? There is a dance that we dance. A game of catching up and keeping pace. There is a confrontation with human limits when the machine reaches a limit. A cry. Maybe something more. Because the machine was made to extend those limits, diminish those limits, erase those limits. Now, it does this too well and will continue to do this too well. We no longer cry because the machine cannot keep up. We cry because we cannot.

  1. Ian Hamilton Finlay ↩︎

  2. “By throwing one’s left (or toisgeul) shoe at it, the Fairies are made to drop whatever they may be taking away—men, women, children, or animals. The same result is attained by throwing one’s bonnet, saying, ‘this is yours, that’s mine’ (Is leatsa so, is leamsa sin), or a naked knife, or earth from a mole-hill.”  —John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland ↩︎

  3. “We simply have to wait and trust that the throbber’s motion does indeed represent some form of progress. The throbber is a sign of temporal rupture. It is the last barrier to a perfectly smooth and seamless virtual experience. It draws attention to an asynchronous maladjustment, or misalignment, between the space of our bodies and the infinite atopian fluidity of the digital world.”  —Jack Self quoted in: Callum Copley,New Document 1 ↩︎