Return to Form
Desiring something real
It is getting perilously close to a full year since I last published anything on here. I find there is a real struggle within me when it comes to intellectual work, an apathy towards sitting down and writing that must be overcome. I don’t think it’s that I’m inherently lazy since I’m busy enough in other areas of my life, but there is definitely a reluctance within me towards any exertion of my mind.
I’m certain it has something to do with looking at computer screens all day.
I work in a technical role right now where I spend every day staring at a screen for up to 8hrs. There is a feeling at the end of the day, when you step outside and, in my case, onto your bike of disconnection from reality. Your eyes are slightly unfocused and your mind floats unmoored from reality. Street signs, buildings, and pedestrians seem to appear and loom up at you and then disappear with equal rapidity. It takes a real act of will to return to full presence within the world around you. Oftentimes it feels far easier just to continue along in this fugue state - right onto the couch and immersion in another type of screen.
I grew up in the early days of social media. Instagram wasn’t around till late highschool, and even then it was largely connected to real life. The digital hadn’t yet fully attempted to obscure the real. I hope, pray, and believe that there are many people in my generation who are becoming dissatisfied and angry with the ways in which the digital has been substituted for the real. In both our work and our play.
Somewhat recently Ruth Gaskovski recommended a book called “Revenge of the Analog”. I was pleased to find that my local library had it available and am midway through it currently. I don’t think it presents anything extraordinarily surprising but it does it well and with numbers to highlight the growth of these analog industries. I think this “revenge” accounts for so much that we see flourishing in the world today. There is a revival of interest in heritage forms of construction, in folklore, in foraging, in food - a desire to be connected to the material things of our world.
I credit my own interest in beekeeping and agriculture to this same source. In university so much of what I was studying had become revisionist theories that were constantly in a state of flux. I critiqued the idea of objective truth enthusiastically and fully immersed myself in contemporary academic culture. I think a hallmark of this culture is the belief that you know better than those who came before you and can remake the world as you see fit - everything is up for reshaping and reimagining. Looking back, it was a time of unbelievable arrogance and I think that deep down (or possibly even not so deep down) I knew that it was all bosh.
This slipperiness in contemporary thought, where you can never nail something down for what it is produces the slipperiness of the digital world that is everywhere now. We are not made for slipperiness, but for tangible realities and truths that can be gripped and engaged with. Only when I was confronted with my own lack of substance after leaving the echo chambers of university was I forced to come to terms with that. I am grateful that I was raised in an orthodoxly Catholic home that provided me with a way out of this morass. Truth was waiting for me, all I had to do was reach out.
Others are not so lucky and yet they are fundamentally looking for the same thing. They are looking for “authenticity” and engagement with a reality that will not suddenly change and reshape itself. This accounts for the growth in trends like homesteading or slow living. If you don’t have the tools to search for truth in the abstract, you certainly have the tools to search for truth in the real simply by virtue of being an embodied person. I think there is a tendency to mock and belittle some of these trends, but I think we do so out of ignorance of the real desires behind them.
This is why Christ gave us the Eucharist. Not as a symbol that must be interpreted and re-interpreted depending on your particular lens, but as a concrete reality of His presence. I grant you that it can be a difficult reality to come to terms with, but it is also the most tangible reality we can encounter on earth.
I think I’ve gotten a little off track with the Eucharist, but it seemed to follow naturally from the earlier paragraphs. I think fundamentally, what I’m trying to articulate is that whether we are Christian or not we are searching for an unchangeable fact. A reality so present to us that all of the slipperiness of our daily lives will fall away. And this searching expresses itself in the revival of the analog, the resurgence of interest in craft, the explosion of hobbies that get people outside and away from their screens.
We should welcome it. It is a joyful thing.
Stay tuned, I have some beekeeping content planned for the rest of the summer.