by Mike Driver

Humanity is trapped in the space between peace and flow: a permanent agitation. The main culprit is in front of your face right now. The blind mirror, a mirror that only reflects half of reality. The dead half. A mirror that can only present what is constructed, forced, labelled, modelled, politicised, propagandised, manufactured, verified, certified, credentialed, seductive, selective, sensationalised, tampered, re-represented, reified, reduced, separated, digitised, financialised, corporatized, sexualised, compartmentalised, decontextualised, formalised, processed, objectified, artificial, hollow, desacralized, corrupted, depraved, perverted and unfeeling.

A mirror reflecting only the past or an absent future but never now. All the time, every day. A blind mirror that only reflects half of you: the restless, tense, anxious half. The addict. What is propagandised as connection is disconnecting the contextual, grounded, present, relational, quiet, calm, loving half. The half that hosts that feeling of peace we all crave. The half that lives in the reverie of flow.

There are two states to wish for in this life: peace and flow. The trouble is you can’t aim yourself right at them, they arise as a side effect of doing something else. Agitation on the other hand is an easy target to hit. Just turn your phone on and let the algorithm manipulate your synapses.

So, what is peace and where do we find it? The recently deceased Wendell Berry (RIP), pictured, answers that question for us here:

The Peace Of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light.
For a time, I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.

Where do we ‘rest in the grace of the world’ today? If we were visited by particularly cultured aliens, might they consider annihilation of grace to be the purpose of our modern society? We inhabit environments where the aesthetics are relentlessly ugly and utilitarian, what the architect Chris Alexander describes as ‘these faceless things’’. Where would we go to live what Alexander called ‘the sanctified life’?

Consider the difference between a library and a data centre. The library contains life, warmth, wholeness and beauty, it is connected to history and tradition, it has a quality you struggle to name. A peace you can access. The data centre on the other hand is dis-harmonious, ugly, voracious, atomised, the noise unnatural, the electronic howl of something from the depths of madness.

We’re draining the resources of the planet to build the latter while the former becomes a museum of our lost minds.

McLuhan famously said ‘the medium is the message’ – are we the medium and if so have we become the message? Have we lost ourselves? Has something removed our internal life and replaced our minds with an artificial imposter? What effect does the method of storage and accessibility of knowledge have on us? What happens if we outsource the processing of this knowledge? What is the consequence of the loss of unmediated experience? What is left?

Denise Levertov steps in to explain the problem here:

Contraband 

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That’s why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.
We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again
but, knowing no better.
It’s toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable – but reason
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell
reflecting our own faces. God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in – as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.

The storage and instant retrieval of knowledge at this scale results in an overdose. Our minds become ‘hardened to steel’. Our fixated certainty a ‘wall between us and god’.

Denise tells us ‘God lives on the other side of that mirror’, what happens to us if we can’t see anything else?

I realise I’ve asked my reader(s) to read something else rarely attended to in the modern world, entire poems. We might get a line here or there chipped out to illustrate a particular point (as I have done in the previous paragraph) but we rarely address a poem in whole. When we do that we let the light in, we hear that distant strain of music, we find ourselves in flow and on the other side of that flow we discover peace.

What is flow and how do we experience it? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow describes the experience as when we are completely absorbed in what we are doing, attention is concentrated and our self-consciousness recedes, the activity becomes rewarding in itself. The blind mirror continually returns us to an agitated sense of self while in flow we quiet that anxious voice.

I often find my flow in writing; Ted Hughes captures what happens here:

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

The next word seems to present itself irrespective of conscious thought. The words discovered rather than mediated via a machine. As an aside this is why the machine cannot create anything new, it has no mind into which the fox can walk. Writing works for me but it might also be music or painting, dancing, working with your hands, gardening, sport, solving a difficult problem, deep face to face unmediated conversations with other human beings or prayer. Where the blind mirror induces a self continuous with the machine, flow dissolves self-consciousness into a sublime feeling of being.

The consequences of minds induced into a permanent state of agitation are playing out all around us. Thoughts are projected from the outside onto the mind itself. In these circumstances the machine thinks for you wholesale, anything no matter how destructive or ridiculous can be believed. Truth becomes open to reason, beauty relative, freedom exchanged for the mirage of convenience. Every day a repetition of absurdities and atrocities. An infinite regression of algorithmic sameness. A world without transcendence, without peace, without flow.

Life doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine walking to a daybreak free of screens. A daybreak full of mystery and possibility, of hope and spontaneity. A daybreak that says:

here’s another chance,

and another,

and another.