.
Inklings
Shut off that damn brainwashing, numbing screen!
Tonight I did. I reached, opened that book.
From sentences, the mind gleans what it means.
What happens when we painstakingly look?
We visualize and vocalize the text
And enter in the flow between the lines.
Carried along, we wonder what comes next.
Shun all concepts! Fill up a glass of wine,
A cabernet chilled with vanilla scent.
See it—swirl it—smell it—sip it—zest it.
Savor the wine’s bouquet, it’s tart accent
And on that beach, let’s swoon… all is moonlit.
Those screens bombast our minds. Zombied we stare.
Images flash and we’re lobotomized
As gray matter shrinks from never-ending glare.
We root down in our seats—anesthetized.
A book is the mind’s screen. We generate
Reality. On that beach, toast your glass
And in each other’s eyes, look and fixate…
Never hearing the gusts through sea oat grass.
.
.
Peter Venable has been writing poetry for fifty years and his poems have appeared in The Lyric, The Merton Seasonal, The Christian Century, and other publications. More of his work can be found at petercvenable.wordpress.com. His “Roofless Church” merited an Honorable Mention in The Best Poems of 2024 in the SCP’s International Poetry Competition.
This poem interests me on several levels, Peter, and raises a lot of questions.
Knowledge, history, storytelling used to be the purview of specific members of society in the past and was oral, committed to memory. The advent of the written word, quill and paper led to the storage of knowledge and history, while storytelling, I suppose remained with specific tribal and clan members.
When the printed book came on the scene, apparently there was a similar feeling as there is today with screens. Productive people were wasting too much time with their noses in frivolous novels. Meanwhile, a large number of old stories, threatened with becoming forgotten, were saved by the efforts of the Brothers Grim, academics who saw traditional storytelling dying out, collected them together and put them in a book (though they self-censored for the second edition).
So, the question is, are we just fuddy-duddies standing in the way of progress when we talk about screen zombies.
For the record, I’m on your side, though I feel we’re King Canutes in the final analysis, battling not against a tide of what I call ‘dummy fodder’, but a tsunami. Then again, with my qualms about ChatGPT, etc, and cheating, didn’t we cheat by using dictionaries and thesauruses, instead of training our brains?
As for your poem, Peter, the fourth quatrain really summed it up for me. I recently escorted a group of visiting tourists around some major sites of London, but most were ‘scrollers’, interested in nothing more than the group pic and selfies in front of Buckingham Palace or Big Ben (Queen Elizabeth II Tower), though they did perk up at the WWII Women’s War Memorial when I told them that my grandmother worked night shift in a munitions factory during the Blitz. I felt like the old storyteller who would soon be superseded by the march of time.
Anyhow, I’ve rambled on enough. Thanks for the read.
Appreciate your time. key on!
Paul, I think there is a major difference between the development of computers (and the “screen-and-scroll” culture that has mushroomed out of it), and the invention of printing from moveable type.
The early printers did their very best to produce books that were indistinguishable from manuscript books. They wanted their books to fit in with the existing book world, so that readers would not be upset or disoriented by something new. Many of the printers (like Gutenberg) actually hired artists to illuminate their printed books with illustrations and large ornamental capitals, so that they would look just like the products of a monastery scriptorium. I have old books from this period, where you can see that the printer left a wide space at the start of a paragraph (with nothing but a small letter printed in the center of that space) to tell the illustrator what big letter he was required to put into that space, with color and fanciful designs.
Why this added time and expense? Simple — the printers worked on the assumption that books were books, and had to look like the books that their niche-market knew and preferred. This was a highly conservative attitude, in that it strove to remain true to the inherited culture of written texts. Many of the earliest incunabula books look exactly as if they were penned and illuminated by monastic scribes. And even then, many very conservative buyers and collectors refused to have printed books in their personal library, dismissing them as cheap, newfangled frauds.
Computers and the “screen-and scroll” culture they promote are radically different. The people who started it all, and who are employed in its development now, are not conservative in any sense. They are driven by a wild, manic energy that makes them look for anything new and radical and cutting-edge and exciting. Quite frankly, I believe they are driven by a misplaced sexual urge to find ever more complex ways of doing things, and ever more intricate computerized machinery. I have never met a computer nerd or an IT person who wasn’t wet in the crotch for “new stuff.” Their wide-eyed enthusiasm is repellent.
And the real interest of the computer world isn’t text, but visuals. Yes, computers have made many texts easily available to a wide audience, just as the early printers did when they produced 500 copies of a book in a few weeks, when a monk took a year or more to copy out a complete Bible. But the vast majority of computer users are there for the sights and sounds of music, videos, podcasts, oral reportage, photographs, and the brainless interaction of social media. Those of us who use the computer for texts and reading and research are in the minority.
Screen zombies are real. They are glued to the screen for countless hours, but they certainly aren’t reading poetry or scholarly dissertations. They want to be glutted with visuals and auditory experiences. And the computer business knows this, and caters to them primarily. As for those of us who are still connected to written-word culture, we are just here on sufferance.
Points taken. Re screen zombies; ten or more years ago I had a story published in an Australian magazine about a ‘screen zombie’ who wakes up, gets ready for work and heads off to work not knowing that the zombie apocalypse is unfolding because she’s glued to her screen. Equally, the zombies mistake her for one of their own due to her zombie-like demeanour, and leave her be.
Not unsurprisingly, the story ends up in a mall, where she’s informed of what’s occurred and proceeds to take pictures of the zombies pressing at the front entrance of the mall to post on her blog.
Peter, I’m much in favor of books, and usually start the day with one in addition to the seasonal prayerbook. And I may do some writing in the notebook before moving on to the screen. You put much more than books, though, into the hands and lives of us inklings. Glad to recall the Oxford Inklings, that large group of talented scholars and writers who gathered and welcomed guests for literary discussions. You do mention looking in each other’s eyes (rather than solely or mainly at the screen), and isn’t it these personal meetings, whether for discussion or casual talk, that add immeasurable depth and joy to our existence? Not to mention the wine and the ritual of appreciating it–or the beach with breezes and sea oats, and the moon! So lovely a poem to remind us of the best in ourselves. What can we do if we “painstakingly look”? “Visualize and vocalize” and “wonder” and “enter in” so as to “generate reality.”
Appreciate your comments, and the others. I read, God knows where and when, that sometimes a poem has more depth and meaning that the composer ever imagined. Apart from interactive screens, screen viewings are passive. Reading is active. Key on.
I’ve just finished (editing aside) a sonnet on this topic, Peter, the impetus to do so coming your poem.
I’ll share it here some time if it’s deemed up to scratch.