May/June 2006

Column

Heartbeat by Rabia Terri Harris
Off the Grid

Once upon a time, back in the legendary Sixties, quite a few folks were deeply unconvinced that the computer was our friend. In that primitive, unenlightened era, it seemed that the homogenization of distinct persons into sortable statistics, manipulable by any parameter of choice, would be profoundly disturbing. We were full of frantic alarms about dehumanization. And we were right.

Little did we know that people would learn to enjoy it.

After all, the human being is a rather embarrassing object. It smells and itches and has warts and bunions and rolls of fat; it sags and shrinks and develops wrinkles and bald spots, and not all of its parts necessarily line up right. By and large, a very bad piece of design. Whereas as images, we can all be just as slick as you please. All we have to do is purchase the right stuff, thoughtfully marketed to us according to the parameters of our painstakingly analyzed and cunningly generalized desires. Why not escape from yourself into your own avatar? Just pick who you want to be from our broad selection. And then, as long as the money doesn’t run out, it’s all infinitely renewable: an entire nation of Dorian Grays. If for some reason you can’t endure – or afford – the cybernetic nip and tuck and start to come apart, letting the ugly stuff leak out, you can be scary infotainment. Or you can simply disappear off the screens, leaving not a trace. Virtual reality. What a concept!

Okay, freeze frame. Back up. Change the channel.

We don’t have to go there. We’re not even capable of going there. It was all a bad dream.

The human race doesn’t come in masses. It doesn’t come in types. It comes in individuals: lots of them. How much of our wrongheadedness, our pure cussedness, our weird ideas, our flameouts and belligerence and self-pity, the general aggravation that we cause to other people, is just the pitched resistance of our simple humanity demanding that it exist?

Suppose we cut our imperfection a break. Suppose we sent the whole notion of image away on a long holiday. Suppose we decided today that we’re all kind of fun the way we are. Maybe other people’s faults would start striking us as interesting, rather than offensive. Maybe even our own faults would become bearable, so that we could look at them directly, without that cold terror in the pit of the stomach. You never know.

In Islamic tradition, the Devil gets to be the Devil by refusing a divine order to prostrate before the human being, into whom, for some strange reason, God has just breathed the mysterious sacred soul. “You have created me of fire and that of clay,” complains the slickest image of all time. “I am better.” This does not go over well with God, who clearly has a higher opinion of clay.

Could be that it wouldn’t hurt us, either, to have a higher opinion of clay. Clay is cool. It slows us down, it makes us think, and it makes us care. It saves us from a whole hell of a lot of arrogance.

If we’re properly grounded, maybe the random infusions of megalomania that now permeate our lives won't find it quite so easy to take hold. The heady taste of comic-book superpowers we get from the ‘Net is likely to vanish when we notice the toilet paper attached to our shoe – and noticing isn’t painful if we have no image to protect. Who we are, after all, is just exactly who we are. We’re irreducible, irreplaceable, unmappable, helpless, capable of anything, tragic, hilarious. We’re always off the grid.

Rabia Terri Harris, associate editor of Fellowship and chaplain at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, welcomes your comments and feedback.

©2006 Fellowship of Reconciliation