There’s definitely a top note of Marmite with this week’s cogitation. Some are going to love it, others hate it, and with few, I dare say, in between – just like opinions about that dark mystery, which comes to Portugal at great cost.
And speaking of dark, costly mysteries, I’ll pick up where I left off last week, with my hammering of the Great Iberian Outage, AKA ‘Dark Monday’, endeavouring to shed some light on the matter, unapologetic about the wanton use of puns and contrived imagery that will run through these next few paragraphs.
If you weren’t there or don’t recall, I did not mince my words about what I considered a stunning breach of the social contract. It was a bitter judgement upon the unprecedented and irresponsible civic injury that had the stink of corporate and self-interested incompetence about it.
It was, I admit, a dismal display of utter disdain on my part, about this dark matter, which was notably free of my customary hopefulness and positivity. That, I promised, would follow. So here it is.
It is indeed a higher and more transcendent perspective that I’d like to deploy this week, pitched way above righteous condemnation, while narrative-followers, nervy apologists, and conspiracy theorists continue to battle it out on the mundane levels of the matter, where I am certain no certainty will ever emerge.
If it’s relief or peace we are seeking around this sorry state of affairs, or even the next inevitable newsworthy distraction for our precious attention (and aren’t they coming thick and fast?), forget rationality, or what passes for it today. We need to get spiritual.
I mentioned possible haters of what I am sharing here today, and I’m guessing they will be the atheistic and agnostic among us. For you ‘non-believers’, I’ll simply ask that you bear with me and align yourself with, and stay in, that instinctive place you go to, before your rational mind kicks in. Or, alternatively, align with who or what you pray to, because everyone prays when the chips are down, even the nay-sayers of divinity.
And for the variously religious or spiritual, who might consider yourselves to be more open, which indeed I would expect if you are walking the talk, please keep your heart and mind open for what I am about to suggest.
Looking back at the loss of power, the grid failure and the lack of connectivity with a calmer and cooler scrutiny, I’m going to call it and develop a grand metaphor.
Progressively, we have turned our back on the supposed, superstitious naivety of faith, and fixed our mentality upon more obvious and rational forms of comfort and support, bingeing on information rather than getting true nourishment from knowledge.
We have new, shifting preferences now, attachments that suit our changing minds, rather than any sense of difficult and fixed truth that could undermine self-interest and passing pleasure.
And on that ordinary Monday, in an unexpected instant, all that transient data and its appeal disappeared behind and beyond the darkened screens of computers, ATMs and supposedly ‘smart’ phones. And if not instant, then gradual computerised cognitive impairment, as batteries failed and the last few bits of data were spent and used up, in desperate attempts to connect and confirm. The false gods died that day. That which we unconsciously worship, with just about all our attention and trust, froze over.
Electricity was no longer omnipotent and omnipresent. Consequently, the altar we call the Internet failed us, however much we begged, pleaded and persisted for its grace. Modern money – in our times facilitated electronically – also left us forsaken, apart from its ‘Old Testament’ versions in paper and metal, which few had taken the trouble to carry, conditioned as they had become to the suddenly useless ‘New Testament’ plastic and app likenesses.
Laboured, I know, is my allegorical account of the “Apagão”, the outage, but nonetheless a fair crack at summing up the pretty pass of our collective predicament; our hopelessness actually, which seemed so sophisticated when up and running, its integrity beyond doubt or concern. We discovered we are really not as clever as we thought, are we? OK, maybe clever, but certainly not intelligent, with all our eggs in one huge and vulnerable basket.
How did we get here, do you suppose? It’s certainly a question I apply myself to, while other men carry on adding further layers of, to me, transparent clothing to the Naked Emperor of modern life, covering his immodesty with only intellectual satisfaction and nothing that the authentic human spirit is crying out for in these crazy times.
It’s clear to me, we built and got connected, addicted, to the wrong grid. The Industrial Revolution, and its prolific problem child, the ‘Digital Age’ (think Trump and Musk) has admittedly been so alluring and enrolling with its comfort, convenience and charm, but through the chinks of its shiny armour, reveals only growing lack for the many and pointless riches for the few.
Sure, we’ve all gone along for the ride but now found ourselves on a juggernaut too big, too bold and horribly addictive to easily abandon. Strangely, it let go of us that day, if only for a few hours. And in its biblical drought, had us recall and enjoy something more beautiful, as the children played and birds sang in the ‘only sun’.
In that enforced peace and casting out of our technological Eden, some may have seen how we’ve turned our back on the true matrix. Call it God if you like. Or the Universe, the all-that-is or just life beyond living. And for the atheists, that which you came from and shall return to, even if it is, to you, ‘nothing’. There, some of us were face to face with the simplicity of being, and free from the hypnosis of doing that characterises and permeates our ‘normal’ lives.
Yes, I did just turn a power-cut into an elaborate parable. And I’m not done yet!
It’s time to reconnect. Time to switch ‘The Light’ back on. And to enjoy the warmth, the comfort, the security, of that which is not only greater than ourselves but IS ourselves, if we only remember ‘it’. It’s not that we even have a choice, we ARE the grid, and we voluntarily disconnect and ignore this constant source of love and goodness, in favour of the false gods and prophets, at our peril.
