I’ve been thinking about plasticine. I’ve been remembering the smell. The colors. Blue in particular, how it stained my fingers and left little clouds on things when I stamped it – on the pages of my “notebook,” the fridge, the kitchen table. I can’t describe the smell to you. I’m sitting here to think, but I can’t come up with much beyond “rubbery” or “faintly petroleum.” And those don’t exactly cut it.
We were having dinner on Sunday. Henry was home for the weekend. I made salmon with habanero oil and lime rice. It was pleasant — candles, Willy’s “Old and Outdoors” playlist. But the conversation darted like a pinball, pinged from thing to thing in a faintly exhausting, whiplash way. Bits of topics, all of them potentially good, were ripped off course by iPhones and the more interesting things those bits of metal and glass had to offer.
One four-second byte of conversation was to do with some book or other. But it came to an abrupt end when someone — suddenly thinking about a different book, or the movie made of it, or the guy who starred in it, the coat he wore in it and how much it cost on Amazon — plucked a phone from the table, and that particular thread was lost.
So I carried on pondering books later, and I got to thinking about the writing I spend most of my days doing. I felt sad, dinosaur-ish, heading for extinction, wondering about value. If there is any at all in what I do. And it was less about me and my pursuits, and more a concern for a future in which the human mind doesn’t look the same. How the new mind may not have the dexterity to turn the written word into pictures, nor the writerly inclination to transpose the world around us into words.
Google says the average teenager now spends 8.5 hours a day on their phone. That’s a whole work day feasting on images with no smell or taste. Which surely means the new mind – with a very different brand of lived experience – will have fewer real, 3D memories; a shallower and shallower reservoir from which to retrieve corresponding sights and sounds. In other words, the two-way relationship - the magical system of osmosis between writer and reader - will meet a wall. We just won’t really know what the other is talking about, and words on a page which should – like match to sparkler – light up the mind, will not.
For centuries, it has been the writer’s job, and goal, to try and do this — to give the mind of her reader somewhere to go, to offer up a kind of dream. It’s why, presumably, books and their stories keep the captive sane. Considering this, a book is a world. But to read books, we need agility. Our minds, like plasticine, need to stretch; and keep on stretching.
“Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.” (Toni Morrison)
AB - 4.24.24
If I were still teaching reading/writing/grammar in a classroom every day, I would print this out poster size—with color, texture, and perhaps scented ink—to hang on my wall. Thank you, Alexa.
This is a perfect commentary on the present! My god, what we are losing. I do sound and feel like a dinosaur. You write so very well, Alexa.