Desire Paths

My feminist theory teacher demonstrated the idea in college by taking us on a campus walk where she trampled wherever she wanted, regardless of what the sidewalks were laying down. (She was Laurie Finke; she wore a skirt made of men’s ties.) I remember her confidently charging across the plantings. It was a simple, yet radicalizing lesson.

Humans Make the World by Being in It

I have spent my life implicitly or explicitly answering the question “What does it mean to be human in an age of technology?”

So have you.

Like you, I have not found the answer. But I have, I suppose, created a space in the world using the world as it is. (Haphazardly, tentatively…)

This is just to say: technology doesn’t necessarily shape the world, our relationship to it does. We forge a path through the grass. Whether that grass is, you know, an actual lawn or, maybe, data-sucking applications or advertisements or songs about dances or videos of cats befriending elephants or whatever it is — it’s the ground we walk on.

The End of Middlemarch

I recommend the whole of Middlemarch but especially the last paragraph. (The preceding 1000 pages give it, literally, heft. But it works as just a paragraph, too.) George Eliot says some true things at the end of that book that relate to the topic at hand:

“There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside of it.”

(And George Eliot hadn’t even seen a smartphone!)

Also:

“… the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to a number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

The Path Forward

We don’t know how or who made the tracks. Yet, they are there. Our world is not as ill as it might have been because of those many, unhistoric travelers. They found a way through the world. A way of being human. Who made these paths? And how?

In Desire Paths, we’ll follow humans, historical and not, known and unknown, and walk the paths they laid down.

Next time on Desire Paths: A portrait is painted in Guilin, China. (No AI was involved!)

Upcoming this season in Desire Paths: Haiku and the Blues, Ikiru and bureaucracy, the lives of forgotten sailors, the cinema of Youssef Chahine, the 90s Men’s Movement when the Johns were Iron and Joseph Campbell made dudes craaaaazy and Jacques Derrida on the reasons why it’s not good to pay your babysitter too much.

Desire Paths comes to your inbox every other Thursday!