Plastic Rose – The Changing Nature of Memory

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Isn’t it interesting or perhaps more fittingly alarming that we have precious few markers of passage? A letter is such a finite thing. Perhaps no more finite than a tweet but certainly more tangibly finite. Because the leaf, the bit of tree, it will yellow and curl and return to earth. The words that it held in scripts so reflective of the man and mood that etched it, they are so personal, and thus so exquisitely temporal. You can picture these textures in the grand tapestry of time. Yes, of such markers there are precious few.

The modems hum, the screens glow, the constant podcast prattle. These innovations are worth celebrating. Yet as much as they inspire they alter the nature of inspiration. What is the qualia of this novelty?

What sort of poems, novels, philosophies, and sciences will flow from the omnipresent memory of machines? From these mirrors into which we can instill our favorite reflections and gaze thereupon to our heart’s content – can we expect an accurate picture? And if high definition does indeed provide accuracy is it fertile? Or is it merely a reflection of saliencies that serve onanistic solipsism.

It is difficult to tell how we will change. It is perhaps impossible to know how altered we already are. It is definitely impossible to know how altered we were at the advent of the transistor. For such knowledge is ephemeral. It is gone with those that possessed it.

It is precisely this thing, ephemerality, that we must watch.

For a flowers beauty is in the rareness and brevity of its blossom.

A beauty which the plastic rose destroys.

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