Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No Hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people livin’ for today
Ah, ah, ah-ah (John Lennon)
John Lennon’s poignant song “Imagine” has been updated to address our dire postmodern times:
Imagine privacing as the practice of resisting postmodern publicness.
Imagine remembering apart from recording.
Imagine it as dismember- ing’s antonym.
Imagine sensation saturated with the undigitizable.
Imagine thinking fed by sources that remain opaque.
Imagine language with purposes other than communication.
Imagine, in place of text that undermines and disintegrates us, writing that underwrites the writer’s integrity.
Imagine technology that survives apart from the networks, that remembers none of our behavior and transmits no information, that extends our range without deranging us. It might well look like technology of the past.
Imagine imagination insulated from the constant exchange of public images, given time to ferment before it is exposed to light.
Imagine an invitation to a space without electronics or identifiers—an event with individuals and experiences that remain unrecorded, that start to shimmer with the aura of the unprecedented. You retrieve a forgotten urgency, a sense of the singular, a drama that separates this place and moment from the net and makes it yours, now, here. Each must rely on their own capacity for recollection. Nothing can be duplicated. Nothing can be subsumed…
Well worth reading!
