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| Paul Peel, A praia na Normandia, séc. XIX. |
domingo, 28 de outubro de 2018
segunda-feira, 22 de outubro de 2018
Sacred sites
Because being online has become a concrete expression of how entangled and contingent our lives inevitably are, being offline has taken on for some the ramifications of a higher plane, an analog temple in which one can more readily perceive one’s better self, in harmony with a truer, more “natural” reality. As if spirituality were a matter of escaping the claims of others, rather than orienting oneself in the midst of them.
But the internet itself, as a site of interaction, has always had a “spiritual” quality, evoking a universalist dream of spontaneous communication across great geographic divides, and seamless communion unbounded by embodied constraints. In “Paradise Regained,” Soraya King cites the example of the chat room, which in earlier days made Netscape feel a bit like the astral plane. Chat rooms then were carnivalesque; they seemed to suspend the rules of everyday life, at best enabling a blissful chaos wherein one could slip out of unwanted identities and try on new ones with apparent ease and — at least through the glaze of nostalgia — without harm or consequence, nothing to gain or lose beyond the experience. What happened in the chat room really seemed to stay there: Nothing and no one followed you out of the tab. The particularities of everyday lives were stripped away, leaving the warm, magic feeling of ambient co-presence — in essence, a spiritual transubstantiation.
As King writes, the sacred site — whether a conventional holy place or a more informal colloquial space in which to rise above the everyday — is not some fixed portal to an unchanging other zone. Rather a sacred site is the product of a collective intention to defer, alter, and rearrange the assumptions and expectations and categories that stabilize and constrict daily life, peeling away the world’s oppressive specificity. Sacred sites are not inherently sacred by virtue of where they are, but become sacred by virtue of the behavior they coordinate.
Sacred sites, Real Life, June 18, 2018.
