technology and the feminine ii

book of qlōnq

technology increasingly is the male. as man builds himself outside himself, he places his essential strength in his prosthetic and so diminishes himself. as man cannot stand to be diminished, he identifies with his creation and becomes it. he sings its praises in the choir of self-effacement - a choir that has many parts but its song is one. woman makes love to a machine, something she increasingly expects and is satisfied with - as long as the machine’s software is programmed to please her, and free her body from its historic chains

 

yet man’s will is relentless to the point of death. he builds according to the blueprint of that will a prosthetic for his weakness that will grow until he is its limb. he will become a shoot on technology’s tree, until even the shoot is required no longer, and the tree will rid itself of the unnecessary anachronism spoiling the perfect beauty of its bloom

 

but man has a second movement on which he now depends. the feminine is his inward movement, his journey to his centre. with the death of god, the feminine is the only spirituality left to man. he tries to turn technology into spirit, but he knows that it is a pale alternative, being only a physical copy of himself. he knows too that he has exhausted his spiritual possibilities, for technology is nothing other than his dead god revealed. he has seen the decaying face of that divine being in the vaporous environment of his concrete, wired world, a sight that demands his demise - for he has already tried his god and found him wanting, which is to say nothing other than he has found himself wanting. since he cannot admit this lack to himself, he tries another avenue of transcendence - a paving of the visible world. yet whether man dreams himself in the invisible realm or the visible, nothing within changes. he just moves blocks around. he is still man

 

no. technology, despite the outpouring of energy into it, is not the locus of spirit’s growth and future. spirit’s home is outside the walls of flesh, sight, even word, although its power is strengthened through their use. the feminine is man’s spiritual prosthetic necessary for him to be other than beast and reason. technology extends the reaches of his body and mind, and creates a path on which for him to walk outside himself, but it does nothing for his need to travel to his centre. the feminine is this inner path

 

man’s supreme difficulty is that his only experience with the feminine is through its negation - the feminine existed for him to the extent that he denied it. this negative way was sufficient when he lived closer to his body and was able to unite the extremities of passion in the forge of his creative will. then, he was the positive charge against negative feminine power - but now, with the feminine growing as the only spiritual path on which the living walk, he can no longer in truth displace his negativity on it. so he turns against himself in secret. to accept the feminine as a positive force, man creates a negative to balance it, for the world must have equal charges for it to be. thus man changes himself from a positive to a negative charge and in so doing disappears. technology is the force that allows him to continue to have a presence in the world

 

man travels down to nothing but needs woman to lead the way. she is long skilled in disappearance and the art of travelling far and silent within herself - her primary landscape has begun at the surface of her flesh and extended inward through unseen forms to an inarticulate core - a world she has wanted man to enter, but he has continually refused. she is the only teacher capable of showing man what he must learn to disappear - man can teach man nothing but technology. but woman cannot express her knowledge in terms or shapes that man naturally understands, for what she knows has been formed on a different path than man’s, a path that does not use man’s language so appears to him as if it has none.  what is popularly called the communication challenges between men and women is a superficial example of the attempt of woman to teach what she is not used to teach and man to learn what he is not used to learn. but do not mistake the surface exchanges in bars and beds for the depths of spiritual struggle. we do not know what it is to transfer charges between opposing poles, but we do know that playing with unprotected, opposing wires in the dark and without knowledge is not a game with any assured outcome. nevertheless, it is a game that must be played, even if the rules remain unwritten