The main focus on technology in this later collection of Crawford’s occurs in the last section of the book, with the same title. These five poems deal with the death of the poet’s father, they are about grief and trying to find the Spirit in the Machine, which echoes both Arthur Koestler’s ‘Ghost in the Machine’ and Mamoru Oshii’s animae ‘Ghost in the Shell’. They are far more personal than those in A Scottish Assembly and the poet’s relationship with technology has become far more complicated than in his earlier work. Technology is seen as a saviour of knowledge and culture – a memory keeper but it also betrays his father. The reader can see the poet struggling with a love/hate affair with technology. Crawford is not only mourning his father’s death but also the way his work as a bank teller was usurped by computers, or ATMs. There is a play on the word computer going on. Computers were originally people who made computations or calculations.
The Poems:
CD ROM explores the idea that memory can be captured on disc without change, which infers that our brains’ memories are corrupt and apt to change or re-arrangement.
Time and Motion has the repeating phrase ‘Please insert your personal number’, which ironically (and I’m sure intentionally) illustrates the impersonal nature of ATMs compared to his father’s work as a bank teller. The valuing of efficiency and speed over history and people.
Liglag has ‘screens dark as carrion crow. Databases that are like exhausted land… I key them into this computer’s empire beside a wall fatigued with hard work.’ Cyberspace is simultaneously preserving and dematerializing Scottish place names.
Similar themes appear in Deincarnation, Crawford lists the names of computer pioneers, references Silicon Glen – ‘laptops siphon off the glens’ but then the tangible becomes spirited away. ‘Digitized blue, massive Roshven/ loses its substance, granite and grass/ Deincarnated and weightless.’ Digitalization is robbing the hard landscape of its reality. By making virtual versions of things they become unreal – ‘Cybered in a world of light’.
In Alford the internet is a framing device (through the windows of a Scottish mans). It begins with a virtual tour of Scotland and its history then telescopes to the personal and specific. His father’s face ‘was a fresh roll of papyrus’ on his deathbed – the opposite of digital. The play on mans and mansion from the endlessly opening internet to the bible and the notion of Heaven containing many mansions compares ethernet to a heavenly aether. ‘There is no here. Here goes.’ The physical become virtual.
No comments:
Post a Comment