Sense Extensions / I Am a Direction

Sensory Extensions The electric lights exist to reveal what our naked eyes cannot. The stereo systems echo and repeat sounds which our ears were not present to hear. A soufflé of international gourmandry awaits my tongue in the kitchen, while my video game system gives me the thrill of wars I'll never participate in. And the car: The car is my two feet multiplied by the tens of thousands. To hear the whir-increase of an accelerator in the distance is to hear an actual human foot, wrapped in its augmentation, running across the earth's hard surface. And yet, we dance. We dance because our bodies, often it seems, enjoy to be "naked" without their accoutrements, extensions, and amplifications. We dance in the dark to the slight sound of our heart-beats to celebrate the dim small places from whence we came, the slight whimpering bang which lodged us all -- we creatures, we beasts -- into the air and space we now occupy. But it is not everything, it is not all of us. We ourselves are but a thin, airless mirror, hovering behind a massive apparatus of muscle and bone and skin and fur. Looking farther still, we see the way in which this mass has attached itself to still other masses: trusses and trellises and chassises of all sorts. These in turn must be wired -- hard or airlessly -- across vast distances of communicable space, so that they may dance in sequence. This unrelenting progression outwards from us: from meat to machine to information space and back again, is everything we could qualify as "us". I am not a lone thing: I am a direction... outward.