Tag Archives: Job 1:7

Burnt Knob, burnt, not by the Wrath of God, but in a controlled burn by park conservancy workers last Fall.

Just after the equinox in March, I was walking up a trail to Burnt Knob in Iroquois Park*, I saw three deer with their tails up running upslope across the trail in front of me. I hear crashing in the underbrush, much noisier than a deer, noisier even than a squirrel (squirrels make an amazing amount of noise running on the ground through leaf litter). I spot a man, about my age–mid-sixties–picking his way clumsily through the underbrush and green thorny brambles that were already sprouting well before the equinox.

I wondered if he tried to follow a game trail that petered out, or was inexperienced enough to break trail straight up the hill. I walked on, as, like deer, I do not care for noisy people in the woods.

As I reached the edge of the pocket prairie on top of Burnt Knob, I heard and then saw the same man coming up behind me. I saunter, he was marching. He was playing a podcast, or some audio on his iParasite, a man’s voice rhythmically intoning “Jesus” one word in every five or so.

Now, I look askance at anyone playing noise, music or otherwise, or talking into their phone while afoot in the open air. I regard it as a disturbance of the peace, the peace I seek “walking up and down in the earth, and going to and fro in it.” So, I looked askance, giving Jesus man my best evil eye. I took the right hand road, he took the left.

The paved, pedestrian only road around Burnt Knob is a meandering loop. Against whatever I have instead of hope I met the same man, same Jesus every five words, coming around a bend where I often see deer or an occasional wild turkey. I looked him in the eye, and said, “You could hear God if you turned off that noise.” He put down his head, and walked faster, putting distance between himself and me, and, I presume, God.

A fortress is my pod.

I have thought for a long time that cyborging ourselves to these devices, the nodes of the iniquitous, now ubiquitous digital parasite, involves a kind of atrophy of our extended ghost limbs, the sensate pseudopods we push out into the world. Walking past the man with his machine Jesus, I thought we have replaced the voice of God. Now, I don’t believe in God, but I have heard the Voice Of.

The whispers, and shouts, of angels, demons, and spirits have been replaced by words grinding out of the faux satanic mills we carry in our pockets. The voices in the machine are now the voices of the machine, AI now grinding up human speech and vision into a recombinant slurry of ex-meaning. The atrophy of apparition. The caves of our souls no longer painted with dream animals, not even with graffiti, but decaled over with the spiritual equivalent of horrific sub-Hello Kitty.

We no longer build our own fortresses against God, against the inrush of the real, we let the fraud of the machine within the machines prechew the walls for us, like termites defending the mound.

Note: This is a thread I posted last March on Mastodon. Very slightly altered. Should have posted it here then.

*One of the Frederick Olmstead designed parks in Louisville, Kentucky.