Temple Of Slow Time (Telepathic Writing with Stephen King)
Temple Of Slow Time (Telepathic Writing with Stephen King)
ENLIGHTENMENT PROMPT #17
Temple of slow time,
still my thoughts, let fresh earth turn-
Spring word-flowers bloom.
The library is a temple of slow time. Books are artefacts of slow time.
A transmitter (author) has slowed down the stream of their consciousness, rendered thoughts legible with strings of words and transmitted them to the thin, dried slices of tree trunk in patterns of small black markings of ink.
You, the receiver of those thoughts, can take as long as you wish to decipher the thoughts, feelings and ideas represented by those words.
What a strange and wonderful arrangement.
Even better, people in the past decided that this slow telepathy between transmitter-in-the past and present-time receiver was so important to human wellbeing that it needed many temples to commemorate, grand and small, peppered all across the face of the earth.
These temples would be saturated with the artefacts of slow thought, shelves stacked with them. Any receiver could wander in, drift through the labyrinth of ideas and find the artefact that had meaning for them. The altar would be the tables and chairs where receivers would receive. They could even take an artefact home with them for free to receive in private, in their own time. It’s worth keeping in mind, in a world that’s increasingly filled with distraction and monetization of all experience, just how precious any library and its treasure trove of books are.
Even now, with the oversupply of highly produced television, immersive video games and IMAX size movie screens, it’s worth remembering that books as a medium still offer a unique, irreplaceable experience that can’t be replicated by any other form of media, no matter how immersive.
Not convinced? Here’s what author Stephen King has to say about it.
“Look- here's a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes…On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8…The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We are close. We're having a meeting of the minds. We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Books allow us to receive the thoughts and feelings of another person, experience the world through their eyes (or their character’s eyes) let those thoughts and ideas swish around in our own minds, and then after, leave us to consider if we wish to absorb any of that experience into our own perception of the world.
It’s like mind sex, an interpenetration of transmitter and receiver, author and reader.
Until we develop a kind of artistically cultivated telepathy, reading won’t be obsolete, and even then, who knows? Telepathy will be fast, the most immediate of real-time exchanges. I hope there will still, and forevermore, be a place for slow transmission, via slow-time artifacts, in the slow-time temple.
Happy Tuesday!