After 911, I remember a child psychologist stressing how important it was, when children were watching the Twin Towers fall over and over again in the media, to explain to them that it only happened once and was not still happening. In cyberspace, the towers are still falling and will always be falling, everywhere, and so too with every other trauma. This is what makes it such fertile ground for obsession.
An English Major Laments the Space-time Continuum
Science fiction writer Ray Cummings explained time
thus: “Time is what prevents everything from happening
at once.” Physicist John Wheeler added as a capper:
“Space is what prevents everything from happening to me.”
This tidy structure we left behind, preferring one
where the old rules don’t apply–cyberspace.
There, everything that ever happened happens now
and what happens anywhere, happens everywhere.
In the old world the body inhabits, this is insane,
but in the new world the mind has colonized,
this is the allure, to savor every blinking meme,
preferring pixels to food, water, love and nature.
