Before I can conclude this brief series thinking aloud about what it means to finally be practicing iPodiatry (part one here and part two here), I begin with Katy Scrogin’s small whirlwind of a rumination posted as a comment here recently.

In it, she mixes tempera with water colors quickly across the windshield in an argument that has to be taken seriously because she speaks from a position of resistance and lament in the techno-consumer musicscape. As she scrapes the wipers back across the colors, one hears the quiet declaration, like a radio left on inside after the car ignition is off, that “in much of the easy accessibility of and predictability/programmability we’re able to impose these days upon information, including music, the opportunities for nuanced interaction with the (real) world might just paradoxically be decreasing.”

As I listen to this broadcast, I hear my own background voice doubling these words. Yes, this might indeed be true. Can I make it not true for myself and for others? On the one hand, getting an iPod has shown me how she might be right. With an iPod, I can now seal myself off for an entire hourlong walk, subway ride from the Bronx to Brooklyn, or through the afternoon at a cafe. (But not at bars; not yet, at least not here in New York.) In doing so, I have pre-emptively withdrawn any chance at the random conversation that is otherwise at least a little likely in these environments. I will not have to decide when the homeless man passes through the subway car as we’re passing under Lincoln Center and he is asking for some money because he has not seen a doctor for at least ten years and needs money for his medicine, and he begins his ask (as New Yorkers will recognize) by yelling from the front of the car as soon as the doors close, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. I DON’T MEAN TO SCARE OR OFFEND YOU. I AM NOT ON DRUGS. I AM HOMELESS AND I NEED TO SEE A DOCTOR. I WILL ACCEPT ANYTHING YOU CAN GIVE, COINS OR BILLS. THANK YOU.”

And he will shuffle through the car and I have completely already let my technology decide for me that I’m not here. But I know the speech he is giving, even if I can’t hear it because of The Dead Weather. So what’s happening right now is that I’m telling you something that recently happened, and I really was hearing the Dead Weather, and as this man, to whom I may or may not have given any money if I did not have my iPod in my ears anyway, walked past me and past most of the passengers who could not really look at him, the song “Jonah” came on, by Lungfish, a song to which fellow Rock-and-Theology friend Mike Iafrate introduced me, and I have never really been able to tell all the lyrics, but there is the repeated snarl of “I beseech” in the verses and the “wages of sin,” “wages of sin” in the first chorus. Then “champions of sin,” “champions of sin” in the second chorus. And then back to “wages of sin,” “wages of sin.” The singer Daniel Higgs mostly yells without yelling, except when he does actually yell, but for the most part the lyrics seem to warn of a prophetic boil of anger exercised in an abandon controlled and melodic, percussive.

So this is not a story about a missed opportunity to acknowledge a homeless man and the guilt that followed. It is a story about wondering what my life was becoming in this little technological change. This was a new level of social insulation. I am more or less an introvert, but this seemed to be making of introversion a social curriculum.

So there is that, and that is real. But there is also the fact that my path to having this thought that makes me rethink where I am letting technology take my life has itself been formulated through technology, through hours and hours and still hours more of metal, grunge, alternative, new wave, progressive, and hard rock through, with, and in which I originally dealt with my spiritual life and later my academic theological training and most of all my generalized theological consciousness. It took proto-iPods to get me to wonder if, for the sake of what I have come to consider unsurpassable in my life, I should refuse this iPod.

What happens now? I am someone who has been formed and continues to be formed theologically by rock fed through my headphones become earphones become earbuds. Do I kick away this ladder of technology through which rock has become so important alongside theology, such that both have become gateways to each other? I am not sure, but I also have a hard time regretting the sheer wash of music that is now available in my life at any time of the day. Taking a long walk with music is not something I will want to do every time, but it does have its own way of opening up a contemplative awareness for me. The iPod does not come with a handbook of audio askeses, a Rule for Listening so as to become someone in the process of listening at least as free and courageous as one was beforehand. A twenty-first century Benedict will have to produce such a rule. But until then, it would be good to have this technology in hand in a way that keeps me unsure of what all this means.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Spam Protection by WP-SpamFree