Vestiges of Industry

We live, we work, we dream. We create. Some people lavish their time, attention, imagination - and love, on machines. Technology.

The first person to take a piece of charcoal out of the fire and use it to draw on a cave wall invented a state-of-the-art technology. Technology evolves, though. It changes. Machines have a lifetime, just like we do. Someone gives birth to them, and loves them. They live, and work - and die.

I look at machines and technology created just one or two generations ago, and I imagine the people who made them, and the time they lived in. I think about which ever-changing laws ruled their universe, their world - their culture. I remember it was once impossible - inconceivable - to travel between continents, or to the moon. I remember that almost everything we take for granted is possible only because we all stand on the shoulders of a thousand generations. A thousand generations of ideas about who we are - and who we might be, about what is possible, what is needed, what is beautiful.

Jean Miele
March 22, 2006

Rusting

I'm thinking of the crane hook
which like our grandfathers
ends in a pile behind
an old building
And the stories never remember
Whether they loved who they were
or not

Ross Harwood
March 2006