How quickly do you blush in cybertime?

Her run-on sentences are delightful.
Time-bending, even.

I love Jay Griifths books and you should do.
Read them yesterday.

Since all good books are

              timeless or timely or time-travel..

I was thrilled to hear that she wrote a book entitled, "A Sideways Look at Time."

Indeed that is the only angle we have on it.

A few blurbs:

“A wonderful, delightfully humourous polemic against everything that's wrong with the way we deal with time today” - The Independent , Books of the Year

“An irresistibly provocative and political analysis of time... Her wittily enthusiastic thesis is that time has too long been used as a tool to power: as a manifesto, it could cause a revolution.” - Iain Finlayson, The Times , Books of the Year

A major book by a woman who is, no question, a major writer. … she writes like four kinds of gorgeous, so deep in love with the world that when the right word isn't there she simply births it… a majestic anthropology” – Bill McKibben , The Ecologist

“Jay Griffiths has the gift of insatiable curiosity. She is intensely aware of the world around her, its wonders, its horrors and its absurdities. She questions and protests and celebrates – all in a language which is constantly alive, often sparkling and deep, like a good river. She is a revealer and a healer - to travel through time in the company of such a magical writer is a delight.” Adrian Mitchell , Shadow Poet Laureate.   LINK

To preface today's excerpt, let me say it's an excellent passage on the downside of "cybertime."
But I also want to know: Can cybertime also bring us closer to Kingdom worldview and timeview?
(see, for example, "

THE KINGDOM'S RETROACTIVE RETROFUTURE."

I would love to go back in time and ask Gerge Ladd this question...
Internet time might be a Time Machine to Kairos.)





Oh,  by the way, I am   (and you should too) soundtracking  (in cybertime and cyberspace) this book excerpt to U2's "Moment of Surrender" (recorded in Amsterdam) in another window..
That I am able to do this  of course exemplifes part of the point about internet life/time...but when Bono moves into his Spiritaneous prayer and recitation of Psalm 40, as he rocks back and forth wailing wall style (What  is the technical term for this prayer movement, Rabbi Adam? ), it just seems so time-transcending to me ( I guess all prayer  inevitably is, if it is Kingdomed prayer ); So Sabbath-ing, as in Heshel's "Sabbath as a Sanctuary in Time,"


Maybe all Jewish prayer is "timely" since "the Jews invented history."


(By the way, this is not the first Jewish prayer method Bono has moved in, see this on elevation-prayer, this on nigun, etc..  And see this to find what the prayer portion of this song evenually became).


---
Griffiths:

But the creation of cyberspace means "cybertime,"  virtual time which itself is like a fifth element, of Teflon time, within that element, people virtually shop and set up business and fall in love...

Michael Castells, in his exhaustive three-volume work, The  Information Age, describes the network society and information technology creating "a timless time," negating past and future in a  hypertext communicated anytime anywhere.  Castells decribes the time of industrialism, the schedulization of human behavior, as "clock time"  and contrasts  both timeless time and clock time with "glacial time"--a key feature of environmentalist thinking; both looking far back into the past and forward into the future.

But in this timeless-time, or replica-time, it is only replicas of ourselves who can live; hoping to cheat nature, it can actually cheat life..

You cannot have humanity in this timeless zone because relationships are suffused with time. How quickly you blush; do you pause before you speak; do you laugh before, after or during your own jokes? How soon do you smile before you weep, which is the last gap before you gap with delight; and is your hesitancy thatt of sleepiness or shyness?  Can you bite your virtual tongue? Is there such a thing as virtual spontaneity?..

...Every act in virtual time is finite, final and finished.  No human act is.  This is its pity--the act without consequence, cruelty without remorse,  sex without hands and jokes without laughter.

-Jay Griffiths, A Sideways Look at Time, p. 270-271 (click title to testdrive the book)

 Another excerpt here.