Boxed In (2019)
Robot Feelings
It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street
is a robot, and incapable of love
he is capable of an endless, grinding, nihilistic hate:
that is the only strong feeling he is capable of;
and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the street,
they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.
–D.H. Lawrence, published posthumously in 1932
I was intrigued by the poem from D.H. Lawrence when I came across it a few days ago.
First, I was surprised by him focusing on robots. But thinking about it, it was written sometime in the 1920’s at a time when futurism and robots were in vogue, with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis hitting the movie theaters in 1927. The term robot itself was also first coined and came into use in 1920 in the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) from Czech writer Karel Čapek. So, robots as a theme might not be as unusual as it first seemed to me.
But it was Lawrence’s cynicism about man living in modernity that caught me off guard. I was ambivalent about it at first. It seemed such a harsh analysis of humanity.
But then again, Lawrence has seen the world spiral into a senseless World War that took far too many lives. Plus, he himself had suffered in the court of public opinion as his work was censored and banned, labeled as pornography. For the last decade of his short life, Lawrence went into a self-imposed exile from his native Britain. He died in France in 1930 at the age of 44.
That might well explain his harsh judgement of the man in the street.
Was he correct?
There are certainly days when I share his feelings, that the collective crowd has become more openly mean-spirited and more prone to hatred than love. Reading the comments of many social media posts makes one believe that we are indeed capable of that endless, grinding, nihilistic hate that Lawrence described. That our ability to collectively love has been replaced by an infinite capacity to hate.
Some days it feels like we are forever being prodded toward hatred, manipulated as we are by media that has become the servant to power and wealth.
Even so, I am probably more generous in my opinion of humanity than Lawrence. While I can see the robotic nature of those who let themselves be pulled into the vortex of hatred, one that makes them small and bitterly unkind when we are, in my opinion, meant to be large and generously kind.
I believe that the individual who thinks and feels freely, who resists the crowd, will persist to outlast the ugly, naked nihilism we are facing today.
That might be my naive hope speaking.
Maybe.
But I will choose hopeful naivete over bitter cynicism and hatred any day.
Here’s a song to cleanse the palate. This is a young Ren (again, sorry) and The Big Push doing an impromptu rooftop performance from a while back. The song is their cover of Bongo Bong which was a hit song around Europe back in 1999-2000 for Manu Chao. It’s a fun song plus it is kind of maintains the theme of this post as it is about being who and what you are and not caving into the pressure of the crowd.
Hopefully naive? Sure, why not?
You be you. Go bang your bongo anyway you want…
Redtree Times 