This episode was originally released on August 3, 2023.

Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Some weekends, you can find me in a popular big box store that sells electronics. It’s one of my happy places, truly. I am not there to purchase anything. I come to bear witness to technology’s great march, the result of human imagination and engineering.

With my hands behind my back and a studious gaze, I simply wander up and down the aisles with other devotees of applied science. It’s as though I am taking a stroll through the woods. I find my revelations wherever I can, even here, in this, this National Park of Gadgets. Encountering a new device is like spotting a bird I’ve never seen before.

I am transfixed by the crystal-clear simulcast of TVs along the back wall, streaming an ice-skating competition, which makes me consider my own fragility and elegance. As I walk by, the home security area brushes me like a tree branch. The sleek array of shiny refrigerators with French doors exudes the epitome of forested serenity, all potentially controlled by a cell phone. When I stop and close my eyes, I listen to the rustle of a digital future that is already here. I feel like a child again.

Am I under the influence of Mother Nature or of humankind? I take a mental snapshot of my digital ecology. As I glance around at the laptops, and the audio speakers, and video gaming systems, I experience a sense of smallness. I am humbled and awed. When I exit and return home, I practice yoga, and pretend I am a tree.

Today’s poem of self-mocking irony makes the connection between our daily routines and the natural and artificial environments that we navigate—how we negotiate a dissonance that complicates our sense of what’s real and what’s unreal.

Happy Campus
by Rodrigo Toscano

I

This is the dirt-eating poetics that’s gotcha
The dirt-eating poetics you’ve been yearning for. 
You did good, you did something you hadn’t before
Contorted yourself into optimal stances.
You persisted with your dirt-seeking impulses.

II

When the garden trail came to a sudden dead-end
You celebrated by dreaming as a log might
Calling forth decomposition’s cute sister, life.
A single crushed can of rosé strewn thereabouts
Is all you, too, at maximum inflection point.

III

But here you are back at the plazas of commerce
Into the routines of knowledge dispensation.
Here too you contort yourself to what’s most pressing
These happy or grim faces of late empire’s throng.
You do a sort of bump dance; attention glides up.

IV

At noon, the plazas clear themselves of their contents.
Overhead, a Boeing seven thirty-seven
Roars for curious ears; streaks of places to be
Fade, till the next industrial jolt wakens you.
Time for a quickie jaunt among ferns’ spongy soil.

V

This is the dirt-lavishing poetics at hand
A flexed forearm gripping a bulky book at dusk
Gives way to dalliance with penciled sprites at dawn
A picnic in the style of twenty twenty-two
Keen to supply lines of microchips and maidens.

VI

FUEL is what’s on tap today, sparking up form’s forms
Combustions, pipelines, canalizations of fire 
How the plazas themselves are poetical feats.
You can deem yourself a fallen log at midnight
Or rally the concrete under your feet to flight.

"Happy Campus" by Rodrigo Toscano. Originally published in POETRY. Used by permission of the poet.