gone is the power of now
published: 2011-03-23A woman comes out of a train station. She steps into bright sunlight and squeezes her eyes. Without the sun, it would look like she is very angry. Angry and rushed. While walking, she eats a partly wrapped sandwich, steady paced. Suddenly she stops and looks up at the skies. People keep walking and rushing past her. She lets out a deep sigh and then decides to sit in the sun.
Hell, why not. It’s a beautiful day after all, is what her body language says. The power of now, and all of that. The kind of things we keep reminding ourselves of, but never do. She does it. She takes off her jacket, crosses one leg over the other, turns her face to the sun and eats. Her jaw now moves slowly. She is actually tasting her sandwich.
It lasts only a few seconds. She then becomes aware of the huge billboard close to her. Loud noises come from it. Mechanical sounding raspy clunks and clangs, of chains, of machinery. A metallic female voice repeats, “I have so many things to do,” in a robot-like way. And then a man’s voice says, “I perform one million operations a second.” The robot woman says, “I now have a business.”
There are moving images too to go along with all that noise. They are hard to see as the sun hits the billboard.
The woman has stopped chewing mid-bite. Once again she furrows her brow and looks at the video art. Computerized internal clockwork, consumer society type complaints. Clung, cachung.
The woman does not finish her sandwich in the sun. She gets up and rushes to the metro.