Column | Behind a screen, full of longing for the real world

What would I really like to do, I wonder as I stare grumpily at my computer. Of course I have to do things, write a piece, reschedule a hotel reservation, send a note, read a report, answer emails. Screen stuff.

I would like to find a line of poetry for July, one that characterizes this month. Just leafing through various collections of poetry for a while. And shall we have leeks tonight with that delicious but rather laborious saffron vinaigrette – I could make that now, wouldn’t I? I also want to tear up some bindweed in the garden – in the garden you are undecided when it comes to other life forms. When I am weeding I always think of a poem by CO Jellema: „Knows the creeping buttercup fear / When from my hand the shadow approaches her, / Wouldn’t the trot rather run wild”. The weeder in that poem is cleaning a rose bed and weeding what he can’t use: “all that interest that soil wants”.

There is no end to the destruction you cause as a living being. The trot itself is also not lovely, plants are not afraid to suffocate each other. That is why we garden. If you didn’t, nettle and bramble, bindweed, trot and cleavers would grow all over it. Then forget about those poor dahlias.

So I sit staring out the window, longing for the real world, but my computer screen is calling.

The green released a song about artificial intelligence, a subject I’m not really into, because I want the ‘real’ and the human. But you also don’t want to just sit on the sidelines grumbling about how all that “you can easily arrange that yourself now” drivel is just a disguise for austerity and profit-seeking and so on. Then you eventually feel like a character from a novel by Couperus, who expresses his disapproval of the automobile with its dangerous speed. Although such a character cannot be denied a certain right. For a moment I think with lust of the enormous slowdown the world would undergo if we were carless again. And plane-free too, of course.

Plants are also not afraid to suffocate each other

The green I read a piece by Frank Mulder who wrote, “as a small act of defiance”, not to have a smartphone. I must confess that I wondered: how on earth does he do that. Still, I feel like following that protest, to no longer participate in all that faster and smarter that yields much less to the individual than the big companies.

Yes, the big companies again. Who goes to Albert Heijn every week? Correct.

That resistance would certainly be small, we might say minimal. Even if you were to dedigitalize completely, if only to not contribute more to the enormous pollution that all our digital actions cause (I read 4 percent of global emissions, more than aviation). After all, everything has become digital, or is it going to be, so what do you want now?

Plucking out the bindweed with its beautiful white flowers is actually the least evil I do. And see how the garden looks smiling; „satisfied/ he surveys the border around the shrub rose/ […]/ in the sun and with birdsong in his ear”.

Now let’s do some digital payments first. Very easy indeed.