Postmodern Light Switches

A postmodern light switch, typically a ‘rocker’ switch, is a light switch that doesn’t have a specific click for on and off; instead the switch position is unreadable or ambiguous.  It is a light switch for which the function of turning the light on and off is too simple: sometimes for example, an ‘off’ instruction misfires; a companion light switch for the same light but on some other wall has been used so that you turning the strip on leaves it burning at 30% of normal luminescence because it thinks an emergency has occured.  The light is on for three hours; as a kind of emergency default (just in case you should need emergency lighting) but on the other hand neither does a on resolve the semi-off-ness; the situation remains intermediate and beyond instruction.  The system needs rebooting maybe.  One thing is clear, it is not obvious; there is no old-world bi-polar diffusion of light and dark; when off is off or on is on is like a sub-divided pie: quarters, fifths: of an electric pie. 

Like everything else a light-switch has a narrative function; like everything else it tells us what the world is - this or that.  The world stands in its image.  Screwed to the wall, the wires inside can be traced up to the bulb in the middle of the room, which hangs inside a shade, a fly blown skeleton but attenuated into an imaginary plasma that casts actual light, an opaque energy saving virtual ‘tube’ for which off and on are relative terms, for this device is controlled not by the switch itself but by a central computer somewhere in the depths of the house; symbolic of the loss of hierarchy endemic to our postmodern condition: who is in charge?  Not the light switch operator, obviously, but some sort of external ‘mind’ is.

Faint, the outline of the flying insect, a man with thick notched lips, at play on the vertical walls of the shade, casting shapes on the ceiling that flap endlessly to a quick fluttering sound.

Swimmers

A city: driving at its centre, crossing an intersection through the green lights, a playhouse sideways to a church not lit, then a road, then a night-time avenue, then a dark football stadium, I was reminded once again of how sometimes it looks as though cars - their oblate fish-like shapes, their colours, their smoked glass - seem to to originate from a Philip K Dick world - to exist as precursors perhaps: to our future robot identities or existing perhaps as contemporary with them (supposing a car a kind of proto-robot): except that we are not aware of it.  They don’t seem fully real, modern cars.  Like those swimming pools with windows cut into the sides below water level.  Looking through the greenish glass one sees a series of headless bodies in movement suspended impossibly, feet kicking; and then suddenly a complete swimmer appears, perhaps having dived in or jumped.   They coalesce holding their noses, a stream of bubbles behind.  All this in silence.  Like a street light caught in the bulbous glass of a car’s rear window, the yellowish stain of the lamp a lozenge exploding and sliding into oblivion.  Cars are like the swimmers that never fully appear; they hang there in reality but are never truly present; or they are present but for a moment.