Back when the World Wide Web was young, it was popular to include, front and center on one’s site or page, a graphic that looked like a yellow road sign of a stick-person digging. (Sometimes these would be –gasp!– animated.) Below would be the caption, “This page (or site) is under construction.”
Even back then I found this an annoying statement of the obvious. A Web-thing is made of digital bits; there is nothing inherently permanent about it!
Twenty-some years later I might be able to get myself to a more sympathetic place–our prior communication-work-product was more likely to become tangibly finished, and to have to be physically revised, so perhaps it was disorienting to operate in a world where that was never objectively true.
But then again, maybe I can’t. Won’t.
**
I’m reading an ecofeminist theology article from 1999. I find the situation-ality pervasive and relentless: “a somewhat different epistemology […] because no one can claim to be starting from zero” — “what we call ‘knowing'” — “to attempt to express in tentative and limited words what our experience is” …. (Gebara, 48-9) .
!
Good God, whether above or cellularly pervasive (so that I am not reifiying Your relationality) grant me patience–grant me sympathy.
Because I am so annoyed by being repeatedly informed we’re all and always “under construction” I may go in the rainy backyard and burn every last page.
Just say the thing already!
Gebara, Ivone. Longing For Running Water. Fortress Press (1999).