The Moving Finger Writes

"The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Marshall McLuhan referred to our technologies as "extensions of the self". Let's go back and read our worn paperback copy of Understanding Media, or perhaps, download it on our new Android Smartphones.
Let me tour the Self I have created, in the short three days since I acquired this alterEgo, this tiny black box that functions as my telephone, my secretary, my memory, my piano, my photo albums, my navigator, my computer, my ever-renewing newspaper, and, oh yes, my Zen Guru.
Zen tells me today,
"If you understand,
things are just as they are;
if you do not understand,
things are just as they are."
Let me open it, and present the Self I find here:
*Press "On", and the screen is an orchard of ruby pomegranates, a glorious grove of pomegranate trees I stopped by on my way to work.
*The moving finger writes.......Already this machine and my moving finger are so synched, that I can sweep my index finger over the first two letters of a word and Word Prediction knows what I meant to say and types it. In Swype mode, you don't lift your finger and touch each key on the touch screen. You just sweep through the letters, so the fingers in a very short time simply know the motor pattern. Like talking. Like dreaming.
Next blog, I'll tell you about my piano, about my sign language tutor with videos of each sign, of the gallery that magically, without my input, contains my dearest photoes of all the years (I must have had them stored in Picasa all this time. There is always a realworld explanation for the mystical. And the bits and bytes of the realworld explanation make it all the more wondrous). Press "Latitude" and there appears a detailed map of my exact location. Where am I? Who am I? One more app: Eliza, the therapist. Type in comments and this little phone interacts with you lke a psychiatrist.
All this, and I bring you a small promise to myself: Each morning at 6, except Shabbat, the little black selfmachine will sing me sweet wakeup music. Before I read the Globe and Mail or the Jerusalem Post or my Facebook breakfast conversations or my email or my Zen message or my to-do memos, I will pick up a simple ball point pen, and write one small note on that previous, wondrous technological miracle, paper. Before I ask the world, I will consult the closest I can come to the pure self that I was, before the world began. Good morning, uncluttered one. You are here. Right here on the page.