a recent realization: how easy it is for us literate and able bodied to perceive writing as a mere extension of ourselves.
witnessing this right hand move across paper reminded me of something important about writing’s nature: a mechanical, technological process shaping cognition.
in german, you say begreifen – to understand is literally to grasp, to handle physically.
in a state of mechanical trance induced by my pilot g-tec we jotted down in my journal: “write a lot edit little just move with the pen writing is not intellectual it is mechanic the motion is what will take you to the end of the sentence”
what seemed physiological reveals itself as techno-osmosis – flesh and tool merging into artificial intelligence (augmented). the pen opens a new mode of being, the keyboard enforces a different rhythm to my thinking – fractured by typos, going back to fix them, thoughts circling back.
with the pen, its deceptive familiarity induces flow states. ink streams continuous thought, unlike ancient quills demanding pause-dip-write rhythms. thoughts slow, adapt, merge with the medium.
keyboard and finger tips as one entity, pacing and shaping emergence. there’s no “I” here (sorry, descartes) – only agencement: written language’s history, tool constraints, imposed logic, cultural systems, neural patterns, all converging. human-mind-tool-history-culture thinks as one. there’s no “I”, there’s only us.