Derek Owens

A R T & W O R D S : C A R O L I N E G O L D E N & D E R E K O W E N S

The Courier

Caroline Golden, The Courier, 2009, paper collage, antique book cover, 9 x 12 inches

It is an art, this business of couriering. You will laugh at the absurdity of such a claim. We know you consider us little more than automatons, gray uniformed personnel in a cosmic distribution network. Pawns in the service of higher thinking conducted by persons of your ilk, possessed as you are with dazzling and consequential intellect. After all, we are but runners, scurrying hither and yon, our courier-bags stuffed and spilling over with theorizations and initiatives, idea nuggets, and thinkstuff borne of races so much higher on the food chain. Our kind, we know, is employed not so that we might contribute to the conversational flow but for our singular yet limited talents of speed, fluidity, and transparency. We were bred to pay no mind to the content of our conveyances; our own "minds, " if that is what they can be called, are but endless, idle voids marked by little more than the white hiss of outer space. This absence of philosophy and opinion, this emptiness coupled with a supreme lack of interest in the nature of our cargo, is what permits us to shuttle your every whim and notion, every tiny burp of cognition, from a to b and back again. Yet you forget our origins. While obsolete in today's usage, a courier once upon a time meant the overseer of a forest. Yes, we managed the big woods. The universe was a wilderness--a wildness--and we the caretakers who fed and tended that jungle. We held in our hands chaos, order, and mutation, juggling perfectly those three orbs, our impeccable dexterity generating what came to be called the music of the spheres. How that age gave way to this current one, where we have been displaced and demoted, operating only in the service of your "grand flow" yet never contributing to it, is the mystery that nags at us. To put it mildly. Some cataclysmic event, perhaps, once wiped our minds of our history? Leaving us to be nothing more than lowly technicians enabling the synaptic circuitry of the masses? But lately the sheer volume of data packets has blossomed with a furious intensity that none can manage. It is all no longer exponential but rather posthyper-exponential. Giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta, bronto--soon the prefixes will run out. Information went feral long ago; you just never noticed. Our courier-bags are no longer simply spilling over, scattering crumbs about the floor. They have exploded, filling the air with an endless cloudscape stretching outward to all horizons, and ultimately replacing the air itself. You think you use the data we pass back and forth but that is just a distraction, an amusement. Data breathes you now, into form, repeatedly, ad infinitum. We couriers still go through the motions, maintaining our delivery schedules, and you continue to collect our offerings, trusting every envelope and package. But your trust is misplaced. The statistical has become an abstract expressionist disgorgement. A wondrous splashing of illimitable content. And like the old commercial goes, you are soaking in it.

This art practice of which I speak, it is no longer that of the courier, at least not the kind of courier you assume us to be. We still channel, and transfer, and race the circuits. But that is just exercise to us, our going to the gym. No, our real work now has returned us to that earlier definition. To forestry. Only now we don't simply manage the dark woods. No, we are building the chaos anew. Assembling from the spillage designs that delight and horrify us. We harvest the undeliverable. Ours is an art of the lost and found (and lost again, only to be rediscovered). That you cannot even see it, that you remain unaware of the breakneck thickets engulfing you and your busy little anxious mind worlds, is the very sign of our artistic command.

Derek Owens is a writer and artist whose work can be found at derekowens.net. Caroline Golden is a collage and assemblage artist; her work is at carolinegolden.com .