Hum

by Helen Phillips

Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy. —PARACELSUS

Again the instinct for the phone, the desperation to document.

Already she could feel the minutes vanishing, already she could picture herself returning to the suitcase the stacks of clothing she had just put away in the cedar drawers.

They could divide and conquer, but they hadn’t come here to divide and conquer. They were always dividing and conquering, day in and day out, exhausting.

Yet she knew there was plenty in his phone that wasn’t right here in front of him. The entire universe.

“the goal of advertising is to rip a hole in your heart so it can then fill that hole with plastic, or with any other materials that can be yanked out of the earth and, after brief sojourns as objects of desire, be converted to waste.”

“We are all villains,” the hum said. “The system only gives us villainous options.”

You know the world is damaged, but you don’t know what that means for the lives of your children. You want to prepare them for the future, but you are scared to picture the future.

“Have you ever wondered, May, why ‘scared’ and ‘sacred’ are such similar words?”

“You can’t avoid the void,” the hum said. “Statistically speaking, you are safe. The voices outside grow quieter as the voice inside grows louder. Focus on the moment you are in. Notice what you have. Moor yourselves in your bodies.”

How might we dose our technologies? How might we dose our usage of our planet? How might we dose our children’s independence from us? I hope Hum raises these questions for readers. May fights to connect with her family, with nature, and with herself in a world that seems designed for disconnection.

This is the paradox of the adversarial man: any attempt to evade the system may only make it stronger, because the machine just keeps learning. And,