! ! Technology - A Thumbnail Tribute To Martin Heidegger

Tekne’, to the Greeks was the art of bringing-forth from the true (and, it’s hoped, the good) into the beautiful: poetry; sculpture; machinery of wood and metal such as that which raised the Parthenon; raised Apollo, Venus, out of stone; raised myth out of poetry. And I, we, too have technology forever at our finger-tips.. Did it happen through chance, through procrastination, or through attention given to a task and needs, this ‘beautiful’ solution that mathematicians talk about? it happened on one godgiven day, scrubbing those shining new potatoes: the right-hand thumbnail now grown long suddenly a more efficient tool for removing ‘eyes’ and hollowed dirt.. so now, this intimate and valued tool carefully shaped between a v and u; and from the fingertip to heart arises wonder, awe: the gentle curve of nail gives added strength.. how magnificent the humblest, least worshipped fingerends of these so precious hands… Do I mimic man called ‘primitive’ as I depend on nature’s tools to alert the inventive mind by the attention which, taken so for granted links us to the gods themselves…? Tools first, then machines, then ‘technology’ have no limits under divine law: call them, the exteriorisation of our brain, our mind: thumbnail, bridge, interstellar rocket are thus one in wonder; every action now to mind and heart, a sacrament; the bringing-forth, the showing-forth of Man – the tekne of the gods; the gods who live, who wake from sleep, only when Man rounds the circle with his praise. “Questioning is the piety of thought.”