(Dear Mum, you're always with us, you're the whisper of the leaves as we walk down the street, you're the smell of certain foods we will always remember, flowers we pick, the fragrance of life itself, you're the cool hand on our brow when we're not feeling well, you're our breath in the air on a cold winters day, you're the sound of the rain that
lulls us to sleep, the colours of a rainbow, you are Christmas morning and live inside our laughter, you are the place we came from, our first home and the map we follow with every step we take, you're our first love, our first friend, even our first enemy, but nothing on earth can separate us not time, not space...
Though she never explicitly cites Benjamin--or other commentators, which gives her writing a TV-like sense of presentness, as if it is communing with the screen in a void--she channels his attunement to the correspondences between technological formats, States of mind, and politics: "But, of course, we don't have to think about anything once television
lulls us to sleep and begins its dictations." I don't know whether she was familiar with Paul Virilio's oeuvre back then, but she hits on the immediacy, ubiquity, and collapse of time and space by TV in a way that resonates with his eerily prescient concept of "indirect vision"--the trending toward technological interface that anticipated today's rampant smartphone addiction, as well as drone warfare.
