Buttons

The Fantasy of a Push-Button

We live in our world of buttons, where if I press UP on the thermostat, I expect the heat to come instantaneously to warm me, but life and evolution have not categorically been instantaneous, though much has happened in an instant. We mere mortals live with the illusion that our ego is capable of producing phenomenal results, as I press the switch and a fireplace comes on, I turn a dial and the kettle begins warming water, I enter digits and hear a friend's voice, I click and receive a book in the mail.  We try to use buttons resourcefully yet we neglect to think of their machinelike way of mediating our world. I didn't control time on the screen or calculate algebra or produce a moving picture with sound. The button did it all. I just pressed it. 

Some could distort the use of buttons by making the hour false or the temperature extreme or the attendant too busy. Buttons can be abused. But more than that, the quarter-inch or half-centimeter press of a synthetic surface and poof, a change occurs, a door opens, a light turns on, a connection is made. Comparable to push-buttons are books, which when opened, allow our perspectives to shift along with the universe. Here, the button becomes a button, an intermediary that is not just an automatic gesture. It also becomes the fastener like the fabric button.

A button can be worn or undone, pressed or dismantled, acknowledged or jammed. It can be all of these things and it remains a button, in service to man. Only a button could reveal the power we humans have--and the extreme dependency, frailty, and futility with which we seek to control the world. We are bound by age and form, electricity and matter. What was the world like before all these buttons? 

The energy we gain from the existence of buttons, may we use it to illuminate a smile or kindness around us. 

There is a voice beyond the button saying it's okay, it's okay...

Because my memory is weaker than I would like, I pressed ON to video record the affection I shared with a little girl some summers ago... With a button I hoped to somehow capture the adorable cleverness of a little girl who wanted to tell me a tomato was not red (rosso) but yellow (giallo), all because she knew I'd kiss her if she did so one more time... And so buttons also have to do with the emotions and not just the drive we feel inside to do, accomplish, manipulate, build or destroy.