Monday, June 10, 2013

The Pun of Realities and Good Enough

"With the swipe of an airbrush, I command thee"

The Bane of Consensus 

As I age, I notice the rise in the velocity of ritualized sociopathic behavior in the aggregate sum as evidenced by play acting as a sort of withering mind balm that has sharp teeth that can tear flesh and yet the anesthesia of misdirecting attention as a antidote has proved effective against feeling the repercussions of self mutilation.

While reality as formulated by the language we use to describe our experiential realm might be a series of puns, one could take the opposite approach and recognize language as a formulator of conceptual realities...that in of itself  informs us that our terms are good enough as good enough is as good as good gets and is this the highest bar of our curiosity?
Then one considers if language itself has stopped evolving in the experiential range of descriptions in terms of accuracy, outside of the shortcuts we term "slang"
Perhaps literacy is not literacy at all. At the lowest rung, we could say that the most literate among us can use language to utter complete nonsense, that the good enough crowd nod their heads to in a complete state of possession. While we certainly do not live in a world of bobble heads, it is discomforting to ruminate on the mandates of stricture set as writ by the lowest common denominator. The error of making no distinction between a descriptive word and what is being described as if we would not know our elbow if it were not attached to our torso. Perhaps the literal and the literate are one in the same as far as a tunnel vision of experiential cognizance as R.A Wilson suggested.

Fahrenheit 451 Revisited

Burroughs describing language as a control system, more accurately as " a virus." Of course, Burroughs had a highly developed sense of sardonic irony. Perhaps as our society becomes more "productive and efficient" without knowing or having any compelling reason to utilize the same skepticism applied to the paranormal to the subtle and deeper slide into sociological control systems like a  blind watchmaker who considers order as coherence as applied to stabilizing behaviors into predictable patterns, but we know this coherence can also describe psychotic behavior, when the audience is comprised of the compromised in abeyance to going along to get along which in of itself is a chaotic system of pretense and drift.


The most ardent atheist and among the most spiritual such as Krishnamurti recognized that theology and warfare are joined at the hip, and both suggest a pathless path is best advised in terms of avoiding entanglement. Which brings us to Lao Tze and the science fiction author, Ursula LeGuinn,.whose superlative interpretation of The Way should be required reading for high school students, who don't require rote memorization but perhaps in a deeper sense, need to learn how to learn.by discernment rather than follow the dots.



It strikes me that the indoctrination of synthetic semiotics and reality as blurring fantasy with interpretation has increased steadily as a form of narcotic balm against the increasing slings and arrows of racing over the cliff while newscasters are largely lifestyle councilors. No news is good news. The editorial purview of consensus mixed with deniability, boiled with fantasy makes a elixir for the ills  it creates, students as mass murderers in a computer game, psychologically dismembered veterans, that are met by sociological narcissism as a creed.
Look younger, feel better, whiter teeth, smell better..Why clean the outside of the cup when you are not worried about what it contains?
And so it goes...The disparity between Knowledge and Being is striking and it seems none of us are immune from being struck whether you are in kindergarten or in dotage.

Note:
The illustrations for this piece are by John Padlo


4 comments:

  1. Of course in the sensitivity to the collective experience we sense something changing or even wrong and try to say it as best we can in words... as usual your comments are deep and insightful, this one I especially resonate with. I just wonder if there is more actually physical going on here than most of us are aware as we try to make emotional sense of ourselves and the world.

    I am always nearby your blog, thank you Bruce.

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  2. Ray Bradbury metaphors in Fahrenheit 451 that portrayed illiterate hedonism, reliance on prescription drugs and the erasure of dissent by the disappearance of the written word, were profoundly prophetic as metaphors. Voyeurism through television, re: reality shows, is another.

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  3. When I read "synthetic semiotics" what immediately came to mind was a performance piece by Colin Mutchler where he reads the headlines from the New York Times, December 10, 2006. It seems orwellian doublespeak is pervasive now.
    http://ccmixter.org/api/query/stream.m3u?f=m3u&ids=8184

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