Hey Doc...
If you keep saying nice things about me I could confuse that with encouragement you know...
I love diversity. I love diversity in perspective, diversity in opinon, diversity in "position"...ideologically speaking....
Means the people you're trying to communicate with are alive....thinking breathing cognizant aware and ready to step up to the challenges of doing some of the most difficult things....
It's not easy being a human being today.... When wood had to be chopped and water run home in a bucket....when animals had to be taken care of....yeah life wasn't so easy then either.
But we've traded one set of barriers hurdles and obstacles for another....
I don't want or need or require that anyone necessarily agree with what I offer as opinion, I think it's nice when folk at least attempt to understand though....
There is a great power in the universe that we're disconnected from...that exists all around each one of us ...that we spend so much time and effort doing everything we can to ignore and deny that its there....
I don't know if you're a movie buff Doc but way back in the early seventies there was a movie filmed in Toronto (small Ontario town located on the shore of Lake Ontario...). A David Cronenberg wierdness called "Videodrome".... Starring James Woods and Debra Harry....
One of the characters in the movie was named "Brian Oblivion"...terrific name especially if you play a little letter-shuffle with the name but anyway, this character performs a soliloquy of sorts that is recorded on videotape..the only way this guy will talk to or with anyone is through TV...
"The TV screen is the retina of the minds eye"...is one of his lines.... And although not a particularly pointed cinematic thrust at the human social condition as a whole, it is a startling glimpse into the world we live in today....even just after these thirty-five years. "World War III will be fought in the videodrome....."
I've been working on a book that analyses the works of David Cronenberg, Marshal McLuhan and William Gibson....all Canadians and all of whom have made remarkable contributions to the field of communications...
Cronenberg's overarching thesis is that the next evolutionary stage of H. Sapiens will be merging with the machine/electronic world....Marshal McLuhan who taught at the University of Toronto back in the fifties...left us commentary and prognostications regarding TV...there was even a CBC vinyette parrotting one of his throw away terms..."The media is the message"....
William Gibson was the earliest writer to coin the phrase cyberspace and brought a sizeable new lexicon to the English language comprised of terms useful in describing the merging process as he saw it through books and movies..."Neuromancer"..."Johnny Mnemonic"....
My synopsis integrates biological and medical precepts as well as prostheses, stem cell research and implant technology...Cronenberg McLuhan and Gibson were well in advance of what's lurking just around the corner for us all over the next few decades...depends how much longer we'll survive as a species....
A quick...tiny peep....
From the way human beings "learn" and "learn to learn" we have some exciting work done by relatively older scientists and writers developing ideas about how our physiological presence has been combined with a growing and expanding psychological development. As external "expressions" of what McLuhan called 'volutary amputation'...our preparedness to extend/replace the biomechanical constructs of our physiology ...when we use a shovel...we've given up using our hands to part the earth and be in contact with the source of our being and instead use an artificial hand...that both increases our facility to dig and pile and increase production but at the same time isolates us from the essences of the earth from which we spring....
We as a species have a critical need to come to terms with our voluntary amputation and our willingness to evolve (in my opinion) far to rapidly into the cyborg and part-man part-machine that affords us pleasure and comfort but demands that we surrender our spirit and our dreams.....
By now you must appreciate that I just rattle on ...mostly nonsense....but hey I live in a wheelchair and have a very limited life....
Remember you can always change the channel...
