Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Womb with a View, and other cliches

Likely, I won't have time, because a server has gone down. No surprise there, since it's about ten years old, and they've been warned repeatedly, but the responsible person, who works for me, is on an impromptu break in anticipation of my departure, and so it fails on my watch. I guess that's how it should work, no?

So, away from Easter, after writing this really long dense blog about resurrection and thinking about cracks in eggs and peeps and peepers and spring and rebirth and stuff, and after watching What the Bleep because I was too tired to drive back home from my city apartment Easter night, I'm driving across my cosmos (which is really way too big) listening to the radio for more clues, and they are talking about brain stuff, as they often seem to do these days.

So they make some pronouncements about how brain scans show that thinking about something excites the very same patterns as does actually experiencing it. Or was that the Bleeping movie?Not really important, since in either case the proper response is, well, duh! They make it sound as if there's no inside/outside difference. Hello! Have you heard about dreaming? Did you remember your skin? And then they get all excited as though this were some great revelation. What did they think "mind" meant?

I think it was on the radio that I heard some talk about empathetic reactions, and how our brain gets excited the same way whether something happens to us or to someone else. The cringe reaction, I think. Or how my balls scrunch up just watching a football fly from camera perspective.  Isn't that just another big duh? Do we really need instrumental readings to tell us these things? I think that's what's meant by heart and mind; innering of patterns out there.

I don't know, but these things are not all that exciting to me. Of course there's more goes on than my lame brain can process. Of course I sort and sift and stir, just so I can be amazed at what only seems to be some powerful coincidence. Of course I move to rhythms beyond my ken. So what? Isn't that what living is? Or did I really plan myself. The idiocy of Intelligent Design will never stop appalling me.

Isn't it more amazing that we all still choose to keep that television on? The one which numbs us to all cringe reflex, and drives us sociopathically away from any fellow feeling? That some among us actually do enjoy watching angry talking heads which construct perfect fundamentalist squared reality to hold against almost everybody else out there? That young near naked girls are more of a turn on than actual touch? That killing can be a game?

I'm not saying "ain't it aweful", because I really don't think it is. These wombs with view are comfortable, and I like my showers hot. But if only we would step out a bit, we might find that our neighbors don't stink any worse than we do ourselves. We might even let our kids outside so that we can take those furtive breaks we need (some other spot on the radio talked about how Moms have a website where they can share their ridiculous secret tricks and habits for some time off from dealing with kids - hell, when I was little, Mom opened the door and didn't expect to see me back until dinner time. We all knew who the perverts were.).

Crescendo pop, I do wonder if there might be an end to all this projected reality. A good end, I mean. Something to make the death of networks and newspapers OK, because these were not necessarily all entirely good things. Concocted wars. Impacted hearts. Stoppered outrage.

I don't know that it's this newer Inter-network. I don't know that its not. I do know that removes from touch are too dangerous to be as safe as they feel. 

Where's Marshall McLuhan when you need him? If the medium is the message, then this one's all about what's not there. Ether.


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