My father decided in the sixties that he would try as much as he could to present his ideas in an aphoristic style. Aphorisms, as Francis Bacon said, are incomplete, a bit like cartoons. They are not filled-out essay writing that is highly compressed. The aphorism is a poetic form that calls for a lot of participation on the part of the reader. You have to chew on a aphorism and work with it for a while before understanding it fully. A good aphorism could keep you busy for a week – kicking it around, playing with it, exploring it, taking it apart to see what you can get out of it. And applying it here, and everywhere. My father deliberately chose this form of statement because he wanted to teach, not tell or entertain. He said,
"For instruction, you use incomplete knowledge so people can fill things in – they can round it out and fill it in with their own experience."
If what you want to do is simply to tell people something, then by all means spell it out in the connected essay. But if you want to teach, you don't do that. There's no participation in just telling: that's simply for consumers – they sit there and swallow it, or not. But the aphoristic style gives you the opportunity to get a dialogue going, to engage people in the process of discovery.
– Eric McLuhan, in BENEDETTI, Paul et DEHART, Nancy (1996). Foward Through the Rearview Mirror: reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan, Scarbourough: Prentice Hall Canada Inc., p. 45
"My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them "theories" is to miss my satirical intent altogether."
Ezra Pound: "Nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all that circumambient peripherisation."
Would you like to START here >>> MY CANVASSES ARE SURREALIST or someWHERE in the MIDDLE??? In any event, when FINN-ished ! ... We invite you to Go Back to the Beginning and start again ... !? or you can read sdrawkcab or maybe skipping around randomly is the best path ? ... NEW JUXTAPOSITIONS are possible BECAUSE we are always adding new 'percepts' and 'remixing' these 222 probes ... yes! IT'S ALIVE !
the global village is populated with 'discarnate' human beings who no longer exist
as physical presences; instead the electronic or discarnate person is simply an image
or an information pattern, nothing more ...
- Marshall McLuhan
"... in experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter- irritants or technology. For those parts of our selves that we thrust out in the form of new invention are attempts to counter or neutralize collective pressures and irritations. But the counter- irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit. And it is here that the artist can show us how to "ride with the punch," instead of "taking it on the chin." It can only be repeated that human history is a record of "taking it on the chin."
SSSStarting off behind with an end in view
prairie wet nursus came quick with a message in their mouths.
triangular Racketeers unfurl threelegged garbagecans
sworming with pomefructs ... They tally plausible whatsthats.
Somedivide dittoh pricker Paddy squattor
sumthelot bottlogger anntisquattor
Somedivide prittoh dicker squaddy Pattor
sumthelot anntilogger bottsquattor
oh what a meanderthalltale unleavenweight !
"What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light. Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds — imagistic, sound, or tactile — from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, being everywhere at once in the data bank. Discarnate man is as weightless as an astronaut but can move much faster. He loses his sense of private identity because electronic perceptions are not related to place. Caught up in the hybrid energy released by video technologies, he will be presented with a chimerical “reality” that involves all his senses at a distended pitch, a condition as addictive as any known drug. The mind, as figure, sinks back into ground and drifts somewhere between dream and fantasy. Dreams have some connection to the real world because they have a frame of actual time and place (usually in real time); fantasy has no such commitment."
-MM : The Global Village, page 97
