value and authenticity

I am part of the world. I have values. And I act on them. I have a say, however small, in the way the world becomes.

The human orientation in the world is necessarily prescriptive. People value and want to navigate the world in a manner consistent with their valuations. But some people act as if they have no values of their own. They recite the values and expectations of others and play along. They say "Society expects x...men are not allowed to do y...z is the way the world is." What is truly weak is to ignore, discount, or give up on one's own valuations and the power to evaluate.

I would like more people to embrace their religion; not the religion they belong to. The religion of life, instead, that comes from being them. ~Jayson

I don't care what religion you belong to, I care about your spirituality. I care about your personal orientation toward life, existence, and meaning itself. Your religion doesn't tell me that, nor should it. If you discount your own personal experience and pass over in silence allowing the words and experiences of others to displace your own, you may as well be committing suicide. Spiritual suicide.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. ~Oscar Wilde

Acceptance of the way things are to the exclusion of one's values -- displacement of self with affected identity -- is impotency. It is to become like a facsimile, a forwarding address, a soulless pantomime.

"faith"

A: I think I'm coming to the position that faith is much ado about nothing. Like, when your friend tells you they'll pick you up at 8, and it's 8:01, that you still assume they're coming is faith. It's really just that small- just the persistence of a belief after some reason to doubt it comes along.

B: I like that one A: faith is tantamount to an after-image, and not something one has any wilful control over. One doesn't "keep the faith", in truth, or for that matter lose it, but rather simply has the opportunity to observe the phenomenology of its duration, at best to ponder whether the (source of the) image might return... or perhaps whether one can actually see into the darkness. (I tend to think of candles when I think of after-images.)

What seems to complicate this, though, is the idea of having "faith in faith," such that a recursion of belief-feedback loops the after-imaging into a seemingly separate epiphenomenal dimension. It no longer matters whether your friends ever pick you up, but rather just the thought that you once believed they would, which suffices to justify maintaining the faith. Believing one can see in the dark, I suppose.

"Reading McLuhan" by Jim Andrews

[EXCERPT]

>>Transplants, artificial organs, cloning, the car, with all its odd power to move us, these are just a few examples of a symbiosis of man and machine. These examples are very much extensions of the body, most obviously, rather than extensions of the mind or the nervous system. Media technologies are primarily extensions of the mind and the nervous system, according to McLuhan.

>>For instance, print is an extension of the memory. Our memory is extended outside of ourselves. We don’t need to remember what is recorded. We can pick it up and re-member it. It was a dismember of us until we re membered it to us. Jacki Apple, an American radio producer, has said that radio provides people with the soundtrack for the movie of their day to day lives, particularly the young. Radio can fill acoustic space in a way that television or even movies cannot fill visual space. A guy with his shades, in his car, with the radio turned up loud, is transforming acoustic space in a way that would require acid for visual space, or sleep and dream. Speed radio’s D.J.s play a role that must be slick and of the moment. Now and now and now. The time is now and you are of the moment, driving powerfully into the future along the razor edge of now. You are in the time and space of the speeding moment. Speed radio is the pulsing beat of the collective, tribal drum. It extends us into the auditory space along the edge of a now that is always moving and almost ahead of its time.

phase in, phase out

I feel like this blog has served its purpose, whatever that was, and I probably won't write here as much or in the same fashion. Or maybe I'll change my mind; but I wanted to say this because it feels like the proper kind of closure after two years. Adieu.

And thanks.

Germany, November 2002