[RhetoricThug]

Soundtrack
[youtube]hOVdjxtnsH8[/youtube]

Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.

The lineality of the left hemisphere is supported by an alphabet-based service environment of roads and transportation, and by logical or rational activities in social and legal administration. Dominance of the right hemisphere, however, depends upon a cultural milieu or environment of a simultaneous resonating character. Such dominance is normal in oral societies, and today our universal environment of simultaneous electric information has entirely subverted the dominance of the left hemisphere. By tuning in on the new audile-tactile awareness made available by our electric ground, Fritjof Capra found that modern physics was, unwittingly, retrieving a world-view harmonious with ancient Eastern wisdom. His problems in reconciling the two were entirely those of the hemispheres:

"I had gone through a long training in theoretical physics and had done several years of research. At the same time, I had become very interested in Eastern mysticism and had begun to see the parallels to modern physics. I was particularly attracted to the puzzling aspects of Zen, which reminded me of the puzzles in quantum theory. At first, however, relating the two was a purely intellectual exercise. To overcome the gap between rational, analytical thinking and the meditation experience of mystical truth, was, and still is, very difficult for me." (The Tao of Physics, 9-10)

The alphabet created visual space, and with it a lineal and visual 'outer world' environment of services and experiences (everything from architecture and highways to representational art), which contributed to the ascendancy or dominance of the left, or lineal, hemisphere. This observation is consistent with the findings of Russian neurophysiologist A.K. Luria, who found that the area of the brain which controls linear sequencing, and, hence mathematical and scientific thinking, is located in the pre-frontal region of the left hemisphere: 'The mental process for writing a word entails still another specialization: putting the letters in the proper sequence to form the word. Lashley discovered many years ago that sequential analysis involved a zone of the brain different from that employed for spatial analysis. In the course of our extensive studies we have located the region responsible for sequential analysis in the anterior regions of the left hemisphere' ('The Functional Organization of the Brain,' 71-2). Luria's results show that the expression 'linear thinking' is not merely a figure of speech, but a mode of activity peculiar to the left hemisphere of the brain. His results support the observation that the use of the alphabet, with its emphasis on linear sequence, stimulates dominance of this area of the brain in cultural patterns.

Luria's observations provide an understanding of how the written alphabet, with its lineal structure, was able to create conditions conducive to the development of Western science, technology, and rationality. Many left-hemisphere stroke patients become aphasic, losing some or all of their ability to speak or to write, in some cases also losing the capacity for sustained (sequential) thought. They seem to become 'astonied' (fifteenth century English), or 'stunned' - the experience is not unlike being 'stoned' on drugs. In part, this may be the result of a loss of muscular motor control. But much of it is directly related to the inner-outer split between the hemispheres and to linearity as a feature of the left side of the brain. Speech and writing have to be uttered, in a sequence. Just as all forms of sequential activity (as contrasted to configuration or pattern) are functions of the left hemisphere, so too all forms of utterances (and artefacts), whether technological or verbal or written, are functions of the left hemisphere. This extends to private identity- uttering the self as fragmented and abstracted from the group- and to entrepreneurial aggression of all kinds. Conversely, all technologies that emphasize the outer or abstract or sequentiality in organizing experience, contribute to left hemisphere dominance in a culture. Harold Innis remarked on the Oriental (right-hemisphere) antipathy to sequence and abstraction and our sort of precision:

"Social time, for example, has been described as qualitatively differentiated according to the beliefs and customs common to a group and as not continuous but as subject to interruption of actual dates. It is influenced by language which constrains and fixes prevalent concepts and modes of thought. It has been argued by Marcel Granet that the Chinese are not equipped to note concepts or to present doctrines discursively. The Word does not fix a notion with a definite degree of abstraction or generality but evokes an indefinite complex or particular images. it is completely unsuited to formal precision. Neither time nor space is abstractly conceived: time proceeds by cycles and is round." (The Bias of Communication, 62)

Dr Bogen noted, appositely, 'what may well be the most important distinction between left & right hemisphere modes is the extent to which a linear concept of time participates in the ordering of thought' (The Human Brain, 141).

-Marshall McLuhan, Laws of Media, The New Science, pg 72-74

Reflect on your parallel self through these polychromatic parallel ciphers.


Jack Kerouac on Genius vs Talent:

Writers are made, for anybody who isn’t illiterate can write; but geniuses of the writing art like Melville, Whitman or Thoreau are born.

[Genius] doesn’t mean screwiness or eccentricity or excessive “talent.” It is derived from the Latin word gignere (to beget) and a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but Melville could have written Moby-Dick, not even Whitman or Shakespeare. Nobody but Whitman could have written Leaves of Grass; Whitman was born to write Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write Moby-Dick.

Some perfect virtuoso who can interpret Brahms on the violin is called a “genius,” but the genius, the originating force, really belongs to Brahms; the violin virtuoso is simply a talented interpreter — in other words, a “Talent.” Or you’ll hear people say that so-and-so is a “major writer” because of his “talent.” There can be no major writers without original genius. Artists of genius, like Jackson Pollock, have painted things that have never been seen before… Take the case of James Joyce: people say he “wasted” his “talent” on the stream-of-consciousness style, when in fact he was simply born to originate it.

Some geniuses come with heavy feet and march solemnly forward… Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that unescapable sorrowful depth that shines through — originality.

Joyce was insulted all his life by practically all of Ireland and the world for being a genius. Some Celtic Twilight idiots even conceded he had some talent. What else were they going to say, since they were all going to start imitating him? But five thousand university-trained writers could put their hand to a day in June in Dublin in 1904, or one night’s dreams, and never do with it what Joyce did with it: he was simply born to do it.


When the question is therefore asked, “Are writers born or made?” one should first ask, “Do you mean writers of talent or writers of originality?” Because everybody can write but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented new forms of writing and her imitators are just “talents.”

The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar…

The main thing to remember is that talent imitates genius, because there’s nothing else to imitate. Since talent can’t originate, it has to imitate, or interpret…

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night sky can never be seen again… Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and see many times imitated by made writers.

Oftentimes the originator of new language forms is called “pretentious” by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/17 ... k-kerouac/


James Joyce

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.

Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

Aldous Huxley

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.


George Orwell

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Philip K Dick

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

This is a mournful discovery.
1)Those who agree with you are insane
2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.


This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.

Kurt Vonnegut

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

To be is to do - Socrates

To do is to be - Sartre

Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.

To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's.

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.


I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.

Hunter S Thompson

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.

Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.

Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.


Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.

HL Mencken

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes.


Marshall McLuhan

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and
understanding.

Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery.
The politician will be only too happy to abdicate
in favor of his image, because the image will
be much more powerful than he could ever be.

The only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Diaper spelled backwards is repaid , think about it.

Our permanent address is tomorrow.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

The visual power of the phonetic alphabet to translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.

Tribal, right-hemisphere 'closed' cultures are holistic and entire and resistant to penetration by other preliterate cultures. But the specialist qualities of the left-hemisphere phonetic alphabet have long provided the only means of invading and taking over oral societies. 'Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture.' These words of Jacques Ellul in Propaganda draw attention to one of the crucial features of Western history. It is no accident that the Christian church, dedicated to propaganda and propagation, adopted the Graeco-Roman phonetic literacy from the earliest days. The impact of alphabetic literacy is strong enough not only to break the tribal bond, but to create individualized (left-hemisphere) consciousness as well. Phonetic literacy- our alphabet- alone has this power.

The spread of Graeco-Roman literacy and civilization became inseparable from Christian missionary and educational activity. Paradoxically, people are not only unable to receive, but are unable to retain doctrinal teaching without a minimum of phonetic or Western culture. Here is the observation of Ellul on this matter:

"In addition to a certain living standard, another condition must be met: if a man is to be successfully propagandized, he needs at least a minimum of culture. Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture. We are not speaking here of intelligence; some primitive tribes are surely intelligent, but have an intelligence foreign to our concepts and customs. A base is needed- for example, education; a man who cannot read will escape propaganda, as will a man who is not interested in reading. People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory: they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates: they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory & observation). But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above the primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but they do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe- or disbelieve- intoto that they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda."

The dominance of the left hemisphere (analytic and quantitative) entails the submission or suppression of the right hemisphere; and so, for example, our intelligence tests exist only for measuring left-hemisphere achievement, and take no cognizance of the existence of the (qualitative) right hemisphere.

-Marshall Mcluhan, Laws of Media, the New Science, pg 74-75.

Alas, Pofo, how does it feel to be one reactive puppet & the victim of relative translation? What is going through your head when you regurgitate political rubbish, claiming to be 'communist or fascist?'



-RT

[Americanroyalty]

A rainbow of talent to be perused at will? A very digital interface truth be told. Bought were does the prism of genius come in?

[Azure Angel]

What is going through your head when you regurgitate political rubbish, claiming to be 'communist or fascist?

Absolutely nothing.

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

“Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.”

[moxiemag]

I suppose I'll live out the rest of my days in a broom closet trying to think of something original.