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"The study of effects, because discontinuous, appear as occultism" 

            

Dutifully reading my McLuhan this morning, I came across his observation that "the study of effects, because discontinuous, appear as occultism."* How similarly does this statement echo my own thoughts a few years ago. On my Shakespeare course in England I visited Stonehenge with some classmates. Our guide, a self-described "Neo-Druid" with curly springy hair, shared its mystical history as a burial, ritualistic, and commercial hub positioned over intersecting ley lines. These lines imbue the sacred site with power that she proceeded to demonstrate with her L-shaped divining rods that, pulled by their invisible energy, crossed and recrossed as she passed over them.


As skeptics we were immediately prone to dismiss our Neo-Druid guide's assertions as self-fulfilling or occult gibberish, but I couldn't help but consider the veracity of what she was saying. Why wouldn't her experience with magnetic fields, etc. be valid? Mightn't the phenomenon of the rods be based on some natural principle as yet mysterious but perfectly inane? Are we erroneously labeling something as occult because we have not yet grasped the underlying cause, the connection of this process with that process?

But then, why should a natural phenomenon feel less threatening once it has been investigated, labeled, and replicated in some obscure scientific journal, even when quantum chromodynamics is as mysterious to me as chronomancy? Whether justified or not, I feel safe in Science but threatened by Mystery. I still tend towards close-mindedness in such matters—indeed, when our hostess at Kinnersely Castle started on about dowsing, shamins, mugwort, etc, I was reasonably alarmed. The occult is certainly a door I would not like to open, especially since I know it is real based off of an acquaintance's experience (and for that reason I will not go near a Ouija board). I wonder, then--is it the associated traditions that cast practices like dowsing as evil? the practitioners? the purpose?

*McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (1988), p. 51


P.S. divination can be practical

It's a certain canine's 14th birthday today.

As he's always been partial to pancakes, Kathryn cooked him a gluten-free one so that his ears wouldn't itch. We lit a candle, sang "Happy Birthday," and watched his 10-second celebration.

Happy birthday, Mr. Reg!

It's been unseasonably warm lately, but on Tuesday Winter's true nature finally showed up. Everyone's feeling the chill.

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As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe ... Time measured not by the uniqueness of private experience but by abstract uniform units gradually pervades all sense life, much as does the technology of writing and printing. Not only work, but also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to the clock rather than to organic needs.


--Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

It was not until the advent of the telegraph that messages could travel faster than a messenger. Before this, roads and the written word were closely interrelated. It is only since the telegraph that information has detached itself from such solid commodities as stone and papyrus.

-Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), p. 89

How does the disembodiment of information affect our perception of it?

I originally wrote this as one of last week's bullet points, but it got too cumbersome for the format. Here's more about that little reminder...

In all honesty, I have been angry for a long time (for reasons I may share eventually so that others may relate and learn), and it came to a head on Sunday when my simmering resentment erupted in a flurry of questions, accusations, declarations. I told God everything on my heart with unedited and alarming frankness. As others have said, the important thing is to keep talking with God, especially during those times you absolutely don't want to talk. So I talked. And I yelled. And I cried.

And I did it all again on Monday. Why, why would you do that? I asked him. Why?

Does God have to explain himself to man?

Pause. What?

Does God have to explain himself to man?

A mess of concepts and hints of passages I'd read long ago impressed themselves upon me, reminding me of God's awesome, exalted nature.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Who then is he that can stand before Me?

Who has given to Me that I should repay him?*

I don't deserve an answer, and I don't even deserve to be satisfied. God is working out his will as he sees fit, for whatever reason. But it is also his prerogative to love me, for whatever reason. I heard from God in the sense that he pointed me to his unchanging truth in Scripture; he brought to mind whispers of passages I've read years ago, all the more humbling because I was in no mood to reflect or to receive. God does not have to give an account of himself to man, nor is he required to explain his actions. He is God, and what he does or allows I have to accept without necessarily understanding it now (and this, I believe, is what one calls "faith"). I am also his beloved, which for reasons unknown, is his prerogative (and this, I believe, is what one calls a "relationship").

Who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "Why did you make me like this," will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?

What if God, although willing to demonstrate his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And he did so to make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom he also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles. As he says also in Hosea,

"I will call those who were not my people, 'My people,'

And her who was not beloved, "Beloved.'" **

*see Job chapters 38-41 in full (one of my favorite passages in the entire Bible). This part is ridiculously hard to convey, and impossible to convey accurately and without sounding like a mystical epiphany. Out of a nebulous impression I have attempted to pluck discrete bits, define them with words, and string them into the sequence required of narrative. To put it in McLuhanesque terms, I have struggled to convey an oral, all-at-once impression in the sequential medium of print. Anyone who's had that flash of intuition and then have attempted to jot it down but utterly failed to capture it may relate.
**Romans 9:20-25

Isn't it nice to know
That the media will sway our votes
Cause seriously we've got to see
That they choose what we know

Whenever I listen to this song by BarlowGirl ("Time for You to Go" from Love & War, 2009), these lines catch my attention with their simple truth: the press isn't the neutral arbiter of information. Rather, bias is in everything that has been selected. Dr. Paul Levinson, in his insightful and engaging book, Digital McLuhan (published 1999), similarly discerns the power of the press as "gatekeeper": "From the point of view of the reader," he writes, "newspaper gatekeeping has been the more insidious, because newspapers usually present themselves to the public as printing all news, not just the news that they have allowed to pass through their gates. Thus, The New York Times represents itself on its masthead as publishing "All the News That's Fit to Print"; the motto could be more truthfully rendered as "All the News That We See Fit to Print" (p. 122). Similarly, Walter Cronkite's nightly "And that's the way it was," would be better expressed as "And that's the way the editors at CBS decided you should think it was" (Levinson, 1999, p. 124).

When my classmates berate the supposedly conservative bias of Fox News (and, in doing so, belie the tolerance liberals tout), they overlook the bias that is inevitable with selection—and as students of library and information science, this is especially egregious, for the bias of selectivity is something we discuss all the time. What makes these students think that other networks like CNN, NPR, CBS, etc are any less selective? employ any less bias? (and on that note, how did liberal politics become the standard, like the Midwestern accent of broadcasting anyway? When my classmates snicker at conservatives, they do so with the assurance that comes with speaking for the majority, assuming that we think the way they do.)

I'm not against bias—bias is a way of organizing myriad facts along a particular line—a filter. Due to our finite capacity to find, understand, process, remember, and act upon information, filters are effective ways of distilling all the information available to us to what we can manage. Imagine, for instance, if we lacked the filter of forgetfulness and instead remembered everything we'd ever experienced like Funes in Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes, the Memorious." Afterall, I am finishing up my degree to become a professional filter as an archivist/librarian. I am, however, against bias masquerading as the whole truth and bias that occludes the whole truth. We must remember that effective filters leave some things behind and what remains is only a part. Our job is to know the filter, to understand its mechanisms, and occasionally to test it by looking over what's left behind and evaluating whether that is, indeed, dross. They choose what we know--who are they? how do they choose? what have they left behind?

Witness the power of technology: "the age of radio gave rise to the four most powerful political leaders of the twentieth century - Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt - each of whom used the then-new medium to address their people at crucial moments in history. At these times, their voices came into living rooms, heretofore the precinct primarily of family, and spoke via a device unable to register any contrary opinion or objection ... McLuhan caught the fleeting reign of the radio family in his oft-quoted observation (1964, p. 261) that 'had TV come first there would have been no Hitler'" (p. 67).

--Paul Levinson in Digital McLuhan, 1999.

I was walking to the bus stop when I heard fevered rustling emanating from...the garbage can. As I suspected, a squirrel popped up, proudly claiming a chunk of bread nearly as big as he was.

Photo source

Interesting: I just saw a squirrel chasing a bird--over the mulch, up trees, across the sidewalk. Did the bird take his acorn, perhaps?