The Historical Beast

( bucultureshock.com )

Change – we’re in it –

It is interesting to me how this blog, and my relationship with it, has changed.  It began as a performance, a persona who is probably closer to who I was, am, or will be,  than any face I could ever offer the world in my physical body.  And indeed, it is still that.  In my current life, I have a name, a face, a physical being that probably does not look like the woman you imagine could write these words.  I struggle, in essence, because the being inside of me is not the face my body presents to the world.  (I suspect that is true of most of us right now, and it is our challenge, on this earth, to come to terms with the contradictions between what we appear to be and what we really are.) 

I am, in essence, a very old soul who is troubled about the state of the world we live in.  I see us going through monumental change, and yet not acknowledging how profound that change is, and how important it is for humans to accept their role within it. 

( daviddeen )

We are historical beasts, we humans.  I would argue that is one of the things that makes us different from every other animal on the Animal Planet.  My cats, for instance, are not historical, though they each have a history.  They, however, are oblivious to that; they live in the Now.  Right now, all my cats know is that I am not with them.  

I am traveling right now.

Traveling and thinking.  Asking very hard questions, and contemplating their answers, and the hardest question I like to think about is the nature of the change we, as a race, are currently going through –

I have long felt that we are in a paradigmatic shift, and right now, I am participating in a conference where that language is being very readily used.  It is a conference on education, on the changes needed in education to make it a viable industry for our children to participate in.  And our children are not us, in the most dramatic of ways.

Those of us who made their earthly entrance in the late 1950's, early 1960's, can be labeled in any number of ways: in the United States, we are the end of the Baby Boomers, the end of an age of prosperity that was born out of a victorious war. We were born at the peak of a wave that felt our culture is fundamentally right and good, and we were born right before that wave crested and broke against the rocky shoals of the 1960’s.  We were one of the last ages to trust our parents and others in positions of authority. 

We were one of the last ages to be nursed on Great Books, to be led to believe in the Rightness of the Book, and to love Great Authors.  Our age produced an abundance of English majors, because being an English major allowed us to analyze the by-products of Great Human Minds.  Yet we were also the age that was influenced by the questioning of our immediate predecessors, those who asked why all our Great Books were written only by White Men, thus causing a reassignment of Authority to Women and “Minorities.” 

We were also the first age to be raised solely on television. 

( nogreenbananas )

We were a cusp age in that regard, because we have lived our lives in a world where we appreciated and understood the values of the last few centuries, and yet we are the first age that can say that there was never a time in our memory when television did not exist: one might say, we were the first Human Age raised and influenced by a virtual, visual imitation of ourselves.

I hope, dear friends, you can follow this logic, because that’s what it is: logic.  This entry is the painful burden of an unencumbered human mind unraveling the cues that the world provides.  My mind is still an Enlightenment Mind, a Mind that believes that Humans can and do know without technological assistance, and that knowledge can come to us through rigorous study, careful examination of the artifacts of the world around, creative risk, and a good sprinkling of intuition. 

An Enlightenment Mind is profoundly grounded in the Written, Published Text – the Linear  Book, and in language that has been produced for that media.  That’s right: books are a Media, and for a few hundred years, they were the most radical media for disseminating knowledge and provoking creativity.

But the Age of the Book is over. 

Books are now antiquity, and

text

laces through space in a delicate filigree of complexity.

My words,

The words of this blog,

Are part of an increasing cacophony of other words,

A multilingual, unilingual digital embrace which,

Combined

Embodies the workings of the Human Mind.

And we, we lucky Historical Humans alive today

Have been born to witness the rapid transition

From the Age of the Book to

The Age of the Cyborg.

Our children, the current children

Who sit so complacently in our classrooms,

Repugnant

Indulgent

illiterate

Have been born into a New Literacy,

Just as we

Were.

The children of today are “digital natives” and

As such

They are wired to think digitally –

Digital literacy is not Textual literacy

Though Textual literacy is a part of the Digital.

But the Digital Text is not solid –

It practices a New Linearity

                         It is fleeting and acknowledges

The rapidity

With which

It can and will be challenged,

And the children

- if they can survive the education system we still have, an education system that was made to serve the Enlightenment Mind -

Major in Psychology

Because the most provocative fiction they can read

Is the working of Human Mind itself,

And the altered worlds it is capable of producing

At any given moment.

( zapatopi )

Living through a Major Turning Point in Human History,

Which is what we are doing right now,

Is not without trauma.  It is, in essence,

A Birth,

And in our case right now,

Because of the role our own Technology is playing in it,

It is a New Birth into a Different

Physical Form –

The form of the Cyborg,

And any given Cyborg has an absolutely different relationship with the collective human mind (ie: this internet) than we have had with our own minds for

Centuries.

Indeed, the Cyborg accepts unequivocally

Its own participation

In the collectivity;

It relies

On this wealth

Of Knowledge Production and Reproduction

And laughs fondly,

With warm sentimentality,

Over the antiquity of the notion

Of Originality.

Nothing is Original on this earth, in this realm of reproduction and imitation.  From the moment when the Creative Force (aka God) sought to reproduce an entity in His Own Likeness, we (aka: the likeness) have been doomed to Not Be Original.  And now we have finally figured that out, and accepted it, and at some time, perhaps in the not to distant future, we will come to terms with the fact that once we stop trying to be Original, Once we stop trying to be Authentic and Right and True, we will actually Be

That.

But as I was saying, that will be the future,

Perhaps tomorrow,

Or this evening

When that will happen,

But right now we are Trapped in a Moment of Historical Change,

And we will be that Moment’s By Products.

Our delicate all-to-animal human entities will indeed die

In time

And we will be replaced by a generation that will recognize

That time is inconsequential because

The body is inconsequential

And yet,

The body is sweet –

Perhaps the Human Animal will live on through stubbornness (stubbornness is one of our more endearing qualities).  There will be some of us who will refuse to participate in the Rise of the Cyborg, sort of like Apes refused to participate in the Rise of Man, and we will live and toil on this earthly domain,

Sweetly,

Admiring its beauty,

Nurturing it lovingly,

Accepting our mortality

As a fact of life,

And that too

Will be beautiful –

The sustenance of that type of animal life,
of the Human Beast life,

if the Cyborg allows it,

Will be Eden

All over again.

Lost in Space: Paradigm Shift:2012 (or thereabouts)

The human race, 

lost in space:

this is who we are

gripping tight

this wretched rock

we've traveled pretty far.

FULL CIRCLE

( copernicus )

It was shocking when Copernicus

moved the center to the sun;

the earth-moving truth

caused much despair

for a century or two

but eventually brought

intellectual breakthrough.

That is called paradigm shift 

(I've spoken of this before)

We're in another one,

now.

( nationalgeographic )

But this one is more

belittling,

more

difficult to digest

than coming to terms with the structure

of our own solar system.

At least the Copernican

shift

kept us somewhat central.

At least it

kept us in observable

space;

but this new shift,

well,

it asks us to perceive ourselves

in relation to

infinity:

in relation to

what's beyond the horizon,

lying hidden

under the under

belly of all being.

We're here,

at the brink of that understanding,

of being able to perceive

infinitely.

( thegodguy  *If you can make any sense
out of my collective rambling entries,
check out this guy's blog)

It's not half as scary as it sounds.

We merely need

to discard our conception

of time,

and with it

anything else that is

denominational.

( schoolloansblog )

Because once we've seen infinity,

we don't need to count

anymore.

paradigmatic shift

 

The arrow on this image is pointing to Earth.  

I was made aware of this image the other day, when I was listening to the radio, my favorite medium. (NPR to be exact; I got the picture at their article.  Thanks)

There's something wonderful about a medium where only voices live; where the body isn't the thing by which we are judged.  I actually wrote an entire dissertation about that.  That may be the crowning work of this lifetime for me.  But no one wanted to publish it, though a few people published chapters from it.  Radio is the perfect medium for women.  So is the internet.  Radio, and the internet, are like wearing a burka.  No one judges you based on your body, or your face.  If they want to get to know you, they have to look into your mind.

But I digress

This picture was taken by the NASA Voyager 1 spacecraft, and there was some debate over whether or not it should be taken.  Ultimately, Carl Sagan (remember that voice?) and a few others lobbied that the cameras on Voyager be "turned back towards earth"  And this was the image they got, on February 13, 1990.   There's a wonderful quote from Sagan both on NPR's site that features the above image, and on the radio story itself - it goes like this -

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.  (from a book called Pale Blue Dot, but I took the quote from NPR)

What a shocking, stunning change in perspective.  We weren't ready for it in the 1990's; but we need to be ready for it now.

Just the fact we can look at it signifies to me that we truly are entering a new era, and much of the turmoil we've experienced over the past 20 - 30 years is in part due to the fact that science itself has forced us to reevaluate our place and importance in the universe.  Getting used to what it means to be a "Pale Blue Dot," as Sagan called it has at least, if not more, of the ramifications that this shift in perspective had:

 

Ptolemy's Geocentric Model

as found on wikipedia

I don't really want to try to explain the details of the Geocentric Model; follow they link; they're described on wikipedia pretty well.  However, the thing to note as that the earth is in the center of this universe.  This model was replaced by 

 

Copernicus' Heliocentrism 

(Again, the link brings you to the wikipedia entrance on heliocentrism, which places the sun rather firmly in the center of our galaxy, at least.  That's where I go the picture, too.)

Now, some of the repercussions of this change in perspective happened early in my lifetime (Remember, I was born in 1585!)  Copernicus died in 1543.  His treatise was published just before his death, and Galileo was doing his work during the early 1600's, so some of my earliest political memories are of the anger, fear and suspicion that occured around this idea that we were not, after all, at the center of the universe.  

What people from this age know is what the history books tell us.  What I remember is how this set with the common population.  The common man clung to the old view - it was so much easier to deal with.  But the younger generation, and I was part of that generation, was ready to rebel about a lot of things, and one of them was this.  I mean, after all, Ptolemy's system was a bit like the tyrannus system of our families,  and those of us who felt a need to rebel loved the idea that the earth, like our parents, was not the center of the universe!  But in general, it felt like the ground was shifting under our feet.  And then along came Descartes and his ideas about the human mind, and, well, every man became an island.  A few women, too, like me.  Being an opera singer made me suspect from the start, so I had nothing to lose - one of my lovers taught me how to read, and I began spouting my opinions regularly.  Of course, he dumped me then, and I was pregnant.  Made the best of it; I read Shakespeare and Marlowe and Johnson with my daughter.

And for awhile, life, the world, everything, seemed stable and knowable.  And grand!  Kings took the name of the Sun; and we were able to convince ourselves that Earth was somewhat favored in the whole scheme of things because we were the third planet away, and had this very special position that allowed for life.

But today we have THIS image.  We don't think about it often, but I found it so interesting that this radio program talked about it, called our attention to it.  The change in perception that this image requires us to make is a radical one, and I think humanity is finally at a point where it can actually make it.  So the image returns.

I feel it again, that incredible instability of humanity's perception of itself shifting.  They call it a paradigm shift. 

We're in it; wonder what it will look like on the other side.