Podcast 177 – “Surfing Finnegans Wake” Part 2
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]
"McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the Sixties."
"In McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the Medieval world of what he called ‘manuscript culture’."
"Joyce is, in ‘The Wake’, making his own alchemeric cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology."
"Nothing is now unconscious if your data-search commands are powerful enough."
"So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan the book is the central symbol of the age, the central mystery of our time. In a sense, I sort of share that notion. It’s a very Talmudic notion. It’s a very psychedelic notion. It’s the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central, overarching metaphor of the age. And, naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual. And this is in fact how I think reality was seen until the rise of modern science."
"The idea of the individual is a post-Medieval concept legitimized by print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers."
"The notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society, this again is a print-created idea."
"Reading is not looking. Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior. … Nobody opens a book and looks at print … We read print, but we look at manuscript, because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who made it."
"[Quoting Marshall McLuhan] High definition is the state of being well-filled with data."
"Print is the least invisible of all media. Print is an incredible Rube Goldberg invention for conveying information."We are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity and actually reaching back to a shamanic feeling-tone kind of thing."
"A perfect media is an invisible media, and print is the least invisible of all media."
"Those who read, do not see, even when they lift their eyes from their books, they carry the attitude of print into the world. They read. They attempt to read nature. And you can’t read nature. You must look at nature. You must see nature."
" ‘The Medium is the message’ means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference."
"Imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and one-half hours per day, on average, watching. And the one thing about drugs, in their defense, is that it’s very hard to diddle the message. A drug is a mirror, but television isn’t a mirror. Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip. This is an extraordinarily insidious situation."
