Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 07:35:20

What's e-mail? As you see, Slurfish, I am again interested in the hidden intentions of man. What's really going on? About e-mail (like communication itself) someone wrote it'll be a mirroring of oneself on others to form out [one's] own individuality. A basic human urge. Made acceptable and harmless by this kind of Freudian explanation.

But then we know about the illusions in it, especially the imagination of knowing the world. We are so much involved with surrogates, that we welcome even the most artificial, tricking ourselves with enthusiasm. Our true agency nearly always slips out of our reach. So e-mail as well seems to be a vicious circle, like all of those hobbies, specialisations and fanaticisms making the people feel like beeing worth something and giving life a sense.

That is the down-side. E-mail is artificial, highly mediated, masky and a tower of solitariness. But then, what is not? Language itself, to me, suffers this kind of course. No, what I really think is that it is unnatural to live in a dull society having nobody you can exchange with intellectually, and trying to give a smile on newest Hollywood-gag not honestly longing for it. Free media makes people more individual. New media brought strife in a sad manner, what concerns Disney and Hollywood dreams. But what degrades people by showing them money and lifestyle they will never reach is similar to shocking people with porno or dividing them by culture between intellectuals and simple minds.

I cannot value this. Me, myself, I go all right with very different people. Nowadays I don't feel lost in an agency of advertisment and I like simple people too. But I nearly gave up my search for someone having read some books. It's funny. I know many artists, very fine musicians and even some philosophers but people involved with literature seem to be out of my reach. Till now.

Ben

Well Ben, there is nothing innately flawed in your preceptions concerning the modern mind of man nor is your take on his creative postures—designed to keep himself "occupied" in the most broad sense of the word until he no longer is able to agitate for something to do#151;corruptable by anything I might add or detract. High artistry and the lowest common denominator syndrome has factored into our modern age the impossibility of avoiding conflict within the psychological domains of the man on the street who like Eliot wonders whether he should simply eat a peach to maintain his dignity in the Kierkegaardian sense, or rather roll up his pants and go for the gusto in some foul hedonistic construct some will applaud while others will mock.

After breathing the air he cannot see, the singularly most natural thing for the homo sapien to engage himself, all else falls into the category of the artificially induced and orchestrated by weakly understood urges and socialization processes (at the personal level, regardless of intellect). Food and drink. Sex and procreation. Thus by extension, of course the impulse to communicate whatever the individual and the collective culture deems plain or unique could be said to be artificially induced by activity perhaps natural in the broadest sense, but unnatural in the keenest, where man in truth has no purpose other than to explore the concepts life itself identifies as supernatural.

Now it is always true that the act of observing others brings with it the competing notions of equality and the superiority/inferiority pathos. I would agree that the media, in particular the latter 20th century media has brought many woes upon the world with its fluid imagery and caustic irresponsibility. Envy is the bastard child of the visual arts. We all want what we have seen others seemingly no more capable or deserving than us achieve. While conservative thought stereotypically touts suppression of urges for things presently unattainable, the liberal mind rejoices in showing it like it really is or "should" become, that is to say, the apotheosis of urges. Fact is, neither do either very well, and so chaos insues.

Correspondence thru E-mail is without a doubt the greatest boon to the cause of personal communication and letterwriting since the Age of Romanticism, extinct a century now, with its zenith probably two hundred years ago. The telephone and the democratic notion of education for all has brought the art of communication down several notches while spreading its joy to more populations within and across cultures. While it is true that across the electronic medium the garbage in, garbage out formula is highlighted in spades, any brief perusal thru the mundane strings of code which pass for "communication" in these myopic times proves that—along with the urges moving biological sustinance (hunger, thirst, sex) to an obedience to natural law—the forces which compel a person to communicate himself to others at some basic level also fall into that secondary category behind simply breathing. While it is true that nutrients and liquids are a priori mainstays, sex is not, nor is communication, yet neither are easily stymied in a cultural setting. In this sense culture is equated with that education the individual is supplied by his senses as he awakens to them from birth.

Each of your statements made in this discussion I deem to be true, as well as my own. So what is it I am ultimately trying to transmit? Perhaps nothing more than to agree—with what that legendary wit who, as the story goes, once threatened to slice an infant into two halves to determine its true mother who was engaged in a custody battle with an imposter to assert her maternal privileges—that all is folly, and that there is nothing new under the sun. Even the code strings that allow our technology and hence this communication to be transmitted from me to you in mere seconds are nothing but man's mimickry of the genetic and molecular codes already billions of years in laughable reruns.

Who possesses these syndication rights? Ah, Ben, I see we now approach the fetching frontier that the religious mind (even distilled by Kant) has struggled against for milleniums in the heats of a breathless deity, while the scientific mind seeks to stake its own claim demanding whole dominion of these gallant human strides in its own name.

Simply put, ALL of life's petty attempts at serious as opposed to artificial importance is seen through a smudged unfocusable lens. ALL is artificially stimulated by the powers of the hour. ALL is fake except through the grace of a well-scrimmaged acceptance and propped up rationale. Damn, I had no idea where I was headed in this diatribe, but I am sounding remarkably like some street corner Protestant preacher locking horns with the other side of his brain, that of the cynical fart artiste fingering his own anus simply because it feels so good and he can get no one else he'd ever allow to poke it for him, since of course, he's an "original", unique in his artistry, hallowed in all his ways.

Well, that's about it for now Ben. Got some HTML to fathom. Til we cross the great divide once again, I'll leave you with this little ditty of a riddle with the promise that I will forward to you a list of responses, including my own a bit later: Why DID the chicken cross the road?

Gabriel

P.S. And Ben, do not "automatically reply" to this note but instead send anything back to my NEW address at:

slurfish@radix.net

I am still phasing out my Clarknet account but I wanted to include your most recent comments in this note and nearly freaked when I couldn't find them in my current mail bin. It turned out they were over here on my wife's computer posted a few hours after I established my new account, transferring my old to hers, and so in a sense your words fell between the cracks. Finding them safe and sassy kept me a happy camper for although I had a hardcopy I was reluctant to retype your whole note. Anyway, cheers...and another poetic shimmer:

"If there's an original thought out there, I could use it just about now..." —Bob Dylan

"Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused,
His brain's been mismanaged with great skill. All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies..." —Bob Dylan