I must therefore take a more circuitous path than the logical one to describe this process. It would be comparatively simple to build a theoretical framework based on the thoughts of Heidegger, Hillman and Dogen and their interpretations of reality and relate these to prevalent theories and discussion of the computer age and virtual realties. This would lead only to the beginning of discussion and would in fact be misleading in that it directs the mode of thinking away from an apprehension of the possibilities of virtual computer generated worlds. I have therefore felt that the better approach would be to develop a mood, or mood structure, rather than a logical analysis in order to open up this area.
I would like to begin with two texts from different historical, and seemingly philosophical, contexts.
The Neirika is a term which alludes to the unknown; the unknown, not
as an exit, but as an entrance.
The texture of the Neirika is expressed in this passage spoken by the Eskimo
Shaman Aua, in an altered state of consciousness, encountering a "shore
spirit". The discovery of this spirit is a profound and moving passage
which shows the importance and almost indescribable joy at the revelation
of a consciousness which is beyond the fetters of dualistic thought.
Joy, joy
Joy, Joy,
I see a little shore spirit,
A little aua,
I myself am also aua,
The shore spirit's namesake,
Joy, Joy!
"These words I would keep on repeating ," he recalls, "until I burst into tears, overwhelmed by a great dread; then 1 would tremble all over, crying only, 'Ah-a-a-a-a, joy, joy! Now I will go home, joy, joy!
Then I sought solitude, and here I soon became very melancholy. I would sometimes fall to weeping, and feel unhappy without knowing why.
Then, for no reason, all would suddenly be changed and I felt a great, inexplicable joy, a joy so powerful that I could not restrain it, but had to break into song, a mighty song, with only room for the one word: joy, joy! And I had to use the full strength of my voice. And then, in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming de- light, I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about. But I was a shaman. I could see and hear in a totally different wayÖ."
The following describes the potential of computer technology in terms of its effect on imaginative consciousness.
" We now possess a technique that permits us to create the foundations of mental processes that have never before existed, processes for which words like " sensation," "perception," " desire," " thought," and " decision," are inappropriate, since they describe only processes we already know. In short, the statement that we can now create new forms of life implies that we can now create " spirits" that we are incapable of understanding. Is this not a description of magic, and of the magical power that is said to characterise artistic creation?" The new imagination involves the capacity to make pictures of calculations."
(p.15. Flusser. 1988.)and from the same source.
" The old imagination produces pictures of things. ....to clarify them we use writing.. and thus permit an orderly handling of the world. But writing is linear... With each key they press they enter into a field of virtualities. Entire worlds emerge that the themselves had not expected. A new level of existence is opening up, with new experiences, sensations, emotions, concepts and values proper to it. Homo Sapiens is about to bring a faculty into play that so far has only been dormant."
These two thoughts commingle, intersect and interpenetrate each other to produce an environment for the understanding of virtual reality. There are many points of intersection. For example, the idea that virtual reality is the intersection of the human and the non-human in both of the above inserts. This is an important area of hybridity in the understanding of the development of human consciousness. In other words, new developments in human consciousness cannot take place within the area of reiteration and re-placement of the human by the human.
The mode of hybridisation between the human and other forms of existence has always been a sign of the development and expansion of human consciousness into other dimensions of reality; for example in the relationship between the sorcerer and the familiar and the Shaman and his helper spirits, the believer and his or her God. A central interaction in the context of the modern world is between the organic and the inorganic, that is between humanity and the computer.The second quotation or insert clearly relates the development of altered states of consciousness to the interaction of the human and machine in a way which suggests that the mode of dominance of the human no longer applies.
Rather the interaction between the human and computer generates a new mode of activity which in turn produces its own generic reality.Pains.
The concept of pains may help to clarify aspects of this delicate interaction between the two insertions above. Pains are elements, and agents which have no clear conception in linear terms.
"In northern California, among the Hupa, Yurok, Chimariko, and Shasta, we find the specialised concept of "pains". These are looked upon both as the source of the shamans' powers and the cause of disease. The "pains" are thought to be animate and self moving, sometimes with personality. They do not, however, possess human form or resemblance but are believed to be physically concrete."
(p.80.Park:1938.)
The pains become a clue to the mood structure of Shamanism. Shamanism is a process of awakening to the possibility of other dimensions that are as real as the ordinary world. We are not referring to the imaginative or romantic sensibility but to a concrete facticity.
Pains are therefore areas of transgression and integration of different dimensions in the pain object. The shore spirit and the human Shaman together constitute an area of experience and perception which is both immanent and present in the world and transcendent. It would however be more correct to say that these terms are no longer applicable to the world of Shamanic experience as this interaction between dimensions brings a new understanding of the role of language in shaping realities.
In the second insert, it is suggested that computers and the manipulation of data are a form of interaction which produces new worlds of experience and does not necessarily replicate that which is already known. As Flusser states, "..we can now create new forms of life implies that we can now create " spirits" that we are incapable of understanding." (p.15. Fluser. 1988)
This attitude towards technology bears similarities to the Shamanic perception of reality as a "death" of the small ego and the releasement of the self into larger dimensions. In Flusserís quotation we are referring to the interaction between the organic, human, dimensions and the inorganic. But before these two inserts may be compared, what we mean by comparison must be made clear.
MOOD STRUCTURES
Comparison as a mode of thought is deeply concomitant with dualism and logocentrism. Conventional modes of comparison bring with them premeditated notions of separateness. Comparison implies a form of " weighing up" according to discrete themes and aspects which are brought into theoretical proximity. Obviously the two inserts also differ radically in many ways from a conventional perspective. Comparison, as a mode of understanding in the conventional sense, can only lead to old notions of reality and in fact is designed to reinforce the dualistic and binaric perspectives of ordinary reality. Therefore, the basis on which the above inserts may be discussed must be very different if we are to move into an understanding of virtual reality as a genuinely new possibility for human existence. To this end, a brief look at Shamanism as a mode of thinking is necessary.
Shamanic thought.
The Construction of Shamanic thought can be seen as the release of the imaginistic from the confines and parameters of the dualistic and mundane mood of consciousness. This is often seen in terms of "trance" or ecstatic state. (cf. Eliade) )One of the central aspects of Shamanism is its difference to habitual reality. Arthur Versluis describes the phenomenon of habit energy as the continuous reconstruction of the ordinary world as an illusion.
"Although we think that the phenomenal world of matter is permanent, is all that exists, it is not. Rather, each instant both it and we are different. The physical world is transient, constantly changing. ....the corporeal ego, which erroneously believes in the illusionary duality between itself and the physical world, and which, in order to maintain that illusionary duality expends a great deal of habit energy in the constant recreation of that apparently constant world and ego."
Versluis goes on to suggest that the beginnings of magic are related to the dropping of these habit formations or mood structures.
" Magic is none other than the dropping of the illusion, and of habit energy, for to drop it implies freeing energy- which is normally used to maintain our habitual world- in order to channel it towards the realisation of the celestial realm."
This is perhaps very close to what Zen master Dogen means by the " dropping of mind and Body." With the Dogenetic meaning we have a radical throwing off of the illusionary weight of the body and mind and, in this movement, the birth of a new mode of consciousness. This would translate as the dropping of the continual habitual maintenance of the ordinary world and the consequent release of energy.
But the important issue here is that the release of habit energy and the dropping of mind and body both imply a death of the old self or ego. It is this death which is felt by the Shaman and the initiate in an experiential way which opens up the particular " joy" of the Shamanic experience.
The Shamanic area of consciousness cannot be accessed through the modes of thought that are prior to an initiatory experience of death. A new mood structure has to be encountered in order to understand the imaginistic. I use the word encounter because the first principle of understanding this area is the realisation that death means the death of the prior form of consciousness and the releasement from all aspirations to ego-related control structures. We cannot enter into this experience in any way with the accruements of habitual form of thought. We can at best describe this area of thought as a texture of experience or a mood structure.
The term "mood structure" is used with care. It is possibly best explained in the Shamanic process of " seeing" other realities. The entrance into this mental and factual territory of the Shaman is sometimes described as a ëtrackingí or a form of ëscentingí. It is related to what we understand by an emotional response rather than an analytic one. It is more aligned to a feeling and a sensing, a form of remote sensing which defies attempts at entrance by logocentric methods. All that the rational achieves in any attempt to enter this region is to reinforce the inadequacy of this approach in our minds. In The Mushrooms of Language, Henry Munn describes the entrance into the imaginative world of the shaman.
"Let us go to the cornfield looking for the tracks of the spirits' feet in the warm ground. So then let us go walking ourselves along the path in search of significance, following the words of two discourses enregistered like tracks on magnetic tapes."
The mention of the tracks being " enregistered on magnetic tapes" brings us into the proximity of technology, the computer and computer generated virtual realties. But what is being followed and the method of this following does not comply with conventional perceptions.
"Let's go searching for the tracks of her feet to encounter the sickness that she is suffering from. Animals in her heart? Let's go searching for the tracks of her feet, the tracks of her nails. That it be alleviated and healed where it hurts. What are we going to do to get rid of this sickness?
In this sort of experience the relationship between language and thought is not the subject and object directed form of thought of mundane experience. Rather, the Shaman is the prey of language. The imagination of death, or initiation, becomes new imagination precisely because the imagination has been released, or prised by death, from the strictures of the mundane consciousness.
"It is not I who speak," said Heraclitus, "it is the logos." Language is an ecstatic activity of signification. Intoxicated by the mushrooms, the fluency, the ease, the aptness of expression one becomes capable of are such that one is astounded by the words that issue forth experience. At times it is as if one were being told what to say, for the words leap to mind, one after another, of themselves without having to be searched for : a phenomenon similar to the automatic dictation of the surrealists except that here the flow of consciousness, from the contact of the intention of articulation with the matter of rather than being disconnected, tends to be coherent: a rational enunciation of meanings. Message fields of communication with the world, others, and one's self are disclosed."
Again the words used in the above passage bring presentiments of technology to mind. The idea of "fields of communication" relate to a sense of communication which is not predetermined or centred by any human-centric mode of experience.
There is a sense of interaction with elements other than the human, and this in turn leads to an expanded sense of consciousness in that the parameters of the human are extended and self-centredness is diminished.
The thinking that is needed to encounter the Shamanic experience is also found on the fringes of the modern technological age. But this possibility hinges on an irony. The possibilities of biogenetic engineering and the discoveries of physics, place the modern mood structure in a different position or situation from the ego-centric formations of the past.
The possibilities in computer design, albeit a logocentric device, open up areas that go beyond dualistic thinking.
There is a feeling of inescapable destiny in all of this -in all the developments of technology- in that they point to different and non-humancentric positions for the imagination. It is almost as if the modern strides in science and technology, that were born from the imperative of reason, have deviated from their original trajectory, and are directed towards unimaginable areas of possibility that cannot be defined in quantitative or rationalistic ways. As the modern age dies so it finds new meaning in the encounter with its own death. As Flusser states;" We now possess a technique that permits us to create the foundations of mental processes that have never before existed, processes for which words like " sensation," "perception," " desire," " thought," and " decision," are inappropriate, since they describe only processes we already know. In short, the statement that we can now create new forms of life implies that we can now create " spirits" that we are incapable of understanding. Is this not a description of magic, and of the magical power that is said to characterise artistic creation?"
From the above statement we could turn to thinkers like Martin Heidegger who realised the potential of non-conceptual thought in his attention to Listening and Hearkening.
"Heidegger's long reflection on language and discourse culminates in the claim that language includes within itself a nonhuman activity, a Saying (Sage), which must be carefully distinguished from human speaking. This claim rests on two premises. First, Being, unconcealedness (aletheia), world grant the coming of whatever is present in its presence. Second, language is involved in this granting or giving. This Saying does not belong to the human domain. But it calls, makes demands, and gathers itself into the "word," which "word" likewise is not a human word. Dasein belongs to Saying. It listens to Saying and Saying's "word" and responds by bringing what it hears into human words. Saying itself, according to Heidegger, can be described in terms of a stream. Everything which addresses itself to Dasein is embedded in this stream. The addressing itself makes no sound. It is silent, but nonetheless its silence can be heard as a form of Saying. This stream of silence springs from Lethe. This means, in Werner Marx's word, "that the stream has its source (Quelle) in that which has not yet been said and that which must remain unsaid: the 'unsaid.' Thus, human discourse is a response to a Saying which addresses itself to Dasein, which Saying itself is rooted in a primordial unsaid."
Heidegger responds to the problem of language by seeing it in non-human terms and the practise of language as a listening to the unsaid and not a creation from the centre of the human. It is in this sense that we find links to Shamanic experience and especially in the undefined "tracking" of the word or mood structure. In much the same way, we can place the generation of virtual worlds as the generation of a mood structure which is strictly alien to and "prior" to the human and which forms a unique construct in conjunction with the human.
Flusser suggest pictures from calculations. This is an interesting aspect, if we see calculations as estimates of mood configurations, and not calculations in the linear sense.
" The new imagination involves the capacity to make pictures of calculations."
The central idea is that by moving to computer images we move away from the subject-object oriented world to a world of new possibilities.
" With each key they press they enter into a field of virtualities. Entire worlds emerge that the themselves had not expected. A new level of existence is opening up, with new experiences, sensations, emotions, concepts and values proper to it. Homo Sapiens is about to bring a faculty into play that so far has only been dormant."
Two aspects of above are significant for our discussion.
1) the revolutionary magical attitude towards life and
(2) the conversion of desires etc. into a mood structure or mode of thought which is alien and radically different to the textures of the past.
However the understanding of virtual reality in the light of Shamanic thought also provides a threat to humanity or rather to the habitual frameworks of thought and experience. It is this threat which may hinder the development of virtual reality and force it into the well-worn grooves of convention. This aspect is also important in understanding the potential of computer generated realities in that these realities are much more than carbon repetitions of what already is. The possibility of new knowledge and of an entrance into new dimensions of being has always had the effect of upsetting established modes of experience and disturbing the power elites that benefit from the present order of thought.
The meaning of the imagination which is released by the face of death is the imagination of the Shamanic experience. In the first insert we have the simultaneous mingling of joy with an enormous sense of dread. This aspect will be dealt with in more detail.The force of an imagination of this nature threatens the complacency of modern man but also opens up a new world.
"From the point of view religious symbolism, this preoccupation of modern man with his historical and existential situation springs from an unconscious sense of its impending end. It is in this unenviable position, then, that we find the modern temper: anguished by the imminence of Death, yet trapped in profane, historical nothingness; the saving presence of a sacred, transcendent mode of being is absent from the contemporary world view. Thus modern man stands today at the very edge of the abyss of death and nothingness"
The entrance into the Shamanic world and a conception of this worlds relationship to the potentialities of computer generated realities, as suggested in the above quotations, are therefore not a simple case of comparison when this comparison take place within the ambit of conventional and habitual norms. A true understanding of the relationship between the two inserts requires a very different approach.
textures and sites
Once the security and legitimacy of social and other norms have been denied, we are in unwritten territory.
The threshold of normative standards of expression are breached by the Shamanic world in the concept of Pains as well as by the attitude or the view of computer generated mood structures. Virtual worlds lose the flavour and connotation of second-rate or imitation worlds and assume a mood of even greater authenticity than the ordinary world. Virtual worlds become new "configurations" of reality in more than a technical sense.The two central inserts above produce a mood of dislocation and practical deviation from the habitual structures of thought. The mood structure created can be projected to bring us closer to the texture of traditional initiation. Initiation cannot be simplistically understood in terms of a dualistic notion of "joy". In the initiation process the self is dismembered and in fact dies through an intense form of pain. The joy that the Shaman refers to is the non-dualistic conception of joy as a mood whose central structure is the realisation of the factual reality of other worlds and other life outside the human being seen as a limited habit construction.
The joy of the discovery of the spirit is the joy implied in the second quotation where there is a sense of an entering into a new dimension of being and an escape from the bonds of a fixed sense of reality. The focus is not on the reason for the rupture in habitual thought, rather the emphasis is on the reality of the discovery of the joy which the pains elicit. Neither does the focus of the mood structure concentrate on the "resolution of opposites"- rather it is radical extension of the opposites to a point where the separation between opposites can no longer be maintained by the framework of conventional thought.
The mood structure develops a texture or a series of intricately separate and interrelated elements which make up the full meaning of the concept of texture.
Texture, with its etymological meaning rooted in the idea of weaving and web, serves as a useful means of discussing the Shamanic experience.
It is within the mood structure which manifests itself as texture that we see the modern situated. The underlying mood structure within the modern manifests itself as a coherent texture through contemporary images and elements.
Within the joy of Shamanic discovery we have a joy which also a not-joy. By this I mean that the normative understanding of joy has very little to do with the Shamanic joy. In the first instance, Shamanic experience takes place after initiation or, more correctly, takes place simultaneously with the initiation. Simply Stated, Initiation is the death of the old self and of all self and ego-orientated perceptions of reality. "Shamanistic initiation demands a rending of the individual from all the constituents of his or her past." (page 13, Halifax)
Therefore what is described as joy is in fact something experientially very different to the normal conception of the word. In this understanding of joy we see something of the meaning of computer generated virtual realities. As Flusser implies in insert two, there is a sense of joy in the releasement from the prior mood of confinement. The joy that the Shaman experiences in his discovery of a spirit can be compared to the discovery of the spirit in the machine. This relationship, this texture becomes even more intimately complex when we take into account the closeness that has developed between man and machine... between the organic and inorganic. We must follow this texture and allow it to lead us into dimension of reality which we cannot experience within the context of habitual formations of reality.Heidegger describes the texture of reality as a call which is undefined but which appeals or calls the human to authenticity:
"The content of the call can be given different interpretations and is apparently indefinite. Likewise, the call can be misheard and drawn into "idle talk," into routine, thoughtless chatter. But the direction of the call is unequivocal. It calls Dasein back from the noisiness of idle talk into the reticence which belongs to Dasein's Potentiality for authentic existence."
The texture of the site is seen as a situation which is created by the call:
"Thus, the call of conscience does not call Dasein to some empty or abstract ideal of existence. Rather it calls Dasein forth into what Heidegger calls a Situation, a concrete state of affairs which a specific Dasein can indeed seize upon in the unique way made Possible by its own Potentiality-for-Being."
It is at this point that the texture suggested by the insertions both point to the same thing i.e. the movement away from the linear and logocentric preconceptions ( in the sense of the logos as self-defined) towards a possibility that awaits within the innate structure of the texture itself. While the entropy of the texture points away from the habitual structure of the real, so, and in the same movement, it points towards a different construction of thought. From this point , what I call the crawling space, there is no verificational criteria, there are no more maps that can safely guide the mind further. In fact the understanding of what is meant by the structure of the inserts requires that we relinquish all attachments.
Where does the mood structure lead? It leads to an area of intangible feeling that could be described as the alien.
If the mood is left to itself in listening and hearkening than the meaning of the mood fills the space which we would normally describe as nothingness with a sign; a track. The images above may suggest something of the texture engendered and invoked by the insertions.
Liminality
In the space created by the listening, the texture also reveals nothingness as a form of horror as it conflicts with our need for closure and stasis.
The horror of the real is horrific in relation to the search for the comfort of the known. Zen master Dogen saw this as a central element in understanding life and living correctly in relation to reality." One of Dogen's greatest challenges lies in the demand to recognize the possibility that everything we believe to be ultimate and of vast significance is no more than a projection of deep seated insecurity, and nothing more than a projection from minds which resist death and diminution to the end."
In the works of Martin Heidegger we have the realization of initiation as being the movement into dread.
" Dread opens us to that which is other than beings by pointing to the underlying strangeness of the whole of Being. "
In other words, the opening that dread or horror creates is the realisation of the strangeness of mystery of all creation.
A common response to the texture of the real as it reveals itself is to position it as a theoretical and existential area of liminality. This places the experience of the mood structure at the edge of the known but also close enough to dash back to safety. This , I have found, is the usual stance within post-structural and post-modern theory.
To hear the texture of what is being said within the mood structure we must listen in the way that Heidegger suggests. But Heidegger was still struggling against the gravity of the habitual forms of reality.
The noise which obscured Heideggerís vision was the noise of the history of western civilisation and of western thought. Ironically, his concern with the history of Metaphysics, while leading him away from the constraints of this mode of thought, also bound by even in his opposition to it. This menaced his listening just as much as it engendered that very listening. We see a common tension developing in his thought, a dualistic pattern of attraction and repulsion which forms one of the most common responses to the call of textures outside our reality. The feeling is one of not being able to let go. A revulsion at the letting go as a denial of life itself. The fear of official and unofficial sanctioning forms a great part of the inability to enter into the call of the texture.Therefore these theoretical limitations are also the inherent limitations of modern dualistic thought.
The contribution of this paper must be to suggest the possibility of a moodedness, a listening that the computer/human generation of virtual worlds may be well suited towards. A listening to what is being said that goes beyond the tension of clinging and release. Zen Master Dogenís writing provides something of a new avenue from which to discuss this dilemma. If we are to hear the new texture that the computer and virtual reality is suggesting we must as Dogen says. "Drop mind and body". If we do not, then the computer age with all of its technological possibilities simply forms another extension of the present habituated mood structure and nothing else.Dogen experienced the tension which we refer to, and it was this central question that led him into his own personal quest and vision.
Dogen was faced with a religious dilemma, if we are all innately enlightened why do we have to practise to achieve this enlightenment? The solution was a realisation that the mode of questioning was the problem and in a flash of insight the understanding of dropping the false thought of mind and body came to him. This area of Dogenetic thought is extremely complex and requires a much deeper investigation. However, the point that I wish to make is that the mood structure of the modern is aligned to this form of thought in that it too must drop any form of attachment to dualistic and habitual modes of apprehension. The following quotation relates to this aspect.
"Dropped off! Dropped off! This state must once be experienced by you all ; it is like piling [fruit] into a basket without a bottom, it is like pouring [water] into a bowl with a pierced hole ; however much you may pile or pour you cannot fillit up. When this is realized, we say that the pail bottom is broken through. As long as there is a trace of consciousness which makes you say, ë I have this understanding or that realisation.í You are still playing with unrealities."
To return to the two inserts-once the need to verify and quality the texts is dropped one is faced with a raw mood without deviation and any form of obscuration by habitual thought structures something emerges. The trajectory of both main inserts form a concrete picture, a symbol if one wishes, that is not the texture but is an index to the texture.
The Messenger.
Images that are directly related to an involvement with a process of thought which is non-dualistic become more than representations of the world and constitute codes, keys and symbols that may unlock dimensions of consciousness. Images that appear without the direct intention of the individual become important point of concentration and focus that may lead to further thinking. The images are often textures, felt rather than seen, more tactile that visual. The Shamanic view of art and images is expressed in the following:
" The Shaman as fertility daemon and Master of the animals inseminates the earth with animal life; he was the magic consort of the Mother Earth. Painting was literally a creative act."
Note that art was not a representative act, a symbolic act but was in itself a creative act. There is no distance between the art and the act, the art is the act. This form of thinking seems impossible or mere fantasy according to the censoring mode of rational thought. It is this movement away from the representative understanding of the image towards an understanding of the image as the act or rather as a non-dualistic perception of life, that the computer and virtual reality can achieve. The very intimacy and lack of distance in the creation of a virtual world is a indication of this possibility.
The site is the texture: Opening possibilities.
The two main inserts create an area of mood- in other words, a site for the playing out of the mood structure. The site can also be seen as a messenger or angel. The site arises through the inner interstices within the neurological spaces... the pauses in the habitual working of the ordinary. It is the emergence of new emotionality, the uncreated that urges on the creativity and the need for emergence. The sites are composed of the modern... the sites emerge within the modern.
Language and image act out this space or site that the mood of the inserts create, in a number of ways.
the sudden pressure of the site. The pressure is sudden, blood coming to the surface, the new emotion, the mood that lies just beneath the skin, membrane thin.
Something cruising the depths. A site is a mood that is revealed and the artist must produce the language to enable the site to be revealed. The modern space world is a site for the emergence, the bio-rubble of the modern is a site for the emergence of the new. But how? Only by holding the normal matters of thought at bay.Various images emerge The head, the mouth. The stripping of flesh, the allowing of the new emotion to be created. All of these can be generated with the help of the computer. The shelter that this type of thinking creates is the becoming of the underlay of one's own consciousness. The surge of knowingness. The new language needs the new emotion. Without this source there is no language. This new emotion is the mood structure that underlies the modern. It is that which is seeping through the fissures and cracks that the modern flesh is showing. It has to do with a resurrection of the spirit. It has to do with a new form, unseen, that emerges through art. It has the most serious consequences for the modern world, because it is the very foundation of the modern. But how to see it? The trance state provides clues. But this possibility must lie within the mood of the gesture of the modern.
We are tired of tapes playing backwards. The world according to human nature and old habitual ways. but the very image of the modern world, the image that is conjured up within the looking at the modern world, the tapes playing backwards, provides the clue. If we look again at the same thing that arose out of a critique of the modern age, something new emerges.It is not enough to invent new words. This is the same as playing of the tapes. What we must do, the imperative, is to hear what the tapes are saying, not their rewinding but further than the continuous rewinding of the tapes, we must hear the tapes themselves. In other words stop the rewinding and pretending that the sound of rewinding is reality, and open up the secret of the tapes themselves.
"Let us go to the cornfield looking for the tracks of the spirits' feet in the warm ground. So then let us go walking ourselves along the path in search of significance, following the words of two discourses enregistered like tracks on magnetic tapes."
(in Harner p.89:1973.)
The work of the modern artist, and this term no longer refers to just the painter or sculptor, is to work until something unseen but immensely familiar emerges.
Now we can understand the statement that healing takes place within the texture of departure. One has to listen carefully to the sounds of moving healing. Through the gist of illness. Through the process of the illness and the movement towards dissolution. This is the hearing of the illness of the world. Through the illness of the world we hear the sound of the texture, the texture of healing at work in the madness as the relief pierces the darkness with odd intermittent bursts through which the wheeling day can be discerned. There are images that appear here- the sounds and songs that well up from our depths where there is extreme emotional and psychic pain. The textures of healing can be discerned like threads beneath the skin... like movements beneath the skin .... hidden tattoos.... these are the actual physical textures of the world under transformation. Modern art should be the building of pathways which involves the intimacy and physicality of textures.
Conclusion
gary@niobe.marques.co.za.
If we allow the two central inserts to speak to us and by speaking I refer to a tactile, textural and visceral form of contact; then the possibility arises of a move beyond the confines of the worlds into the areas, as Heidegger states, of the "call". Then we will have begun to move into an area of meaning which is something alien to a normal reality censored by the requirements of logic and reason.
Of course the dangers of becoming enmeshed within the hidden valences and movements of oneís own being are always present. Versluis argues that true enlightenment within the modern world is not possible without a return to the teaching of tradition in order to guide us. However valid this may be, we find ourselves within a contemporary situation in which these teaching are lost or are corrupted and nevertheless cannot provide a strict schematic of the modern. We are faced with no alternative but to learn to listen again- to take what is valid in a contemporary sense from the past and to attempt to listen to what is being said in this time and place. It therefore becomes imperative that we develop techniques of listening and that we bear in mind that we are always attempting to hear from within the outworn carapace of rational thought. We must therefore invent techniques to free us of old forms in a radical and sincere way. It is in this context that the computer and virtuality become an important technique in the process of learning to sense the world. However as long as this technology is simply employed as a way of continuing and reinforcing the past modes of thought, then the computer loses its potentiality for altering human consciousness.
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Gary Smith. 1966.
