Dada, Gaga, there, there...

For Nabs:

Dada: empty language of meaning ...the world already has too much meaning and must grow light again: the heavy burden of the word must be destroyed in a counter-culture. Iconoclasm.

Lady Gaga. Crikey! The desire to shock soon becomes quite tedious, moronic even. Guenon was surely right here: the carnival only makes sense against the backdrop of a stable world. Which doesn't, of course, mean one sides with the stifling and pernicious woolly-minded ramblings of the conservatives and the orthodox. It doesn't mean taking sides at all: I prefer not to.

The hyperinflation of the word (G.Steiner), the lack of what Illich calls the 'commons of silence,'...very much in line with the instantaneity of late capitalism, with all this fake mumb-jumbo about gnosticism and spirituality: the truth is within, words are heavy and deceptive, not the real thing.

The Declining Art of Conversation: yeah, like, whatever. Facebook, for example. Not a substitute, to my mind anyway, for the day-to-day conversations (informed discussions, or just joking around with friends) that go to make up the social fabric of our lives. You might be there, but what if there's no there, there? What if experience cannot be communicated because we have such little experience of the world, of other lives?

The old tension-which led to so much creativity-between the word and life, text and experience, presence and absence, is lost in the swamp of information, all 'downloadable' at the click of a button. Does a world of all possibilites cease to be 'a world'? And what happens to imagination, memory, and reticence in the headlong rush to take it all in: been there, done that?

The speed of conenctivity doesn't necessarily foster the ability (or desire) to connect.