WATCH: The Gutenberg Conspiracy (The Media Matrix — Part 1)

Perhaps things will just develop in such a way that what we consider today to be essential faculties, like being able to read, will be something which only those who can be bothered will manage to acquire.
The nanny state will cease to educate or school us in such things, and those who are lazy by nature will remain ignorant… The system will no longer do things for us.

Which brings us back to the many people, especially in the USA, who have for ages longed for the day when the system will be precisely like that and get the hell out of their lives.
I’m really beginning to see their point nowadays.

“Gutenberg Conspiracy” … we LOVE that (and LIVE that) as it summons suggestively such connections to the last time I heard the O.”G” word referenced so suggestively, Marshall McLuhan’s seminal book “The Gutenberg Galaxy” which we first heard of in our late teens (“we”: my posse of chess players, all but me and a couple of G associates who were tournament players and theashed us wannabes early and often, with scant oases of inspiration to salvage us from our arms on the ground/ fixed fast in a profound defeat, possibly like a strategic equivalent of the Sahara). Over a half century past. Odd how at 70 many of those things have resurged to the surface of these times. Cycles?

As grace would have it (we can always hope) I had just looked at a text I sent myself, moments ‘ere this OffG “Daily Update” appeared in my inbox, how Eckhart Tolle had first put me on a path of constantly, continuously, considering verbal and written language as a “fragmentation” of consciousness. It struck me (upside the head, where most must) that we “adult intellekch’ools” (I think that’s how R. Crumb subtitled and posted his ZAP cartoons in the ’60s, out of a cogently addled SF, CALIF.) have spent many millennia taking those fragments and arranging them into mosaics of “meaning”, so to speak.

(I have lived for decades with the affliction of Igor Stravinsky’s famous dictum, in the woefully too narrow circle of modernist composers, when asked to hold forth on the “meaning of modern music” and he held, forthrightly, that “it doesn’t mean anything” ( he’s telling “us”! of the musically great unwashed).

That sucked me back through a wormhole of memory to the R. Crumb creation of “Mr. Natural” in an early ’70s comix (I am more startled than anyone that serendipities would permit of two [2] ZAP! comix references in the same comment, but all bets are off, suddenly) when a captioned dolt, nose protruding awkwardly through a picket fence, questions a bearded guru, Mr. Natural, scooting past on his foot scooter, “But what does it all MEAN, Mr. Natural?!” And our guru/avatar would always respond, “It don’t mean sh**!” My chess master of a whizz pal, Richard, always picturesque in his sullen agnosticism, as counterpoint to my theism, though which we reconciled through love of the classical piano repertoire, which he listened to for hours expounded on the family heirloom, in my early piano studies, a Knabe 1910 grand [piano] and who went on to become the lead engineer of Seattle sanitation [after he worked his way through Gonzaga as a night janitor – last he wrote me: “Yup, still cleaning up sh**”] was delighted with no end in sight by that maxim.

Which is to say, “It don’t mean sh**” is ironically delightful to certain probing minds, but I have always sensed that the ambiguities of meaning have been carefully watered like a bonzai garden and tended by the spymasters, going back to ancient Sumeria, at least. The battle for ownership of meaning, and all the ensuing deformations, since the caves began to turn into cities.

“Abba kukuru” in Sumerian means “father of gods” and it is my theologic bees knees to know that Jesus of Nazareth, who informed us that he was the unique “Man-God” – and “1st of many brothers” – used that very word in Aramaic, an apparent “loan word” from a Sumerian that was oral long before any of it was written, codified in inscriptions on “fragments” of clay, cuneiforms, as THE way of addressing our 1 Father, “When you pray, say Abba, father.”

It has an infant nascent poetry sound, like “Da-da” (the word, not the surrealist, but perhaps I mean both).

So. I asked Pierre Boulez at Harkness Chapel, at the other end of the block from nearby Severance Hall (Cleveland, where in the early ’70s he had been, among so many badboy hats he wore, interim Chef d’Orchestre, after the sudden death of Maestro George Szell) in the midst of a crowd of consternated music critics, if the reason he had spent his whole career advancing, and championing, the newest and most original modern vocabularies of music was a quest to arrive at an “Omega Point” of non-verbal communication, where the more complete language of musics would become more direct communications, more fluid and supple and flexible, than the archaicizing and fractious modes of “symbol”ic language, written, verbal, even numeric.

And rather than codify his reply, here, I simply throw that question into this ring, that such things are the cure, perhaps, for the deeply divisive and fractious frictions of grotesquely ambiguous language.

James J. Angleton, 1st CounterIntel Chief at CIA for 25 years until his dismissal in 1975, as an alcoholic and broken man. in so many ways, was a sort of addict (also) to brit Wm. Empson’s work “The 7 Types of Ambiguity”.

That Angleton, the one who said to Congress things like “We want our adversaries to find themselves in a wilderness of mirrors (meaning by adversaries, cats like us, any probing minds a threat to the elites and other Smaug-like meta-criminals).

And, “Deception is a state of mind and it is the mind of the State.”

(He got the “wilderness of mirrors,” metaphor — turned expanding weaponized allegory by the ‘Web’ — from T. S. Eliot, a frequent pen pal. (“Little Gidding.”)

That Eliot (whom I’ve long suspected of meta-spymastery) whose cenotaph I stood beside, on the flagstones of Poet’s Corner” with its inscription:

“The communications of the dead are tongued in fire beyond the language of the living”

There seems to be an “ongoing” cosmic war for meaning.

Not, what will mean the most, but who will mean the best! An engaging human center.

In the End. Of the Beginning….

As for that evergreen enfant terrible, the late great and dearly departed Boulez…

Just suggestin’