Netzach to balance Hod

[sophiaserpentia]

One of my concerns in the last post is inspired by renewed awareness of what is lost by our focus on rational, alphabetic, numerical, and clock-inspired analysis. This is a way of chopping up reality and focusing on one aspect of our experience that becomes a mystique that is hard to see around. This is not to denigrate the value of that kind of analysis but to emphasize the need for a humanizing balance: Netzach to balance Hod.

My guide lately through this forest has been McLuhan, with his illuminating contrast between tribal reality as a closed sonorous reverberation, and the modern view which sees reality as a deviation from the Platonic ideal of mathematics and "laws" of physics. My previous guides through this territory have been David Bohm and Neil Douglas-Klotz.

For example, we learn to speak before we learn to read. Speech is not simply the stringing together of phonemes to express thoughts in words; speech is a full-body experience that relies on vocal tone, facial expression, and hand gesture as well as words to convey meaning. When we listen to someone speak, different parts of our brain are engaged in analyzing gestures and facial expression and tone and words. Alphabetic writing bites this in half and calls strings of phonemes "language" and derides the rest, conveying only some of this through the use of typefaces like bold and italics.

I don't know when I will have time to work on this, but my mind has been returning to the question of devising a conlang ("Rheomic") to express reality in terms of flow instead of parsing out a subject-object distinction.

To cite a couple of immediate examples, there is the example I cited in my first post on McLuhan about the affects of piping on the social life of Indian villages. Here's another example:

Prince Modupe tells in his autobiography, I Was a Savage, how he had learned to read maps in school, and how he had taken back home to his village a map of a river his father had traveled for years as a trader.

...my father thought the whole idea was absurd. He refused to identify the stream he had crossed at Bomako, where it is no deeper, he said, than a man is high, with the great widespread waters of the vast Niger delta. Distances as measured in miles had no meaning for him. ... Maps are liars, he told me briefly. ... The things that hurt one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and the hurt that come from it. ... I understand now, although I did not at the time, that my airy and easy sweep of map-traced staggering distances belittled the journeys he had measured on tired feet. With my big map-talk, I had effaced the magnitude of his cargo-laden, heat-weighted tracks.

McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 158

Comments

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

I totally am with you here.
One problem I have with the internet is, while I love meeting people and exchanging ideas with them, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to communicate as fully as one would in person. Often an expression or a touch conveys a world more of information to me than owrds on a page do. This may sound strange coming from me, the avid bookworm, but it is so. Also you know from living with me how much information I get through smell. I find it funny that the researchers who discovered recently that gay men react to smell in the same way as women do are confused becuase humans aren't supposed to be affected by smell according to their earlier reseach or something.
Our society has become very overly third circuit, depending more on words than any other source of information. If words say it isn't so, one is supposed to ignore all the body's and mind's signals that it is so. I don't write about many things I have experienced for that reason - words seem to reduce my experience to something trivial or odd, and can't really describe the fullness of the experience.

[chimpstop.livejournal.com]

If the Angry Scientist and I were still serious about starting an order of Mentats, we'd have to recruit you. And people accuse me of being erudite!

Enough with the small talk. Netzach and Hod are grossly inadequate independant solutions to the human equation, though for most folks it's the best they will ever do, one or the other. In this culture it's usual gender based...boys go Hod, girls go Netzach. The Balance of both these ways of being can result in Tiphareth conciousness...the true human balance available to us at this time. The spiritual luminaries of past millenia were the sole people at that time to get that far...it may be the only way we don't waste this planet and all we've worked for these past ten thousand years...to get as many people to live in both Hod and Netzach balanced being at the same time.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Have you read David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous?

There's a bit of a review here. I read the book, got my head going and then loaned it out and like an ayahuasca ritual, found it hard to keep the concepts grounded but basically, the book argued that the disconnect created by our arbitrary separation of observer/observed has cut us off from a rich world of communication and connection that has harmed us in innumerable ways.