Hot, Lame & Shamanic—and WTF is “Specifractiplasty”?

Magnetar Enigma Deepens (NASA, Chandra, 10/14/10) – NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center [CC BY-NC 2.0]

This week in Metapsychosis:

Philosophical shaman/trickster, esoteric everyman, or wise fool (you decide) Layman Pascal is back with an essay that explores the alluring yet treacherous intricacies of how we must make judgments regarding objects of desire in our hyper-mediated age.

“Hot, Lame & Shamanic: Developing a Good Conscience about Intelligent Ambivalence” takes off from, goes in some wily directions, and then finally returns to Marshall McLuhan’s media theory to meditate on the collision of our evolutionary biology with the incentivized agendas of algorithmic technology. Well worth a think!

Then gird yourself for the incantatory, poetic intensity of Benjamin Norman Pierce’s poem, “Odes To The Secret Canons #45: Specifractiplasty,” which includes an audio recitation by the poet. This challenging poem, with a hypnotic quality that seems to transcend interpretation, begins:

I give unto you the failure of the oracles I cast in the palm of spilling dust
I give you the failure to abrogate our dropping of possibility
in how even dust climbs into the wind
how the trees themselves conceal the secret rising
and spreading into living green of unseen soils and ungathered wet
in how what does not rise must drop I give you the oracle beyond all oracles: […]

You can continue reading and listen to the poem here.

Also in the audio department, we recently learned that an evidently pretty cool guy named Matt Baker, with Entheos Designs, produced an audio version of an essay by J.F. Martel we published back in April, “Being at Sea.” The audio includes some impressive music and soundscapes. It is very well done! Get a good set of headphones on and give it a listen.

As always, we’d love your feedback in response to any of the above in our forum. Please also consider becoming a supporting member, so that we can continue bringing you this journal week after week, and do it even better!

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Thanks again for reading, listening, and being at sea with us…

Specifractiplastically,

Marco V Morelli
Co-Creator, Cosmos Co-op
@madrush: on Mastodon | on Infinite Conversations

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