In a message dated 7/29/12 4:19:51 PM, [email protected] writes: > "may I ask you > what you are getting at using commands as "Make the users describe the > notions behind their noises. Get them to see how psychoactive..." Are you > telling us you think Cheers is the savior" > Sorry, Saul, that was a lazy blunder on my part. I excerpted those lines from something else that I'd written, where they were dialog by a teacher talking to his students. I should have adjusted them before putting them on the forum. Mea culpa.
You write: "word are not hallucinatory our belief in them is dellusionary" What I had in mind was this: Words can be as mind-influencing as a psychedelic. True enough -- ink on paper is inert. It can't act. When you read, all the action is by your brain -- recalling memories connected with those sounds and inky shapes. And piecing together new notions you've never had before. Now consider how the great indoctrineers worked: Hitler, Lenin, Freud, Plato, Aristotle, Mohammed, Christian preachers and other politicians, each with his ink-filled "Good Book". Imagine a fundamentalist with a tongue so bladed it could split logs. Imagine his sermon crackling with a vocabulary vivid, garish and ringing, and horrifying imagery. Or imagine Hitler haranguing about the Jews. You would not soon forget what you'd just been exposed to. When next you hear key words they used, there will arise memories and emotions different from what they were before the indoctrineers splashed them with harrowing new hues and echoes in your mind. The recall can be so potent as to hallucinate. Martin Luther King's words come back stirringly to me, with a startling and dynamic cinematic form. Skillful, infectious, metastatic, molders of memory, all of those "eloquent" men. Consider the hallucinatory impact of an aesthetic experience. When I first read Emiy Dickinson... The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door. . . . I've known her from an ample nation Choose one; Then close the valves of her attention Like stone. ...it felt as though the "Like stone" landed not in my skull, but in my thorax, my gut. And when I reread those words today, they continue to have a hallucinatory impact much like that.
