Ray E. Harrell wrote:
[snip]
> A child who is taught languages at the time for that child to learn
> languages is many times more able to function in the International
> world of finance, yet we have a political culture of mono-linguistics
> in the U.S. government and the conservatives. That which develops the
> childs retention of its eidetic memory makes the child that much more
> capable of handling the intracacies of Math and in particular
> Geometric and Fractal componant and yet we cut out the visual art
> programs for anything more serious than finger paint and the eidectic
> memory disappears before the age of 8 years. The understanding of
> aural forms is relegated to "music theory" and taught in college 10
> years too late to serve much of a purpose at all for anyone but the
> musically super talented.... They see no
> purpose in speech grammar and so eleminate it even from the teacher's
> course of study. But if the child is to have that as a resource for
> transfer to literacy why do they?
[snip]
Here we have another instance of "nature" being mindless but
man having false consciousness. "Nature" has seen to
it that we all converse with each other, touch each other,
etc. enough to keep our culture going, including passing
it on from generation to generation, EVEN THOUGH WE THINK
THAT EVERYTHING IS MATERIAL STUFF AND ONLY FACTS ARE REAL
(even though in reality facts only exist in conversation,
etc.), etc.
If we ever really managed to eliminate
rhetoric etc. from human life there would be no human life
left. People talking about how the brain is a computer,
etc. are able to *say* and *believe* this because they
are first-person personal living experience talking
with each other (or at least "with themselves..."), even though
they believe they're computer programs. They act on their
beliefs, and if their luck runs out and they get what
they believe in, there may be computers
running programs for a few minutes before the power grid
shorts out and the earth becomes, once again, uncontaminated
by persons (see the ending of Italo Svevo's novel, _The
Confessions of Zeno_, for one rendition of this fantasy
of a Gaia-cleansing apocalypse).
All the physics books in the libraries and all the
apparatus in the laboratories would be like the hieroglyphs
for 20 centuries before Champollion if ever for one
instant we lose the thread of oral/aural/tactile
transmission of culture.
--
There is also a lovely book by William Ivins: _Prints and
Visual Communication_, which documents how the coming of
technologies for making *exactly reproducible visual
images* (woodcuts, etc.) may have been even more important
for the advance of civilization ca. 1400 than the coming
of print technology -- for, if the process of copying
manuscripts inevitably introduced errors into the text,
the process of copying *graphic images* by hand was
so hopeless that people rarely even tried (engineering
is more dependent on diagrams than discursive descriptions,
e.g.).
Though electromagnetic waves filled the ether,
all was dark -- until man opened his seeing eye
and there was light.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted from memory)
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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