REH in black.
Ed Weick in
whatever color this is.
A couple of points.
1. The process of going out of print with cheap
paper has caused a large
number of books to go the way of the celluloid
movies.
Ever so many of them should probably not have been printed in the first
place. I have a large collection on shelves in our basement that should be
thrown out, but I haven’t had the heart to do it yet, perhaps because of
something I was taught about respecting books as a child.
I was taught the same and have the
same problem except I have two rooms and books doubled shelved.
2. The Internet
computerization of all print with a complete search engine
has the
potential to bring about a real renaissance for the first time in
human
history but with the power of capitalist money it could be available
only
to those who can afford it and therefore will become a tool
of
oppression.
Take a look at
http://www.questia.com/, a virtual library of 70,000 or more
volumes. You have to pay to use it, but the personal cost isn’t much more than
the costs of accessing an ordinary library (gas, bus tickets, parking, fines,
etc.), and the public costs are probably considerably less than building and
maintaining ordinary libraries.
Thanks, I looked, liked and signed up.
3. China during Kublai was the most tolerant religious society ever
seen
before or since with all of the religions of the world living in peace
under
the sword of the great Khan.
I’ve recently done some research on the Khazars, a Turkic people who
converted to Judaism. They were pretty tolerant too, as were the Moghuls in
India. When in India years ago, I heard that one of the Moghul emperors
demonstrated his tolerance by taking three wives, a Christian, a Moslem and a
Hindu. I do hope they enjoyed each other’s company.
There was not tolerance but total
religious freedom to live and prosper but NOT to proselytize which was
considered spiritual war. I think that guy in Yemen felt the
same way about those missionaries although considering the Moslem's history of
proscelytization he is a hypocrite.
4. It
is the West's worship of individualism that is the issue, not
whether China
and the other Asian countries were up to them. China had the
printing press
hundreds of years before Europe. Europe knew it, why
didn't they use
it?
The printed word can be dangerous, serving the purposes of the church and
state, and excluding others. And the printed word is not the only way of
preserving memory. In the 1970s I was at a hearing in the Mackenzie Delta at
which a Gwich’in elder told a story about a very sudden and very great flood
that imperiled his ancestors. A geologist was there with me, and he and I
concluded that what the elder was talking about may have occurred at the end
of the last ice age, six or seven thousand years ago, when an ice barrier that
separated the Porcupine River basin from the Mackenzie Delta broke. How’s that
for memory?
There are, of course, many flood stories. Two American academics, William
Ryan and Walter Pitman, argue, in "Noah’s Flood", that the filling of the
Black Sea at the end of the last ice age gave rise to great flood of Genesis
and the Epic of Gilgamesh, both of which would have existed as oral traditions
long before they were written down.
Ed
In the brain the literate and
non-literate brains have different wiring. Like analogue and
digital, you have the potential for both but you cannot do or in this case BE
both. Literacy eliminates the memory hookups that
non-literacy develops. As a result literacy requires an
external memory bank, i.e. books or computer. I know of
children who have been kept from school because the non-literate mentality is
so much a part of the spiritual practice that to make the child literate is to
destroy the culture.
It is said that the last man to be
non-literate in Greece knew all of the epics which amounted to thousands of
songs. His student who became literate learned 346 and he forgot
them easily needing the text to remind him. The
Meso-American cultures had a form of hieroglyph that represented texts and it
seems that Hebrew was originally the same since prior to the canonization of
the texts in the third century the letters, which only represent consonants,
were a lot more functional as triggers to memory than
alphabetic. The same is true of the Wampum belts amongst the
Eastern Indian Nations.
Books also meant that the person
would continue even if they were killed or died from disease but what stayed
important in memory was interpretation of the texts since an alien
interpretation can mean as much destruction to a cultural system as losing the
system in not being written down. Writing is severely
limited in its expressive possibilities, on the other hand it has the ability
to involve the eyes in patterning in ways that are foreign to the
ears. So you get something and you give something else
up. The problem is when there is ignorance about the way
these things work and you end up with a tyranny of one over the other as in
"White" not "Indian" that is used when English is locked into modern uses of
nouns and verbs and the opposite when non-literate becomes the demeaning
"illiterate" which is a social judgment. In that battle
English becomes White i.e. Yoneg and Yonegas in Cherokee and is a stand in for
forgetful or the more modern "dementia" but used in describing to any
English speaker. This is not linguistics but
cultural war taught in the schools just the same as what is complained against
Islamic schools in Saudi Arabia where the Saudis are as confused as "White"
folks are when you talk this way. Good
book? "The Alphabet versus the Goddess" by Leonard
Shlain. There are others but I don't remember them at the
moment and my index is not up to date. I know, I had a
double whammy, literacy and lead. It ain't
pretty!
Regards
Ray Evans Harrell
Ed Weick
577 Melbourne Ave.
Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7
Canada
Phone
(613) 728 4630
Fax (613) 728
9382
