Psychedelic Salon 176-177
Terence McKenna on Surfing Finnegans Wake (2 parts)

PROGRAM NOTES:

PART ONE

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]

âIn some ways, I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature, of the twentieth century.â

âThe reason Iâm interested in it is because itâs two things, clearly. âFinneganâs Wakeâ is psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic/eschatological.â

Terence McKennaâWhat I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view. There is no character, per se. You never know who is speaking.â

â âFinneganâs Wakeâ is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all the boundaries.â

âJoyce, once in a famous interview, said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed, and only âFinneganâs Wakeâ survive, that the goal had been that then the entire universe could be reconstructed out of this.â

âItâs about as close to LSD on the page as you can get.â

âAnna Livia Plurabelle is Molly Bloom on acid, basically.â

âPeople say the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, dreams are hard to remember, but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience.â

âThe character of life is like a work of literature. We are told that you are supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that.â

âWhat all these people are saying, I think, and what the psychedelic experience argues for as well, is that we are somehow prisoners of language.â

âWe are living in a terminal civilization. I donât want to say dying, because civilizations arenât animals. But we are living in an age of great self-summation. ⦠Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic, and now there is a summation underway.â

âThe purpose of literature, I think, is to illuminate the past and to give a certain guidance as we move into the future.â

âSomehow, complexity is the ocean we have to learn to surf.â

PART TWO

âMcLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the Sixties.â

"The Art of Seeing" by Aldous HuxleyâIn McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the Medieval world of what he called âmanuscript cultureâ.â

âJoyce is, in âThe Wakeâ, making his own alchemeric cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology.â

âNothing is now unconscious if your data-search commands are powerful enough.â

"The Gutenberg Galaxy" by Marshall McLuhanâSo really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan the book is the central symbol of the age, the central mystery of our time. In a sense, I sort of share that notion. Itâs a very Talmudic notion. Itâs a very psychedelic notion. Itâs the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central, overarching metaphor of the age. And, naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual. And this is in fact how I think reality was seen until the rise of modern science.â

âThe idea of the individual is a post-Medieval concept legitimized by print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers.â

âThe notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society, this again is a print-created idea.â

"Understanding Media" by Marshall McLuhanâReading is not looking. Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior. ⦠Nobody opens a book and looks at print ⦠We read print, but we look at manuscript, because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who made it.â

â[Quoting Marshall McLuhan] High definition is the state of being well-filled with data.â

âPrint is the least invisible of all media. Print is an incredible Rube Goldberg invention for conveying information.âWe are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity and actually reaching back to a shamanic feeling-tone kind of thing.â

âA perfect media is an invisible media, and print is the least invisible of all media.â

"Essential McLuhan"âThose who read, do not see, even when they lift their eyes from their books, they carry the attitude of print into the world. They read. They attempt to read nature. And you canât read nature. You must look at nature. You must see nature.â

â âThe Medium is the messageâ means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference.â

âImagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and one-half hours per day, on average, watching. And the one thing about drugs, in their defense, is that itâs very hard to diddle the message. A drug is a mirror, but television isnât a mirror. Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip. This is an extraordinarily insidious situation.â

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews