Cultural Lag

“The bullet of your thought
must have overcome its
lateral and ricochet motion,
and fallen into its last and
steady course, before it
reaches the ear of the hearer,
else it my plough out again
though the side of his head.”
HDT

A Post Literate Age, I say.

We’re Beyond the Book-o-Cracy,
which is why I call it Neo Oral:
renovation of the original oral
tradition I patronize, find quaint
and “mythic” like herbal remedy
& leeches.

Sequential Knowing.
Chrono-logic.
This and then this.

Those were days when I had
to have a good memory, we say:
to store lore which came in air,
syllabics, words, sentences. No
one was taking notes. I had to listen:
oyez, oyez so as to hear words of
the wise as well as practical
instruction.

THEN: written down. Tablets and
spiral notebooks & Bic pens replaced
my memorization. Still possible for
construction bosses and others to be
illiterate and rise to the top but I had
to pretend I could read.

I myself depend on students and the
computer crew to keep me in business.
Skating a thin skin of superficial literary
knowledge still considered valuable as
liberal arts education still considered
pre-requisite to life-long balance in the
post-millennium. No one will question
THAT! Lucky for me. It goes without
saying.

But it’s a New Oral tradition.
Talk-Across-the-Universe going on
don’t matter where or when, hello!

“We’re giving the people
of Zimbabwe another opportunity
to mend their ways, to vote properly,”
the Politburo member said.
“This is their last chance.” Instant messaging.
The Book-O-Cracy is dead
but there’s always cultural lag—
unbridgeable gap between tradition
& what’s actually happening. It hurts—
the split generates restless legs and attention
dys-function. Can’t be denied. Well: it can be.
But it's a given: the chasm chaos.

"Like us (fine artists & humanitarians):
there was an initial flurry, Ben said, and
then not so much; and he & I talked low
in the library about what IT meant and
what IT took to get into IT and how-IT-is
that the MEDIA we swim in now is radically
different than what-IT-was and how IT might
ultimately impact school& schooling and study
and scholarship and research & publications &
academic probation and footnoting, plagiarism
of course (intellectual property rites) & retention
& attendance policies & whether we as colleagues
were shy or lazy or indifferent or not rewarded for
IT or not tuned-in to IT’s possibilities (the media
IS the instant messaging meme-service project
for idea & insight & query & quip & quest &
edification—emergence of local food-for-thought
& foundation for our own intellective and affective
sparking.)”

Too large to nail down.
An image here, notion
there. Represent &
hope for a spark

xxxooo, Presbyter