This entry was posted on 3/23/2008 9:05 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
23 March 2008
Nietzsche, Adorno, and Clarke v. Winfrey - Clarke Redux (Sci Fi v. Self-help)
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Disclaimer: Before you read the below, it is not my intention to offend just as it is far from my intention ever to follow a herd mentality. It is because I have been hyphenated all my life that I can come to create hyphenation thus overcoming marginalization by realizing inherent potentiality in all. Equally, from this perspective it is my natural proclivity to speak however ostracized and no matter how stridently...(If anything, take heart that I rant not against the person, but the mentality.)
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In my prior blog, I wrote of the possible last remaining significant dualities of postmodernism as those between authenticity and hypocrisy and between truth and (self) deception. I propose another: that between the genres of spiritual self-help and science fiction because in truth, they really boil down to a duality between fetishization (or a bastardization - of Eastern thought) and potentiality.
Indeed, the battle of genres is really a battle of truths where the fetishization in spiritual self-help books is a perpetration of the false and the potentiality of science fiction is more truth in reality as we mediate our own transcendence daily and effortlessly through our electronic technologies. This is perhaps the irony of science fiction: it is more applicable to the real and with greater precision to accuracy of our present than 'spirituality as genre' ever will be, and spirituality is supposedly prescribed for an everyday application in practice and for everybody...
In other words, in actuality and ocular semblance, the world of sci fi is 'spot on' whereas the world of spirituality is completely off the mark, actually flying in the opposite direction...
...and this is rather a tragedy, because the precepts and original texts that are bastardized in these fetishized versions are frameworks and paradigms of perspective and lives successfully lived for thousands of centuries...and with more pristine truth than ever acquired in the totality of our present...
Spirituality is not getting a 'fair shake' because in its defiled form today, it is a lie, it is incomplete, it is a transmogrified monster, a hideous and garrulous sham...and the herd is none the wiser...
An even more profound irony here is that scientists - quantum physicists to be exact - are a lot closer to the spirituality and metaphysics of the ancients, as they increasingly realize the same breakthroughs of great historical Eastern philosophers...
Hyphenation is, in a word: potentiality.
Potentiality is the infinite, limitless, omnipotent creativity open to all.
Potentiality of our future and the limitless imaginings of creativity - this is the playground of science fiction and this is where the late Arthur C. Clarke was so genius a player.
Indeed, his "extraterrestrial relays", his mastery of speculative thoughts and imaginings, and his indefatigable timing - his unparalleled prescience - will be a tough act to follow for the current and future generations of sci fi writers (Dave Itzkoff, "The Fuzzier Crystal Ball," The New York Times, 23 March 2008). However, the honesty of potentiality and the impression of hyphenation proper will reign proven...most assuredly...
In a duality between 'spirituality as genre' and science fiction, in truth - between fetishization and potentiality - the scoreboard points to the latter...
Of hope, truth, and potentiality - truly of hyphenation - reign on!
Perhaps we can be reassured in this - in truth, in potentiality, and in hope, this is the greater influence, far more powerful than the almighty herd leader of today...
