Path: news.cac.psu.edu!usenet
From: [email protected] (Zeitgeyser)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: psycho (psukhe)
Date: 31 Oct 1995 13:34:43 GMT
Organization: PocketU
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Message-ID: <[email protected]>
References:
<[email protected]> <[email protected]>
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In article <[email protected]>
[email protected] (Lisa Walton) writes:

> In article <[email protected]>,
> Sweet Poly wrote:
> [...]
>
> >Yes, I agree, based mostly on my own personal experience and that of my
> >friends. For example, I have a really hard time writing offline at this
> >point. I don't know if it's because it's easier to write online because
> >of the sense of the 'audience' on the other end, or something else.
>
> *sigh* Before computers I wrote neatly and eligibly - now its a
> scrawl, and writing on paper seems so tedious and unnecessary. It cost
> me some computerless friends though... Email is _the_ way to go -
> more immediate and intimate than snail mail, less confrontational and
> demanding than a phone conversation (one-channel real-time).
>
> When you're online, you can add the flourishes that create an illusion
> of multi-channel communication - gestures, carefully crafted verbal
> pictures...
>
> [...]

Yes! I had to break myself of writing long hand and now block print
everything because my handwriting is so awful. Writng on line is so
much different than speaking on the phone, but also v. different from
"real" writing (either by hand or with the aid of a computer. As for
the illusion of multi-channels - I don't think it's an illusion.
That's one of the things you can do with text create more channels.
While images may be carefully crafted writing on-line (at least for me)
brings a sense of urgency that isn't there in other kinds of writing

the genesis of several painful misteps on my part

> Very true. Wish I understood it better, so I'll contribute my .02 even
> though this thread seems to have become a bit turbulent since this
> post...

turbulence can be useful but scary.



> This sounds like a spiritual awakening (I do not equate spiritualism
> with religion btw).

Exactly what I should have said and I agree with the dif. between
spiritualism and religion - echoes my sentiments exactly.

> Belief in (or reliance on) the scientific method
> can coexist with an awareness of a different "spiritual" (non-RL)
> reality. People who have only one seem to me to be only half alive.
> Without the former one is lost in ignorance and delusion, without the
> latter one stifles to death in the prosaic banalities of daily
> existance.

It's hard for me to get at this spirituality/non-RL thingie in that I
thing spirituality is RL. It's the same kind of question/separation
that (I think) Poly was trying to get at between RL/cyberspace. I
think there are strong connections that are v. hard to articulate. And
yes, without these connections (articulated or not) life turns grey and
people become ghosts in the machine.

> Rational thought is necessary, but so (as you once said) are stories.
>
> We need the creative outpouring of writers, poets and other artists
> and to listen to those urges within ourselves. Participating in the
> collective creation of special "places" such as the ranch, is like
> wending through and gamboling in the dreams of many souls.

The ranch is a very spiritual (in a totally unconventional and
irreverant way) BECAUSE of its collective creation fractious as that
can be.



> But what do you do if being many people in one (having many personae)
> is the way you feel in RL, and that the appalling tension is that no
> one person seems to be able to deal with all of what you can be? If
> they were masks you could shed them, but if what they really are are
> different facets of the same soul, hidden and revealed in complex and
> subtly shifting patterns, what then?

Let me try again despite MY difficulty in articulating how I feel.
(Zeitgeyser sighs and sets down his pith helmet. Wiping a stray tear
away he stands - a bit shakily - rubs the tender spot on his head and
takes a small uncertain bow.) I'll try not to put words in other
peoples mouths but *for me* this goofy little man is in many ways me.
Not all of me and sometimes not the best part of me and not me all the
time, but I like him. I expand when he's around, sometimes that's a
real pain in the ass, sometimes it fun. That expansion lets me touch
others in a way that wasn't possible before and let others touch me.
That touching is new and different (at least for me) and what I think
this whole thread was supposed to be about before i derailed it with my
inability get at it in a sensible way.


huge of much relevant material

> I do not consider myself to be in that category, because I rarely post
> to anything occurring outside The Ranch - The Roof spirals from my
> Safe Space, and intermingles with the harmony/cacophany that is The
> Ranch.

The ranch is a very *special* place.

> Speaking of which, Sym and I are about to go visit Zeitgeyser, who is
> in serious need of some PB&Brimstone, on the porch...
>
> Lisa

True and thanks fer the thought. Also thank you for saying things that
I would have like to have said but didn't.


**********************************************************************
Zeitgeyser - the Old Faithful of pop culture

"Unity is always at least two"
(Buckminster Fuller)

The trouble with anarchy is that it
ALWAYS degenerates into government (me, heehee)
**********************************************************************

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