WHALE:

I’m talking about a monolithic, centralized media, overlooking a veritable wasteland of self-referential social networking, which cannibalizes its deeply forgetful culture memetically. I’m talking about the latest version of Microsoft Word, which I am using even at this moment to convey this to you, though it does not recognize the name Mirandola, and I speak also on behalf of those who seem to think that if I use the medium I owe some debt to it, rather than holding the entitlement for it to yield to MY intelligence. And I speak about a generation of students whose very school masters deny them access to true literature, who replace a library with computers, as though those kids didn’t already carry computers, of surpassing capability, within their pockets. Yes: I use the Internet. It’s how I publish nowadays. But what I have to say holds value, since I don’t confine myself to the mere mouthpiece of it. I take my cues from books, of course. The paper which a book is printed on contains the history of human culture; all the greats wrote their ideas on paper, to be READ on paper, rather than pored over as the blue light of a monitor burns holes into your brain like L.S.D. Heidegger is worth more than just a migraine; he is to be savoured in a dingy, dusty library among the sorts of tomes where his phenomenology found its conception. It is a tradition, and you cannot argue with tradition, not without appeal to yet another strain of that same common history. And you know what’s great about these books? They last. A single server goes down and you lose some terabytes of data. Maybe someday you will find a book upon the shelves. Maybe that book finds YOU. You do not Google it; you never knew about it. Yes: no algorithm but the Will of God provided it to you. And it was never forced upon you by a troll or radical. It was not sold to you; you simply FOUND it. And you read it; with that choice, you took responsibility for all its contents. It became you. It transformed you. And you broke out of yourself and your own echo chamber. Thus you saw to it that you were more than just the product of your social groups, a mere statistic to the advertising agencies which would manipulate your will. You accrued no viruses, no malware, and no hatred from its acquisition. You stayed with it; it stayed with you. All that changed was your Soul as you read it, over and over again, as Life transformed the both of you. Yet it was not some shady moderator censoring the pages, shadow-banning the author for his indecorous honesty about matters of deeply personal import. The publishers made sure of that. And in its constancy you found your own; and in its constancy you found YOURSELF.

I still recall Howard Beale raging about how so few Americans read books. Back in the seventies, the Internet was not a problem for us yet. You’d have to be daft as a fish to say he had the right to rage only because the Internet had not yet saved us. Even then, the radio had been a threat. Yes: even then, we were the fodder of the television set. You think I speak regressively? The men who knew the most of science in those times predicted that humanity would suffer, for they also knew of the humanities as well. Humanity, I tell you, hasn’t changed, except that it’s lost its own motivation to persist. The radio does little now; the Internet is our greatest danger. But since I am told it ate the World, consider this my broadcast from within the whale. At least I’ve salvaged that which the Great Beast has yet to have digested. And at least I might make palatable to the modern tongue the language of a distant decency. Do you know even where your indignation comes from? All the greats were those who wrote our ethics. How then do you dare to call them products of their time and place? No: in their books, we find the timeless. It is WE who, with each passing day, become far more generic and mechanical, confined to just the desert of the present moment, having lost our roots within the past, uncertain even what the future OUGHT to be, except that we might crave the novelty of it. WE are products of our time and place, but THEY had seen the future and the past. Their books accomplished what our Internet could not. It was because they took the time to write it down. I had a friend – an actor – who once said to me, deep in a late-night phone-call, that I spoke as if I wrote on paper. This was true. How did he know? He knew quite many things intuitively. He was an old Soul. He probably remembered his past lives. And once you’ve been around a few times on this circus wheel of Life, you scoff at modern “novelty”. And you return then to your novels, knowing they inform all that you do within the End Times we inhabit.

(Dm.A.A.)