Text [even UFO text], all by itself, is everything!

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

A review in TLS [March 17, 2017, Page 29] by Gill Partington of Juliet Fleming’s book Cultural Graphology: Writing after Derrida reminds us that, even though Jacques Derrida’s influential literary method known as “deconstruction” has become passé pretty much in academia and among literary critics, his “infamous credo, ‘there is nothing outside the text,’” still resonates with “his legion of followers” and those of us who see the text in every writing medium as the sine qua non of intellectualism.

That is, the most important thing about writing is not how it’s packaged or presented in situ but what the (written) text is telling us.

All the filigree that one finds in newspapers, books, and especially magazines is detrimental to the text. The New Yorker is an example of a magazine that uses Derrida’s credo opportunistically whereas a magazine like WIRED and many others vandalize their text by inserting graphics and/or photos (even advertising) to the detriment of the text.

Web-sites and blogs are real credo destroyers, clogging text with attempted efforts to capture the intended reader’s attention but actually warping the attention away from what really matters.

To read more about Derrida, check out these links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida

http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/

But your own commonsense should alert you to the fact that many books, magazines, and the internet sites you visit are marred by accretions to the text, even illustrative elements (such as graphics and photos) do much to destroy the meaning of the text.

UFO witness accounts are often similarly distorted by the addition of drawings or bad photography, not to mention the insertion of attendant text that is superimposed on the witness’s text.

Absurd commentary about the original text also intrudes on the purity of the text, if one tightly follows Derrida’s credo: “there is nothing outside the text.”

The [text] purity that Derrida expounded is a must for making sense of material that we read, not only in books, but everywhere when we come in contact with text.

RR

UFO Cliques

Those of you who are paying attention, to the overall UFO community, know that the field is cluttered with small groups of people tethered to one another for various reasons, many forming inane cliques that ruminate about how good each of the members is.

I have a small group of followers, most of whom take my musings with a grain of salt, rightfully.

Kevin Randle has his followers who adore Kevin and are provoked by his postings. They are fans of Kevin, as am I.

Then there are a few podcast guys who thrive on a few ass-kissing listeners, the podcaster often touting his or her listeners as “friends” – close friends.

One log-time UFO buff has the bad habit of propagandizing the ideas of a few people he thinks are remarkable, when the ideas generated come about from the fruit of other blogs or persons, the persons lauded taking ideas they see elsewhere and reworking them often to the point of imbecility.

The UFO topic is rife with heavy-footed buffs who never offer a fresh idea and support their blogs and podcasts with mischievous or sleazy gatherers of other people’s ideas and work.

The sleaze is incestuous and toxic, but UFO buffs, especially newbies don’t know that; a few names of credible UFO researchers are thrown out only to bolster the credibility of the podcaster or blogger.

Interviewed persons for podcasts are often at the fringe of UFO fame and only used in a pretense that the podcaster or blogger is flush with cachet by association; e.g., “if I get Leslie Kean on my podcast, I’m in the same league as she is.”

I’ve noticed a raft of stolen materials, mine included also, even as lame as that material may be, showing up in the far reaches of the internet’s UFO communities.

Ufology can’t get any worse than it is now, can it? The damn thing will implode, if a number of people take on (or take out) those who are less than honest, and scummy to boot.

RR

Why the “rabble” sees (and studies?) UFOs

Copyright 2017. InterAmerica, Inc.

The Times Literary Supplement for March 17, 2017 has a review, by Brad Inwood, of Peter T. Struck’s book, Divination and Human Nature: A cognitive history of intuition in classical antiquity [Princeton University Press, $45].

Reviewer Inwood notes that “both psychology and epistemology [were once] sharply distinguished [but] are now being reunited in some of the most exciting empirical work in philosophy and cognitive science.” [Page 16]

And book author Struck, in his book, presents “a compelling account of the great Stoic Posidonius, who … in the context of a physical theory … emphasized the interconnectedness of the cosmos and all its parts, including the human mind.” [ibid]

“And … Struck offers a highly perceptive analysis of the Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus who took divination in a wholly new direction, tying it not to knowledge about the natural world we live in, but instead casting intuition as a special line of communication to the Divine, a transcendent world from which special truth can be funnelled [sic] down to specially gifted humans. [ibid. italics mine]

“Early theorists, even Plato, limited divination and related phenomena to knowledge about the mundane world, and even the sober Aristotle recognized that gifted dream-diviners had a way of getting at facts about the natural world that most people of normal mental talents could not access. It is reassuring, in an odd way, that on Aristotle’s theory such insight is made possible by the limited intelligence of the diviner: too much conscious rational analysis swamps the frail channels that open the diviner up to subtle causal influences from the world. Being able to sense truths in dreams is not a mark of god’s favour or a special kind of intelligence, but is in part a matter of lacking the normal mental strengths that the rest of us rely on.” [ibid, italics mine]

What this means, to me, is that those who have mental limitations, the uneducated and lower classes of human society, see and have access to things that those who are better educated (and in the higher classes of society) do not – because the “educated” have cluttered their minds with the complex and “irrelevant aspects” of their lives, while simple folk cut to the chase, as it were, seeing and accessing visions that lie outside the “normal world of economic or worldly pursuits.”

The peasantry, or proletariat, as I once called some UFO buffs, are simpletons, in a way, and, thus, have or get access to (or study) other realities that the rest of society doesn’t contend with.

This “gift” to the poor and impoverished elements in society produce UFO encounters or visions of divinity (Mary, the mother of Christ, or even God, itself, in a burning bush).

RR