19 September 2008

The memetic diaspora appropriated into a signifier of hegemony.

Last week I found myself at a defining point in my academic career, wherein I was able to glance around, occupying several different vantages at once, and see the wide sea spread out to the four corners of the world. The sea, I understood, was (wo)man's search for meaning and definition. Language the blunt and beautiful tool. This is the spirit of the times. This is what's going on: a whole lotta people trying to say the unsayable, name the unnamed, and talk about processes that may or may not even be real. And you can see this happening in the realms of gender studies, poetry writing, fiction writing, rhetoric, cultural criticism and just about everywhere else. Everything's in question. Reality, though - and I mean all of it - is just an old, ancient, kaleidoscopic, multidimensional, lumbering, quivering, vibrating myth. And the new myth is troubled because it thinks it's a new myth. It doesn't realize it's just another facet of the old myth in new, critical clothes. What's any of this got to do with Runts (c) candies in a gumball machine? Not much, I guess. Ah, but what do I know? I'm just a gleam in one of the myth's several million pulsing eyes, strange monster that it is. Maybe everything is everything. And maybe everything is worthy of worship.

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