I hear what you're saying, but I (do I? Oh, yes sir I do) still quibble. Does the injoke as outlined really have anything to do with internal management of oneself/one's memories--with psychic cleanliness? Are what we're talking about really injokes at all?
If the injoke is the spontaneous eruption, the manic nothing, the late-night catharsis that attains epic status between a few once-friends and is referred back to by them as a touchstone, but defined by its internality--origin in the self and as such more of a point of meditation or departure that anything else, an accessway to one's thought processes at a past time--then aren't these really outjokes, cultural kernels whose paths intersected with ours, or not? And if not, we fake it, fall back on our poverty of stock images when that perennial conversation about actors or what have you rolls around? I just mean, rather than a contemplative focus, fresh sweet hay as you've made of ol' Pikachu notwithstanding, aren't they a open hand or shalom or collective kowtow, a way of building bridges to people with whom you have no better foundation upon which to build than coincidence of birth whether it be temporal consanguinity (as in this case) or just shared Canadianness or summat?
I mean, given the elaborate set of trust-building rituals we've evolved to require of our fellows, without this shorthand I imagine humanity would be a much more suspicious and violent creature and modern atomized society might be un-possible, too much mental strain. So it's sort of chewed-over cud v. "21st Century Schizoid Man."
Oh, but I agree with this summation as well, the many negative adjectives I may have thrown around notwithstanding. Such is the trouble with writing; acknowledging the presence of 'multiple parallel truths' is second nature for most of us mentally, but to express it in static sequential words one must hijack prose with a certain kind of cleverness and profundity which has so far been outside my reach.
Yet if we imagine a Venn diagram based on the relationships between the three assertions "communication is good", "advertising is bad", "evil is unfortunate" I think it becomes clear that we are describing a similar system, just focusing on different areas of overlap...
(...but by that logic, if you imagine a Venn diagram big and recursive enough, maybe EVERYBODY is always in perfect concordant agreement with EVERYBODY else.)
If the injoke is the spontaneous eruption, the manic nothing, the late-night catharsis that attains epic status between a few once-friends and is referred back to by them as a touchstone, but defined by its internality--origin in the self and as such more of a point of meditation or departure that anything else, an accessway to one's thought processes at a past time--then aren't these really outjokes, cultural kernels whose paths intersected with ours, or not? And if not, we fake it, fall back on our poverty of stock images when that perennial conversation about actors or what have you rolls around? I just mean, rather than a contemplative focus, fresh sweet hay as you've made of ol' Pikachu notwithstanding, aren't they a open hand or shalom or collective kowtow, a way of building bridges to people with whom you have no better foundation upon which to build than coincidence of birth whether it be temporal consanguinity (as in this case) or just shared Canadianness or summat?
I mean, given the elaborate set of trust-building rituals we've evolved to require of our fellows, without this shorthand I imagine humanity would be a much more suspicious and violent creature and modern atomized society might be un-possible, too much mental strain. So it's sort of chewed-over cud v. "21st Century Schizoid Man."
Reply
Yet if we imagine a Venn diagram based on the relationships between the three assertions "communication is good", "advertising is bad", "evil is unfortunate" I think it becomes clear that we are describing a similar system, just focusing on different areas of overlap...
(...but by that logic, if you imagine a Venn diagram big and recursive enough, maybe EVERYBODY is always in perfect concordant agreement with EVERYBODY else.)
Reply
and I like to imagine that diagram.
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment