Like Moths We Are to the Flicker; a Follow-up to My Follow-up
I just can't let this teevee thing go, it seems. I'll try to make this my latest last speculative rant on the subject, at least for a while.
To catch you new readers up on the drama, I almost suffered a kidney refill without respite from a television. That got me to correlate that near-trauma with an email a friend sent a fast food joint, which led me to speculate about a possible synergetic commercial/corporate/political conspiracy riding on the laziness of stunted American brains. Confused yet? Well, here I go again. Perhaps I'm not finished. I got to wondering exactly why that idiot box is so damned appealing.
As with everything, I kept that thought stewing in the back of my head as I went about my daily routines. One of those routines involves podcasts, which I truly feel will supplant radio at least in frequency of listening and listeners in the near future. Why? I can't tune in Stephen Fry on the local Seattle yakkity-yak, now can I? His latest podgram, recorded live at the iTunes Festival in the Camden Roundhouse, touches on the origins of the word "focus," which coincidentally might have something to do with my latest two rant entries. I transcribe below:
Let's cast our mind way back to when our species, Homo sapiens, first emerged from earlier versions -- Homo sapiens naught point one alpha version, or beta versions, if you like, from Homo erectus and neandrathal, the first versions of humanity -- one of the first things we learned to do was to tell each other stories, as it seems, around the fire. Fire is very important, incidentally. I don't know why I mention it. It always interests me . . . the way language is so much wiser than any of us tends to be. The Latin for "hearth" is focus. We've used that word "focus," now, to mean almost anything around which we concentrate ourselves. Indeed, the focus of your cameras that are pointing I'd like to think lovingly at me. And the Old English for "hearth" is hearth, from which we get our word "heart."
So it is very deep inside us to do what you're doing, to be in a round place listening to someone telling a story usually with a fire flickering in the middle. . . . Anyway, that's what we first did when we'd hunted and we'd mashed up grain and we'd fought off dangerous animals and we'd survived yet another difficult day. We sat around the focus, the hearth, and we told each other stories.
(I also emphasize. Peri S.)
So let's parse this.
Here we are, an offshoot of creatures that would become monkeys and apes, newly introduced to hot meals through our mastery of fire, meals that may have led to our divergence from our more monkey-esque cousins. We gather as daily as we can around this chemical-phase miracle, its heat denaturing our proteins and gelatinizing our starches and collagens, its light warning us of danger. It's the perfect place to share wisdom to a huddling crowd. Lessons can be imparted while we all gnaw on our charred roots and fat-dripping meats, lessons perhaps so important that they can impart a survival benefit . . . to those that bother to pay sufficient attention.
Could fire have inadvertently become our species' mental trigger for trance states? Could the flicker of the hearth become our ancestral cue for absorbing information without undo criticism -- the importance of which is reflected in our ancient languages -- simply because those whose brains rejected the fiery siren lights failed to absorb verbal information crucial to survival and thus failed to pass on their always-skeptical genes?
Cop a squat. Spike a dog or a marshmallow. Discuss. If you get bored, switch to ghost stories.
To catch you new readers up on the drama, I almost suffered a kidney refill without respite from a television. That got me to correlate that near-trauma with an email a friend sent a fast food joint, which led me to speculate about a possible synergetic commercial/corporate/political conspiracy riding on the laziness of stunted American brains. Confused yet? Well, here I go again. Perhaps I'm not finished. I got to wondering exactly why that idiot box is so damned appealing.
As with everything, I kept that thought stewing in the back of my head as I went about my daily routines. One of those routines involves podcasts, which I truly feel will supplant radio at least in frequency of listening and listeners in the near future. Why? I can't tune in Stephen Fry on the local Seattle yakkity-yak, now can I? His latest podgram, recorded live at the iTunes Festival in the Camden Roundhouse, touches on the origins of the word "focus," which coincidentally might have something to do with my latest two rant entries. I transcribe below:
Let's cast our mind way back to when our species, Homo sapiens, first emerged from earlier versions -- Homo sapiens naught point one alpha version, or beta versions, if you like, from Homo erectus and neandrathal, the first versions of humanity -- one of the first things we learned to do was to tell each other stories, as it seems, around the fire. Fire is very important, incidentally. I don't know why I mention it. It always interests me . . . the way language is so much wiser than any of us tends to be. The Latin for "hearth" is focus. We've used that word "focus," now, to mean almost anything around which we concentrate ourselves. Indeed, the focus of your cameras that are pointing I'd like to think lovingly at me. And the Old English for "hearth" is hearth, from which we get our word "heart."
So it is very deep inside us to do what you're doing, to be in a round place listening to someone telling a story usually with a fire flickering in the middle. . . . Anyway, that's what we first did when we'd hunted and we'd mashed up grain and we'd fought off dangerous animals and we'd survived yet another difficult day. We sat around the focus, the hearth, and we told each other stories.
(I also emphasize. Peri S.)
So let's parse this.
Here we are, an offshoot of creatures that would become monkeys and apes, newly introduced to hot meals through our mastery of fire, meals that may have led to our divergence from our more monkey-esque cousins. We gather as daily as we can around this chemical-phase miracle, its heat denaturing our proteins and gelatinizing our starches and collagens, its light warning us of danger. It's the perfect place to share wisdom to a huddling crowd. Lessons can be imparted while we all gnaw on our charred roots and fat-dripping meats, lessons perhaps so important that they can impart a survival benefit . . . to those that bother to pay sufficient attention.
Could fire have inadvertently become our species' mental trigger for trance states? Could the flicker of the hearth become our ancestral cue for absorbing information without undo criticism -- the importance of which is reflected in our ancient languages -- simply because those whose brains rejected the fiery siren lights failed to absorb verbal information crucial to survival and thus failed to pass on their always-skeptical genes?
Cop a squat. Spike a dog or a marshmallow. Discuss. If you get bored, switch to ghost stories.