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I walk about two hours a day so I can feel the ground under my feet. It’s unmediated.
Unmediated is “not mediated: not communicated or transformed by an intervening agency.”
In the middle of unmediated, hidden there, is media. Media is the original plural of medium. Medium is from an ancient root *medhyo– for “middle.”
Mass media is a medium of communication such as newspapers, radio, and television.
Mass media often stands between us and the real news about our lives.
On my walks there’s nothing much between me, my body, and earth. I don’t traverse the earth on Google Earth by moving my mouse. I don’t read of its wonders in an ebook. I don’t watch a colorful documentary on YouTube. I see earth’s flowers, smell its grass, hear its birds, taste its fog on winter days, and touch its soft feathers when they molt to earth.
The media scholar Marshall McLuhan and I became friends when I was eleven. We met at a public library. My mother dropped her four kids off while she went grocery shopping. For the bring-one, take-one bookcase, I took in a paperback ordered at school from Scholastic and took a book home titled The Medium is the Message/Massage.
Later I found there The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and my favorite, Understanding Media. These changed me. Luckily I had no idea he was a “philosopher” or someone a pre-teen should not read. I understood enough, and he stayed with me. I returned to his work often over decades.
When I read his ideas—that most people are unaware “blissfully” of “what the media do to them” and do not notice that “the medium is also the message [and the massage in that] . . . it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio,” my seeing was changed forever. I started noticing the radio and the tv in new ways.
In graduate school, much later on, I learned McLuhan did his dissertation on grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all my favorite inquiries, and was himself influenced by Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
So I can study media and learn with and from my students, now I teach a course at University of California, Berkeley, titled, “The Meme and the Human (& AI): Digital Literacies,” inspired by that chance encounter in a public library decades ago.
Memorably, the Introduction to the first edition of Understanding Media begins, “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding.” McLuhan adds, “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” He argues that we are approaching (now are in, he might say) “the final phase of the extensions of [hu]man—the technological simulation of consciousness,” and he says that “the creative process of knowing will be collectively” because we have “collectively and corporately extended . . . our senses and nerves by the various media.”
McLuhan is an expert in pointing out the obvious that was not so obvious until he points it out: “Any extension [like a bike, car, cell phone, or social media, I add], whether of skin, hand, or foot, [or consciousness] affects the whole psychic and social complex.”
Sensory overload can prevent us from living in the present, unmediated, as McLuhan observes, “This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any ‘point of view.’” He also gave me hope by naming “[t]he aspiration of our time” as “wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness” as “a natural adjunct of electric technology,” by which he would also have meant our internet and social media today.
The essences of these “electric technology” changes are hard for us to detect, however, while they are happening. McLuhan calls it “the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation.” He compares the “content” of a medium to “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” He adds that while a movie’s content is a novel, a play, or an opera, that the “effect of the movie form is not related to its program content.”
He saw, for example, that these media come to us (as the radio did in his day) “with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate” and that “touch[es] remote and forgotten chords.” This tends “to numb our central nervous system,” he says because when it is “extended and exposed,” we are overwhelmed, and that’s one reason, he notes, that we live so much with a rear-view perspective, what McLuhan calls in one interview “the rearview-mirror view”—because we are numbed by the new technologies as they are making a new environment—we work to make the old environment that much more visible by turning it into an art form and attaching ourselves to its objects and vibes, which explains a good deal of the present-day nostalgia.
Anyone wanting to read more about this can find media scholar Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture, where she helps us understand today’s “participatory culture.”
All I can say is that awareness for me includes walking the earth and listening to egrets, my family, my friends, my students, and everyone I meet. Trying to be a real listener is a path to walk also.
And I try to listen to my ancestors and these include those I’ve lived with and translated or communed with, like Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510).
It would be wonderful if we could all read Friedrich von Hügel’s The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends published by James Clarke in London in 1908. In fact, I put that there to remind me to one day. Ah, my bucket list of books grows apace.
But we don’t really need to read von Hügel. Instead we can go back to the words of Catherine. It’s one reason I translate or have translated and one reason I look up word etymologies every day. I go to the spring, the source of the Water. It’s also why I read the Bible and other Scriptures with commentaries and history books beside me, to reveal their words’ meanings and their contexts and to reflect on living out the word: “God is Love” into today.
These practices have also been and are life-changing helps with my decades-long-undiagnosed dyslexia.
If I go to the sources of classic works translated in English and read their original words, and if I go to words’ sources, and read their origins, then I can make up my own mind what they mean for me, as factually based as possible.
It’s also why I practice and study Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems, and that’s for another blog piece. I want to go to my own sources, my own parts, because I have experienced and do experience that the pre-packaged, systemically taught monomind paradigm is not true for me. As Beatrice Bruteau (and many past mystics) said and experienced, all of us have “artificial selves” and a “natural self,” and I call these my non-authentic, non-relaxed selves and my True or Authentic Self. Students always say, “You do you” or “Be authentic.” That Self.
About the True Self, in a very encouraging way, Catherine of Genoa gives us a word still as fresh as dew for today. Catherine is famous for saying, according to the translation you read, either, “My Me is God,” or “My deepest me is God!” And I think how she worked at the hospital helping people.
For “God,” “Love” or “Kindness” or “Ultimate Reality” or “Something More” et al., are often preferred.
Her words spark the question: What does it mean to be human?
Not to be a screen.
And what did she actually say in Italian?
“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”
Look at how the “Dio” and the twice “mio” rhyme. The Dio meaning God and the mio meaning my. That’s the medium being the message/massage. The è means is and the essere means to be or being. The English words essence, essential, and presence all have the same root: Latin esse for “to be” from the ancient root *es- “to be.”
I go to sleep now saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.” On mindful repeat.
I walk through the marsh saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.” Then I stop to listen to the egrets.
Because as Rilke writes, “Through all creatures extends one single space / World space within. Through us the birds fly silently. Oh, wanting to grow, I look outside at the tree / that grows in me.” [From “Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum: Weltinnenraum,” Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte 1906–1926, Sämtliche Werke, II]
“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”
If I translated Catherine’s word, which I try not to because I’d rather experience it, I’d hear, “In God is my being, my Me.”
I go to sleep now saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”
I walk through the marsh saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”
I remember how Catherine of Genoa helped people at a hospital. I try to teach and be kind.
“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”
I teach, I sleep, I walk through the marsh. I listen. To the beautiful, raucous calls of the egrets.
Unmediated.
Without media.
“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”
“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”
“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”
