I have been circling around the edges, orbiting the event horizon, of this maelstrom for many years now, aware of its powerful attraction but without being fully submerged. No longer. The whirlwind has been reaped.
What finally nudged me over into the spiraling void was a form of contact through the electric ether. The simultaneously lucid and obscure, radiant and enigmatic, Bob Dobbs, arguably McLuhan’s most worthy living emissary, left a series of comments to a recent post of mine.
Dobbs noted the “xenochrony” (a Zappa-coined designation for strange coincidence, sync beyond sync) of the fact that the themes of my post were virtually identical to those discussed by he and his posse on his weekly marathon 16-hour radio show. He invited me to phone in to the show and discuss these points.
I unfortunately was unable to join the conversation, but later I listened to the archives [from 17:08 in] of the show. Within the free-flowing mind-meld is commentary on my post from Dobbs and friends, including the channeled voice of an entity representing — if I get this right — the extension of immateriality. This charming alien presence goes by the moniker of iON.
At any rate, this all risks getting sidetracked from the get-go. Dobbs is a wild hare warren in himself. I’ve only dipped a big toe into the immense pool of content that Dobbs has produced on the most fascinating of topics, projecting MM out into hyperspace. I’m certain that Dobbs will come up again in this blog, and his insights and visions much more thoroughly explored, but for now he plays the role as an emissary, a kind of magical helper of the monomyth, and an entry point into the McLuhan Maelstrom. Read the entire article at Groupname for Grapejuice
McLuhan´s NovelSeptember 2, 2015 at 12:42 AM
McLuhan commented in several occasions that he was talking about the "occult", the new hidden ground; connecting dots and creating patterns beyond only the information given by main stream media and the Gutenberg Galaxy; exploring as an anthropologist, all human expression and medias. The same goes to Bob Dobbs, who has been studying not only McLuhan for 40 years, but Wyndham Lewis and Joyce´s works and it influence in McLuhan. Because he knwos the real hidden ground, he dared to explore with other unconventional "media", to explore the last extension of men by the Non-Physical. To do so, he recurred to medium, like the Evergreens and iON. A way to illustrate this, would be with the movie Annie Hall, the scene in which Woody Allen is trying to make a point as he discusses with a McLuhanite, and he just takes God himsefl, Marshall McLuhan from behind a cardboard ad, and asks him to intervene to see who is right. Then Woody Allen says: "Don´t you wish real life would be like this?"; well it is for Bob, he has decided to go further in the exploration of media, and include his discoveries using channeling and Non-Physical, he wants to know and asks the directly the source, Lewis, Joyce, McLuhan, Zappa, etc. His discussion are available to listen, as he is also extreme generous and makes his own archive public. Bob Dobbs-Neveritt is in a position in which he has no need to be afraid of loosing his reputation. But the main result of his explorations of McLuhan, the Wake, and the effects on media on cognition and perception has led to major discoveries and breakthrouhs in the creation of a new environment which obsoletes the electric environment and the android meme. You could think of this in the same way in which a cathedral was build, it would take several generations to finish the project. The whole evolution of media, all the Gutenberg Galaxy, were actually only part of the process of our evolution to retrieve the iONic-technologies affecting us and the environment in the Now- here.
I have been studying Bob for years, and it has taken me 6 years to understand the magnitude and relevance of his output. It is worth exploring, join the Bobyssey in our journey back to Ithaka. Like McLuhan said , "it would take a week to explain" all Bob´s main patterns, but you can go and explore him in the ether, and even start engaging the new technologies, and the new environment as it is beign created and explained by Bob and iON.