Finally, an important book, or at least a chapter, has been written on Marshall McLuhan that takes its bearings from the appropriate precedents—namely my multimedia translations of McLuhan’s multimedia creations.
The author, Znore, has collected his blogs from August 19, 2012, to December 3, 2015, into a volume titled “Death Sweat of the Cluster: Selected Essays from Groupname for Grapejuice” (Sync Book Press, 2020, 400 pages).
His final chapters – 25, 26, and 27 – are titled respectively:
MEERSCHAL MACMUHUN MOONCHILD ME 1
MEERSCHAL MACMUHUN MOONCHILD ME 2: Mirrors
MEERSCHAL MACMUHUN MOONCHILD ME 3: Mosaic
Here are most of the words on my work:
… And so, given the track this study is trudging, it was likely inevitable that it would eventually get sucked in by yet another vortex – the maelstrom that is Marshall McLuhan, another soul struck by the spell of the Wake.
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.
The Human Chain Extends
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 post at my blog.
Dobbs noted the “xenochrony” (a Zappa-coined designation, here used for “sync beyond sync, super strange coincidence”) 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 of the show (March 14, 2015). 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 study, 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.
Dobbs’ essay, which I’ll touch upon here, is the crucial “McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia: The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome.”…
… The third phase, from 1977 to 1997 (around the time Dobbs wrote his essay), is a post-McLuhan phase which the mage foresaw but mostly did not get to witness himself. Dobbs describes this phase as one where the machines – for McLuhan, “the extensions of man,” – began to extend themselves.
IN SHORT, THE EXTENSIONS OF HUMANITY HAD EVOLVED TO THE POINT OF ACTUALIZING THEIR OWN DRAMA OF COGNITION.
At this point, I will not get into Dobbs’ incredibly intriguing thoughts on this third phase (and presumably the “fourth phase” we are all living through right now), which Dobbs calls “the Android Meme,” but my attention here also revolves around McLuhan’s key theoretical obsession with the drama of cognition and perception.
Accordingly, it is to the first of Dobbs’ phases which I’ll primarily explore. This is when McLuhan’s visionary career really began and the stage-doors of perception started to crack open. This is also when McLuhan began his lifelong study of Finnegans Wake.
The title of this chapter is taken from Dobbs’ essay in which he notes that in one of McLuhan’s copies of the Wake, Marshall had penciled in the words “me” and “moon child” next to the name “Meereschal MacMuhun” on page 254 of the Wake. McLuhan, born on July 21st, 1911, characterized himself as a Cancerian “moon child,” an impression doubtlessly reinforced with the Apollo 11 moon mission coinciding with his 58th birthday….
