MY RESPONSE TO CLARK STRANDS POST ON FB:
CLARK STRAND:
THE ALTERNATIVE TO MEDIA...IS MAMA!
This past weekend I read an online article that cited the work of contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, suggesting that the only meaningful response to the SorroundSound sense of alarm that is now the driving force of all forms of media is to INTERRUPT it. This is accomplished by not passing our fear along to others through "shares," "posts" and "tweets," but rather sitting with it in a thoughtful, pondering frame of mind. Only in this way can we refuse to be a passive conveyor of fear from one person to the next in a game of hot potato that includes everyone on the planet with a smartphone.
LINDA MARY MONTANO:
PARAGRAPH 1: U said: " Not passing our fears through shares.....passive conveyor of fear..." The artist's raison d'etre is to do just that: vomit out the detritus of their subconscious which is their respected and sometimes only way of "talking", making sense of and reflecting the climate of their minds and the times. The reader and audience is often disgusted by the taste of the artists mind-vomit and their need to talk a language that triggers the readers'/viewers visceral negative reactions. Artists thrust their wares without discerning or caring who would like or not like their message; in fact not to be understood is grist for their inspiration mill and more reason to go deeper to another level of alpha wave and toxic memory and another reason to be misunderstood, yet again. So thinking before sending might not be a popular suggestion for those addicted to sharing their ucks and "please don't." Not for anything but narcissist that I am, I'm sure your don't pass fears post is about my having sent u my Wagnerain death tape to view?
CLARK STRAND:
It's a "buck stops here" approach that invites us to sit with our fear and ponder it, and in most cases simply "ride it out." Which is a hard place for a buck that big to stop. Too hard for anyone but a philosopher to take seriously as the solution to a panic that is now basically borderless, because it is everywhere in the culture at once.
LMM:
PARAGRAPH 2: .... you say, "the buck stops here..." Yes the buck stops here has become the mantra of now. Our fingers and eyes are exhausted from hitting, "delete", "pause," "alt" and "hide!" Our daily and more than once daily fear-share facebook and media dance has made editors of us all and quick minded purveyors of what we do and don't want to know about, see or want to continue to be associated with. Not a bad thing. To be exposed to all kinds of untruths and vileness and clown acts is a kind of transparency that many were deprived of who were the products of a closed family/church/educational system that hid the ugly.
CS
But is that strategy really meaningful as response to fear? Is "sitting with it" going to make a difference to a culture that has its foot to the floor on a highway leading nowhere but over a cliff? Riding it out would be fine if we weren't seated behind the wheel of a culture that is, metaphorically speaking, the biggest, most lethal moving vehicle the world has ever seen.
LMM
PARAGRAPH 3: ..." the most lethal moving vehicle..." Agreed, the demons of now have been sent into the proverbial pigs over cliff- sinkholes. Violence and impermanence are waiting right around the corner of everyone's nightmare.
CS
It's my same criticism of the mindfulness movement: Unless we are mindful of the suicidal momentum of a consumer civilization in its death throes, what we call mindfulness is really just a blindfold in disguise. The flaw at the heart of that movement (which seems to have infected even German philosophy) is that it presumes that our societies and our planetary ecology remain intact and that the mind is therefore essentially "safe within itself." Mindfulness has no way of recognizing, much less metabolizing legitimate threat. But, then, that is the underlying point of it. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON is the mantra of a very frightened and shaky status quo.
LMM
PARAGRAPH 4: You say, " Mindfulness has no way of recognizing, much less metabolizing legitimate threat." I like that yours and Perdita's minds are so brilliant and erudite and sharp and theologically radical that you both see through literally everything. Like that a lot!!! And yes, it is hallmarkish at worst, mindfulness that is, and yet the villagers do eventually find out that Yoga at Sunbeam Studio, is taught by an extraordinary teacher and they bring their beach towels, NYC street incense, imitation yoga matts and mispronunciation of "Namaste" to the class, thinking that their final mindfulness has been WON!!!! It is a cryable scene because so innocent and wrong but also a teachable moment because they become a marker of one's own place in the picture of now and they become an indicator of ones own place on ones proudly attained ladder of theology. It becomes spiritual us-vs.-oye vey them.
CS
So, IS there any meaningful alternative to fear?
One thing we know at this point is that there is no such thing as an "alternative media" where fear is concerned. There is no book or article we're going to read (online or off) that isn't to some extent infected by the grab-for-all-you-can-get panic that, whether we realize it or not, we are now in the grips of as a species. The one percenters aren't the cause of that panic. They are the symptom of it. We all know this deep in our hearts. We are not so far from our animal instincts that we can't sense a massive change coming in the global wind. The fear that gets flogged on FOX doesn't have its origin in the newsroom. They just channel it for their own political purposes. Gone are the days when fear needed to be manufactured. No one even needs to add to it. For the foreseeable future, fear is here to stay
LMM
PARAGRAPH 5; You say: " For the foreseeable future, fear is here to stay." Absolutely. And it feels like 12 bad TV shows on regular TV being played at the same time inside a not-get-outable paper bag. It is a freakish fear, a neurologically shuddering fear, a hide your fill in the blank fear. A "you better smell the scams" fear. Thankfully there are some prophetic minds and hearts gyroscoping above the stench of it.
CS
Where can you go to escape from global warming? The question is its own answer. Nowhere. That's why we've agreed on the collective stupidity of calling it "climate change" instead...as if climate wasn't a global system and change didn't mean rising sea levels that will swallow many, if not most, of our coastal cities by century's end.
And so I will ask the question again: Is there any meaningful alternative to the fear that our media-saturated culture is constantly telling us to pass along?
LMM
PARAGRAPH 6: You say, " Where can you go to escape from global warming? " You cite avoiding ecological truth as a way, an escape, an avoidance. Nothing to say here except all night Coast -to- Coast conspiracy radio does provide a call-in forum where chem trails and JFK's murder by his colleagues can at least be discussed and de-feared via dialogue with tired truckers viewing wish fulfilling escape routes via UFO's landing a few feet in front of them. An easy endgame and escape at best.
CS
I believe there is. But it certainly isn't 'blindfulness.'
In the Fall of 2011, not long after Our Lady woke me in the middle of the night to pray the rosary, I found myself entertaining the idea that the rosary might be that rare cultural phenomenon: a true alternative media. It conveyed a message...but not a written one. It had images...but they didn't come from outside of the mind. You formed the words of the rosary with your own lips using prayers you knew by heart and visualized its fifteen mysteries with nothing but your own imagination to draw from. The rosary wasn't "coming at you" or "through you" from the culture as a way of harnessing your opinion, your spending patterns, or your vote. It was an autonomous, self-directed form of spiritual devotion that came from within you instead.
LMM
PARAGRAPH 7: You say, " the rosary might be that rare cultural phenomenon: a true alternative media. It conveyed a message...but not a written one. It had images...but they didn't come from outside of the mind. You formed the words of the rosary with your own lips using prayers you knew by heart and visualized its fifteen mysteries with nothing but your own imagination to draw from. The rosary wasn't "coming at you" or "through you" from the culture as a way of harnessing your opinion, your spending patterns, or your vote. It was an autonomous, self-directed form of spiritual devotion that came from within you instead." Good to see the take back the power aspect of your take on the rosary.. The inner tv-ness of it. The ability to make your own movie, be your own editor and write your own script for the rosary. And yes given the mind's need for story and narrative and prompt, the Rosary surely does provide material in an imposingly kind manner. Just like an inner iPhone, it becomes an appreciated mystical app.
CS
Of course, that was before I'd read much about the history of the rosary. Not being Catholic, I learned only much later that the church had been using the rosary for centuries as a form of propaganda for channeling fear. First the rosary was suggested as a weapon for fighting witchcraft, heresy, or the devil. Later it was a defense against the Turks. Then it was used to battle the Enlightenment, and then (in collaboration with the American CIA) to fight communism.
LMM
PARAGRAPH 8: You say, " I learned only much later that the church had been using the rosary for centuries as a form of propaganda for channeling fear. First the rosary was suggested as a weapon for fighting witchcraft, heresy, or the devil. " The rosary was the fear catcher of the past, you say. It seems to me that it was used in the past to CLEAR not channel fear, no? Historian that you are, you have found really important info about the way literally everything can be screwed around by whoever wants to screw around with whatever! That is, take the rosary and attach: witch, devil, heresy and communism to it and in so doing, you are being a great and wonderful and totally shivering and scared Catholic, back then!!!! But I have my own non-fear Rosary memory that goes like this: all 7 of us in our family in Saugerties in the 50's, are on our knees, with our faces buried into questionable smelling seats of overstuffed front room chairs, saying the rosary every night because Father Peton, not sure of his name, had said, "The family that prays together, stays together." And at 70, I must say, im really beginning to enjoy all 3 of my siblings, finally. Thank you, Rosary. Your mission to resurrect the rosary as a Mister/Misses Clean, to counterattack the fear of now, gives it the cheerful weight of being historically legacized.
CS
In many areas of the Catholic world the rosary is now being used to battle abortion: hence the feminist placard that reads "Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries!" Anti-abortion phrases are inserted into the prayers, and at one meeting in New York City, the fear (along with the anger and moral outrage it is intended to generate) is passed along in the form of a fetus in a plastic bag that is literally handed around the room during the prayer. No, I'm not making this up.
LMM
PARAGRAPH 9: You say: " In many areas of the Catholic world the rosary is now being used to battle abortion: hence the feminist placard that reads "Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries!" This needs the delete button but the Bible says it in ditto fashion with it's reference to .."pearls before..." Or rosaries.....
CS
Fortunately, the rosary didn't begin that way, and most of the millions of people who pray it around the world aren't suckered in by political ideologues masquerading as bishops and priests.
The rosary began as a form of devotion to the Goddess that recognized Her sovereignty over the seasonal cycles of growth, death, and regeneration that governed the lives of all beings on the planet -- including human beings. To pray the rosary was to unite with those climatological cycles and feel oneself as "belonging" to a Mother whose body was in wind and water; in animal, vegetable, and mineral; and, most of all, in the dirt beneath their feet. That is why so many ancient images of the Goddess were dark in color, often even black.
LMM
PARAGRAPH 10: You say: "The rosary began as a form of devotion to the Goddess that recognized Her sovereignty over the seasonal cycles of growth, death, and regeneration that governed the lives of all beings on the planet -- including human beings. " And, "That is why so many ancient images of the Goddess were dark in color, often even black." That's why it is so hard to drag Catholics trained in suffering from the 50's into a radical-feminist look at Mary, now. For us she was pure white, impregnated by the Holy Spirit (a bird no less); she was good, never sinned, never felt anything but sorrow, never decided, never Kalied herself into swordplay or longtongued rage, never stomped on a Shiva-Catholic equivalencies body, never fixed everything like Durga of the many arms of possibilities, never touched money like Lakshmi, never had pleasurable sex like Radha or Sita, never sang like Saraswati. Mary then was just Mary. A medieval nice one to be Crusaded for. The one left out of the Trinity, the one who said not a word when she was riding the donkey to Egypt with a newborn still wearing a placenta, the one who cried without tears at the Crucifixion. So it takes incarnations of courage for me to open the door to a Now Mary who Mothers with Pampers and talks/locutes to EVERYONE and rings your doorbell and visits! This NEW Mary is asking for the parents/caregivers of her to be patient with the viewers of Her in her new blackface, sitting in her stroller for mother-runners.
CS
What the world needs now is not more media but more Mother! In that respect the rosary is not the alternative media I once imagined it to be. It is an alternative TO media.
Where can you go to escape global warming? It's the wrong question. Pray the rosary and you will find yourself asking a much more powerful question: Where can you go to UNDERSTAND global warming?
And once you have that question, you discover that you are holding the answer in your hands. The rosary is a guidebook to the oldest, most durable rhythms of the planet...and a testament to the persistence of life in collaboration with those rhythms. The rosary will show you what to do.
The first teaching Our Lady offered to me about the rosary in 2011 was this:
"The rosary is My body,
And My body is the body of the world.
Your body is one with that body.
What cause could there be for fear?"
And My body is the body of the world.
Your body is one with that body.
What cause could there be for fear?"
When I asked Her to explain those words, She told me that the complete wisdom of the rosary was contained within them, and all the wisdom of the planet, too. I would learn to trust that wisdom by praying the rosary and sharing it with others, She said. And that would release me from fear
LMM
PARAGRAPH 11: You say: "What the world needs now is not more media but more Mother! In that respect the rosary is not the alternative media I once imagined it to be. It is an alternative TO media." Leary's TURN ON...is reconfigured yet again and this time the show is on the MOTHER CHANNEL. Let's share the popcorn, her messages and remote control.
Thanks Clark and Perdita for opening the mystery door. I'm ringing the bell as a new-to- thinking, radical, Charismatic practicing Catholic who is carrying 74 years of the OLD MARY; and although she did tell me that she is now my Mother, still, be patient with me when I first come in.
Linda Mary Montano, 2016
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