O Captain! My Captain!

For Abraham Lincoln, after his assassination.

O Captain, My Captain
=================
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Chasing Father Walt (not Disney)

Some of you have been wondering why this blog is called Chasing Eidolons. It's not called Chasing E-Idols, which must be some kind of Japanese semi-norp portal.

If you don't know what norp is, urbandictionary it.

An "eidolon" is a wonderful word meaning:

1. A phantom; an apparition.

2. An image of an ideal.

Which is beautiful and ironic at the same time. Why should a word that describes an ideal also be a world that describes a phantom or an ideal? Embedded in the word itself is already a deep understanding of the impossibility, perhaps futility of having an ideal - it's only and image, a phantom, a transitory apparition.

Eidolons - by Walt Whitman

I met a seer,
Passing the hues and objects of the world,
The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,
To glean eidolons.

Put in thy chants said he,
No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in,
Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all,
That of eidolons.

Ever the dim beginning,
Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle,
Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)
Eidolons! eidolons!

Ever the mutable,
Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering,
Ever the ateliers, the factories divine,
Issuing eidolons.

Lo, I or you,
Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown,
We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,
But really build eidolons.

The ostent evanescent,
The substance of an artist's mood or savan's studies long,
Or warrior's, martyr's, hero's toils,
To fashion his eidolon.

Of every human life,
(The units gather'd, posted, not a thought, emotion, deed, left out,)
The whole or large or small summ'd, added up,
In its eidolon.

The old, old urge,
Based on the ancient pinnacles, lo, newer, higher pinnacles,
From science and the modern still impell'd,
The old, old urge, eidolons.

The present now and here,
America's busy, teeming, intricate whirl,
Of aggregate and segregate for only thence releasing,
To-day's eidolons.

These with the past,
Of vanish'd lands, of all the reigns of kings across the sea,
Old conquerors, old campaigns, old sailors' voyages,
Joining eidolons.

Densities, growth, facades,
Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees,
Far-born, far-dying, living long, to leave,
Eidolons everlasting.

Exalte, rapt, ecstatic,
The visible but their womb of birth,
Of orbic tendencies to shape and shape and shape,
The mighty earth-eidolon.

All space, all time,
(The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns,
Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use,)
Fill'd with eidolons only.

The noiseless myriads,
The infinite oceans where the rivers empty,
The separate countless free identities, like eyesight,
The true realities, eidolons.

Not this the world,
Nor these the universes, they the universes,
Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life,
Eidolons, eidolons.

Beyond thy lectures learn'd professor,
Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics,
Beyond the doctor's surgery, anatomy, beyond the chemist with his chemistry,
The entities of entities, eidolons.

Unfix'd yet fix'd,
Ever shall be, ever have been and are,
Sweeping the present to the infinite future,
Eidolons, eidolons, eidolons.

The prophet and the bard,
Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages yet,
Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy, interpret yet to them,
God and eidolons.

And thee my soul,
Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations,
Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet,
Thy mates, eidolons.

Thy body permanent,
The body lurking there within thy body,
The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself,
An image, an eidolon.

Thy very songs not in thy songs,
No special strains to sing, none for itself,
But from the whole resulting, rising at last and floating,
A round full-orb'd eidolon.

The Manifesto

I promised myself and the world that I would never write a blog. I thought I believed it, but now my convictions and the overwhelming, insatiable urge to write gives me no other alternative. Of course, dear readers, I need to provide some justification for my hypocrisy that extends beyond the words of my hero, Walt Whitman:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am deep, I contain many contradictions."

But first, my qualms: there has been a backlash recently against the horrors of web 2.0, and blogs, youTube, MySpace and Facebook exemplify this. The internet has rapidly morphed into a shrine to the cult of the amateur. Half-baked attempts at humour and endless, pointless clips litter youTube, with mirror gazing teenagers eager to post 10 minute clips of themselves talking much about nothing. Over singing in front of your computer wins you accolades and possibly even a recording contract.

Myspace and Facebook are another horror apart from the tween dominated clip site; seething domains of copious amounts of time wasting procrastination. Connecting to friends and people you know is one thing, but is "connecting" to your fellows via the three sentence message "Omfg, I found you on facebook. How's it going, bro?" really some kind of intimate connection with those you know and love? Or is it in fact a far more lonely, "look at me" cry for attention that the digital doppleganger that is "online networking" makes us believe is meaningful?

Blogs, despite their journalistic power and potential, are the pinnacle of the narcissistic, amateurish broadcasting of brainwaves that best represents web 2.0. Just how many people read blogs, and how many people post blogs? How many blogs really have something to say that is worth hearing? A lot of content is being generated, but I wonder if it encourages amateurs to polish their grammar, written skills and critical thinking, or does it just allow people the cover of anonymity to criticise and mudsling, and the tools from which to broadcast low quality material of the world?

I think it was Plato who said:

"No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education."

An education composed of videos on youtube and a life in front of games without the knowledge and ability to process these things in context is no education at all. The worst possible kind of education is half an education. I would add to those words of sagacity with an annex - the worst kind of production is a half-good one, the worst kind of opinion is an half-informed one, the worst kind of idea is a half-baked one.

Democratic internet movements such as wikipedia are another facet of the half-baked education. It aims to be an encyclopaedia of the people, by the people. That's damn democratic, and beautiful to boot. Recent research by Nature magazine even shows that wikipedia compares well with Brittanica. Most of the students I teach and my own fellows use wikipedia on a regular basis, justifying their laziness in searching for a more credible site with "Well, I just wanted a quick review."

However, using the best discussion of the reliability of wikipedia I could find (ironially, this was on wikipedia itself) says:

Viewing Wikipedia as fitting the economists' definition of a perfectly competitive marketplace of ideas, George Bragues (University of Guelph-Humber), examined Wikipedia's articles on seven top Western philosophers: Aristotle, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, Georg W.F. Hegel, Thomas Aquinas, and John Locke. Wikipedia's articles were compared to a consensus list of themes culled from 4 reference works in philosophy. Bragues found that, on average, Wikipedia's articles only covered 52% of consensus themes. No errors were found, though there were significant omissions.

Significant omissions are even more significant for "quick overviews" than for in depth research. I find it both sad and intensely demoralising that university students would resort to wikipedia as a source of information - the trust that is placed in this website is just amazing.

It is us, the youth of our world who are driving these developments, and it is ultimately us that decides what we are to do with them.

That said, Wikipedia itself is a highly democratic, and is passable at being a place to find summaries of non-contentious issues; further, many pages provide links and references to more reputable sources. There is even a somewhat haphazard project to place the entire contents of Encyclopaedia Brittanica that have passed into public domain. Use it, by all means, for it really is the largest reference of human knowledge in history, but understand the limits of such a democratic information source, where content is "dirty" and in fact could be plain false.

In the defense of the other aspects of web 2.0, it's not really all that bad. youTube has some fantastic content, such as the posting of Japanese content with copyright that does not apply outside of Japan, and many parodies, clip shows and amateur short films are very good examples of what people can do without the professional veneer of Hollywood and television networks.

As a portal for creative pursuits and distribution of our modern television-based culture, youTube is unmatched in brining material by the masses, for the masses, to the masses. Esmee Denters is actually pretty good, its her lucklustre imitators and clingers-on who clutter our mindspace. In some rather old news, youTube is proving so popular that even politicians are getting in on the act, with the democratic presidential hopefuls Obama and Clinton both putting themselves online, not to mention our own sell-out pols, Mr. John "Shameless" Howard and Mr. Kevin "Not Howard" Rudd.

In the US, blogs such as the dailykos and swampland are powerful forces for the democratisation of the Fourth Estate. This is an a industry increasingly controlled by uniform megalithic corporations with a stranglehold on our collective mind space. I hearken back to the time when journalists were independent people who believed in journalistic integrity, espoused principles of transparency and avoided tabloid sensationalism - if there ever was such a time. Perhaps credible journalistic blogs that aspire to such a cause will finally fulfill the dream of newspapers past - keeping the bastards running our nations and corporations honest.

It is the pitfalls of web 2.0 that I will attempt to avoid, and the great things about it that I shall endeavour to preserve. In the closing phrase of the introduction of Shakspeare's Romeo and Juliet:

"That which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend."

Therefore, my

Manifesto:
===========================================

1. Truth: The internet is the information superhighway. If information is power, let it be an honest and truthful power.

2. Betterment: The amateur should strive for betterment while retaining the honesty and passion that promoted the endeavour in the first place - there is no glory in mediocrity.

3. Awareness of Subjectivity: If something is an opinion, then it remains an opinion - opinions (of others, and your own) are intensely informative and contribute to everyone's overall understanding of a given situation, but opinion should be separated from fact, and never become dogma.

4. Uphold the Fourth Estate: Keep the bastards honest. Fight spin with truth. Find out for yourself. Advocate that which should be advocated. Speak out against what should be spoken out against.

5. Communication: Use the internet to achieve true communication and networking. Meet different people, engage in conversations worth having, connect for the purposes of enriching your own experiences, not entrenching your current opinions.

6. Technology: The web is for connecting, so connect! Link to other articles to support arguments, demonstrate abililty to make your content more accessible to people who want to check the validity of your own reasoning.

7. The Holistic Approach: Combine principles 1-6 to make yourself more tolerant, understanding, well-educated and a superior specimen of generation Y.

Thanks for reading my drivel.