Transiency and the Culture of Plastic

Our post-modern era is characterized by increasing dislocation and fragmentation. The sense of permanence and constancy of old, is exchanged for temporality and fluidity, i.e., a condition of transiency. Not only do cars, trains and planes carry us across continents faster than most people once could imagine – perhaps with the exception of Jules Verne and a few others, but we travel cyberspace in zero-time. Speed in the era of transiency, makes the soulful road of the wanderer seem hopelessly obsolete.

Likewise, we are over-exposed to stimuli, information and images: once upon a time we would sit down and quietly look through the pictures of the past, the reminders of our childhood, enjoy a memory, recall days long gone by, share thoughts and feelings from a time that could be brought alive by the one photo from that day. Today, we are flooded by digital photos, numbered almost into infinity. Rarely do we remain more than seconds to glance at each photo, and even more rarely do we return to them – often unaware that what warrants no return, loses its soul.

It is by reflecting on the events in which we partake that we induce them with depth and meaning, but speed and superficiality seem to supersede depth and reflection.

We are flooded with images, but the onslaught of external images disrupts the flow of internal imagery. Excessive exteriority impinges upon the imagery of interiority. Read more here, or at the Fisher King Press Newsletter.

If you are interested in reading other book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and published papers of mine, you will find a compilation at OPEN ENDS.

Certain entries require login. Username and password can be purchased by using PayPal, or at Hebrew Psychology ($15, 46.75 NIS).

Among the articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries you can access by login are:

-- Erel Shalit, Silence is the Center of Feeling
-- Jerusalem as Metaphor
-- Worship of Transiency
-- Dreams in the Bible
-- Sacrifice of Isaac
-- Jerusalem encyclopedia entry
-- Story of requiem
-- Self, Meaning & the Transient Personality
-- Recollection and recollectivization
-- lakes of memory - review of adagio & lamentations
-- Jerusalem - Psyche & the City
-- with James Hall, The complex object

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