Waking Life / Ong

I recently watched "Waking Life" which is a independent, animated film about a man who shuffles through a dream meeting various people and discussing the meanings and purposes of the universe. Yes-- it is very philosophical by nature but stick with me. One of the encounters the dreaming man has with a woman reminded me of the conversation we had last Friday ( I think). Professor Sexton somewhat ranting about clerks at grocery stores asking if "he found everything all right?" I managed to find the script from the movie online (the red font is the woman, blue is the man). Also notice the reference to my own epithet...

- Excuse me. - Excuse me. 

Hey. Could we do that again? 

I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know? 

I mean, it's like we go through life...

with our antennas bouncing off one other,

continuously on ant autopilot,

with nothing really human required of us.

Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there.

All action basically for survival.

All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along... 

in an efficient, polite manner.

" Here's your change." " Paper or plastic?" "Credit or debit?"

"You want ketchup with that?"

I don't want a straw. I want real human moments.

I want to see you. I want you to see me.

I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be an ant, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, I know.

I don't want to be an ant, either.

Yeah, thanks for kind of, like, jostling me there.

I've been kind of on zombie autopilot lately.

I don't feel like an ant in my head, but I guess I probably 

look like one.

It's kind of like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people 

meeting on a road...

And instead of just passing and glancing away, 

they decided to accept what he calls 

"the confrontation between their souls."

It's like, um-- like freeing the brave

reckless gods within us all.

Then it's like we have met

I have absolutely fallen in love with this interaction, conversation, idea, 

whatever you want to call it. For reasons I can 

only speculate, I too like the dreaming man, have felt like a "zombie 

on autopilot" this semester. It seems like I have 

perhaps lost an aspect of humanity in my own life and am simply 

going through the motions. Walter Ong says it perfectly: 

“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer
 outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. 
Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a
 human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a 
landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I 
hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every directions at 
once; I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, 
establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence... You can 
immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse 
yourself similarly in sight. 

    By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a 
unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a 
taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting 
together." 

-Orality and Literacy 

 After reading this exert out of Ong's novel I came to a rather brilliant conclusion. 

This semester I have been struggling to 

apply myself. Failing to keep up on readings and truly engage myself in class 

discussion has led to the "cancellation" of 

some of my senses. Rather than embrassing sound, location, smell and 

every sensation in existence, as Ong suggests, 

I have been letting information pass right through me. Without applying 

myself, there is no way I can immerse myself in 

sound, only sight.