resonance

I really need to do some reading of Marshall McLuhan. I was introduced to McLuhan via one of my favorite books, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, who I sadly just learned died last October.

One of the ideas that McLuhan contributed to (and which Postman described in his book), is the idea of resonance. I'm probably going to botch this...so let's go with a quote from a similar thinker, Tony Schwartz:

Resonance takes place when the stimuli put into our communications evoke meaning in a listener or viewer. What we say in the communication has no meaning in itself. The meaning of our communication is what a listener or viewer gets out of the interaction with the stimuli.

Something like an image of Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presly can have resonance. Resonance can be a means of lending power to other ideas via association, such as (my observation) when a young woman dresses up in a distinctive fashion of the day (maybe to look like, say, Avril Lavinge) to capitalize on the resonance in the minds of her...viewers. (Honestly I'm not usually fooled by this, but occasionally I will find myself regarding a woman as somewhat more attractive on the basis of some odd resonance like that.)

THE REASON I BRING ALL THIS UP is that, being a skinny guy, I work out and lift weights in order to better asymptote the modern physical ideal. And I recently attained what one friend called the "respectable goal" of being able to bench-press your body weight. (Actually, I bench-pressed my body-weight plus the bar, due to my gym-respectability-rites-of-passage-naivete'.) And, remembering the advice of dating guru David DeAngelo that "the only place hair is good is on your head," I decided to experiment with the Lord's Temple a bit by shaving off my chest hair in partial tribute to the governor of California. (Please note that I am not a Republican, nor do I wish to formulate an opinion, right now, of Arnold's governorship.)

And upon doing so, the "resonance" between knowing what "properly buff" should look like and seeing my now-hairless, tiny-"pec"-endowed, ab-less front enabled me to realize that...I've got a long way to go. Put differently, when there was hair there, there was no resonance with Arnold, and I thought I was doing pretty well. The falling of the hair was apparently coincident with the falling of scales from my eyes.

...Time for a Twinkie^(tm).
-Scott

P.S.- By the way, I'm also a not-yet-fan of (the little I've seen from) Ezra Pound, and interestingly enough, Pound and McLuhan had a correspondence. I like this quote from McLuhan on some of Pound's poetry; I think it may be as relevant today as it was over 50 years ago:

The prime diffficulty of your poetry-The Cantos-so far as contemporary readers are concerned is the intensely masculine mode. This is an age of psychologism and womb-worship. Your clear resonance and etched contours are intolerable for twilight readers who repose only in implications. (16 June 1948)