AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
A discussion of two short stories, "She Unnames Them" by Ursula Le Guin and “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon,” by JG Ballard. Lots of interesting resonances are discovered.
Orality and Literacy came up, they are greatly appreciative of the utterly radical difference between oral and literate cultures.
Towards the end, conversation veered (as it tends to) into.a defense of the Imaginal against its reductionist enemies. Mentioned the sources for the idea in some Sufi philosophy, which sounds worth knowing about...but not on the web page, they are usually so good with references.
Alan Moore in Promethea talked in a similar way about what he called "the immateria", but it's the same idea, a world that is imaginary in some sense but also perfectly real, because it can be experienced. And maybe it's exactly what Jung meant by the collective unconscious and its population of archetypes .
Something about the idea irks me, I'm not sure why, I am certainly not against the imagination and I'm have zero problems with the notion that immaterial things like ideas can exert real-world causality – I mean, I'm a programmer, I do it for a living. Maybe it's framing it as a separate world? That smacks of dualism, it's just the mind/body split projected onto the cosmos. The imagination becomes something like Bali or some other foreign land where one may visit, admire, and absorb culture but you always return to prosaic default reality. Or a TAZ where a different and better logic makes things go. A Separate Reality, as Carlos Casteneda called it.