On the Improper Propagation of Ideas

While I generally am interested in mythology, shamanism, personal and cultural enlightenment, etc. I am also, and perhaps more, interested in rational and well-written discourse. I am often flabbergasted by the mummery that passes for philosophy (the postmodern deconstructionism of Derrida and ilk) and religion (the new-agey second-rate Castaneda-ism) these days. The problem being that one can't really turn to science to talk about all the intangible, emotio-cultural, and even otherworldly concepts that also need to be grappled with. The problem also being that language is a frail, frail invention, and that in a world entirely consumed by the reproduction of the word it is almost entirely possible to say something that isn't slanted immediately into a thousand quite subjective perspectives. In other words, there is no objective dialogue. To paraphrase José Donoso, the author of a fabulous novel I'm currently reading, the limitation of would-be writers is that they believe there in the existence of a reality to portray. This is why I love stories. Unlike modern attempts at journalism, which fail because they can never be objective enough, literature by its very nature takes on the perspective of a narrator, and any information or ideas couched in the story are almost more palatable for being couched in what we already read as a biased perspective. Narrators lie, they can be obsessive or misinformed, and we love them all the more for it, qualities that would make us cringe in a journalist.