South by Northwest
Media-ecological speculations inspired by B.W. Powe’s Mysteria
South is South, and North is North
The South floods the body with sensations. Life happens outdoors, skin exposed, emotions expressed. The North wraps you in layers—clothing, walls, distance. Sensation narrows; the world is filtered through insulation and enclosure.
But do Southerners really recognize the sensations nature pours into them? One of McLuhan’s favorite proverbs was that the fish is not aware of the water it swims in. To recognize the water, the metaphorical fish needs to be pulled out of it. The environment is only perceivable when an anti-environment is present. Southerners would feel the pull of sun and warmth when they lack them in northern latitudes. And ah, what a storm of sensations a Northerner experiences in the South.
Do digital media blunt people’s sensitivity to the world similarly in the South and in the North? I think not. The South surrounds people with strong natural stimuli and keeps the sensorium engaged with the environment. However much digital dopamine replaces the stimuli of natural sensations, the South still offers something to celebrate the body and to compete with digital dopamine. On the contrary, as the North naturally limits bodily exposure to the environment and others, the digital affordance of being “alone together” fits the North rather well.
As the South dictates tactility, sensuality, and close bodily proximity, with all those hugs, touches, and emotional verbomotorics, social distancing would feel strange or even insulting there. The Covid virus likely spread faster in such conditions. At the same time, the lockdown likely had a harsher psychological effect in the South.
Noticeably, there was no particular need for social distancing during Covid in Sweden. They did not even enact a lockdown. People there tend to keep their distance naturally.
The pandemic made Southerners into Northerners.
For a Northerner visiting the South and trapped in the Covid lockdown, the pandemic created a perfect anti-environmental storm of perception. Canadian poet, essayist, and media scholar B.W. Powe found himself in the center of this perfect storm. The overwhelming (for a Northerner) and freeing Southern sensuality was abruptly locked inside family farmhouse, pushing environmental perception into an anti-environmental shock twice: first from Northern to Southern, then from Southern to confined by the lockdown.
Powe turned this bizarre and intimate experience into Mysteria, a book compiled from reflections, observations, notes, tales, and poems recorded in Spain shortly before, during, and after the lockdown.
But what is the mysteria Remembering silenced Cordoba and moonlit Sierras remembering dazed people In a billion cuarentenas in small rooms with many open windows our struggle for radiant life
Sabbatical into the pandemic
In one of the few prose pieces in Mysteria, a letter he sent from his sabbatical in Spain to his home university in Toronto, Professor Powe explains the circumstances behind the book. He had traveled to Cordoba, where his Spanish wife’s family lived, to write and study in the ancient library. Each day he walked across the old bridge into the old city to the quiet university library, where he worked on a “book on melancholia and the media.” Then everything suddenly changed.
The virus hit Spain in March and hit hard. People in Cordoba were ordered to stay home, and the town became “deserted, spectral.” Powe, his wife, and their little daughter moved to his wife’s family farmhouse and stayed there through the quarantine. They spoke with other relatives and friends over the fences.
The Spanish sun and the surrounding Sierras were beautiful, but the news from both Spain and Canada grew harsher day by day. Public life stopped, the economy plummeted, healthcare workers were overwhelmed, police patrolled the streets, and people stayed inside their homes and learned to live with social distancing, valuing each outing not only for groceries but for the simple chance to step outside — hard for everyone, but especially in the South.
Still, Powe writes, they had good things. Three generations lived under one roof, and they were fortunate to enjoy being together as a family. Their little daughter improved her Spanish by talking to her Abuelo and Abuela (grandpa and grandma), and Powe himself drew a lot from his in-laws, bringing their fables and parables into the book.
Bruce William Powe, or B.W., as he prefers friends and colleagues to call him, is known for interweaving poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. A former student of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto in the 1970s, he became a renowned Canadian poet, novelist, essayist, and media scholar, and a prominent figure in today’s Toronto School of Communication. Some critics say Mysteria has become his magna opus; in this poetically blended volume of perception and conception, he has perfected his visionary and transcendental style of writing.
A Canadian in Andalusia (In Search of a Lost Chord)
…
Isolation brings intensities. And the isolations seem to bring wonder.
***
Retreat from the library—shrink behind doors and walls—don a mask—screen yourselves—
surrender to safeguards—caution the air—Between the reader and the writer: negotiating meaning
Mysteria is not your (or my) usual kind of reading about media. It doesn’t offer categories or taxonomies, though you could certainly draw some out of it. It’s more meditative reading: you may not grasp every intended meaning, but you can ride the wave of it. Eventually, the book turns the (lucky) reader into Woody Allen’s character in his 1983 movie Zelig, who takes the shape of whoever he interacts with. To catch the author’s brainwaves, you need to find resonating vibrations.
Imagine a reader capable of reaching all the corners of the author’s imagination, able to grasp all the poet’s feelings, hints, and allusions. Can they be transmitted through words without loss? Or do the words, however masterfully composed, create a different picture in the reader’s mind simply because it is a different mind? Can a reader say “copy that”?
That would be the map completely covering the territory. It recalls the puzzle of representation versus simulation that Baudrillard pondered. He discussed it through Borges’s fable about a cartographer trying to draw an exact map of the Empire. For Baudrillard, if Borges’s cartographer were to draw a map equaling the territory, it would create a simulacrum—a simulation swallowing reality. That would be the true, fullest—and impossible—reading of Powe’s enigmatic poetry-philosophy.
(Fifteen years before Borges and fifty before Baudrillard, Alfred Korzybski stated that “the map is not the territory,” pointing out the deficiency and distortion of semantic means. But Borges and Baudrillard, likely knowing nothing of Korzybski’s prohibition, played with the idea of the map fully matching the territory and arrived at two sides of the same coin: the absurdity of superrealism (Borges) and the reality of simulation (Baudrillard)—but that’s a different story.)
However, we earthbound cartographers of poetic worlds can only do what we can—poorly picturing the patches of land we’ve comprehended and fantasizing about the rest.
What do musical notes say when they’re not being played? What do notes for music utter when musicians aren’t reading them and the performers and conductors aren’t releasing what they hold inside? ... Your fear is to pass away unknown. To be unheard. Listen, after the music fades into dark atmospheres, you think we retreat into pages, into silent marks, but we ballad and babble and boast and harp and solo.
Conceptualizing perception
Media—especially the main pandemic media like the screen, the wire, and the wireless—appear in Mysteria, but they are not its main focus. Mysteria is centered on perception. The environment—first ancient, sunny, windy, and sandy, then deserted but still culturally the same—shapes that perception.
Perception shapes how we think and understand—one of the central themes in the late Marshall McLuhan’s work. He argued that the alphabet, and later print, pushed the West toward a “visual bias.” Writing emphasized visual focus and “inner vision,” numbing the other senses and thus creating environmental detachment. The alphabet and printing deepened this through cognitive habits of fragmentation and uniformity. These sensory-cognitive effects helped form the rationality, abstraction, and conceptualization essential to the Western mind.
As a result, the West became less attuned to perceptual wholeness. The emphasis on visual focus, with the other senses numbed, rebalanced the sensorium away from the acoustic, the tactile, the multisensory field. This produced cognitive alienation—from nature and from one’s own perceptual immediacy.
With this analysis, McLuhan called for relearning a more holistic, multisensory perception to counter the detachment, fragmentation, and uniformity brought on by the alphabet and print. He also held that artists and poets naturally focus on perception and therefore act as anti-environments, pulling the fish of cognition out of its habitual waters.
In Powe’s Mysteria, the North is fascinated by the South, but then both are sent into quarantine, creating conditions that were unfortunate and, at the same time, strangely ideal for a poet reflecting on perception. The confinement sharpened perception (already sharpened by the intercontinental change of scenery).
Cast your ideas aside And play what you sense, Only what your fingertips and hands, you wrists and arms Want and recall, only what lips whisper, What your breathing knows. Cast your concepts away, Play from exploring intuition. You’ll sing or perform a rose, a tide, a cloud, a willow, The wings, the full moon, the morning sun, and the darkling shore You knew in her womb sea.
Unelettering
Shortly before the lockdown, in the local library, B.W. came across a 13th-century idea that turned out to fit well with the media ecology of the digital age. In the texts of the renowned medieval Sufi philosopher Ibn ’Arabi, B.W. found references to “unlettering.” From that discovery grew one of the central themes of Mysteria.
Unlettering is a passage from learned, literate knowledge to a direct, intuitive reception of truth that mirrors the Prophet’s “unlettered” access to divine knowledge, attainable only after one has internalized and then moved beyond the structures of literacy.
And Unlettering appeared to mean peeling away your preconceptions seeking what’s momentary without a gloss unfiltering your clogged senses breaking from a domineering concept of reality unlearning what you’re told to perceive cracking the containers of inhibition unframing your ideas for unsealing life hearing a breaching voice making yourself vulnerable to receive what recreates you and you recreate unmooring your senses so signs appear acknowledging the role of ignorance
let your attention be caught by rippling water... break the mirrors that can’t show fluid selves... let your river bear transparent lightning... go without an anchor from a debris shore to the sea wash...
Unlettering is clearly not about orality; it’s a peculiar form of postliteracy, based on literate reflection but seeking a deliterate perception. To achieve unlettering, one must be literate and aware of the effects of literacy—effects fully recognized only in the mid-20th century thanks to McLuhan, Havelock, Ong, and others.
Now, with digital orality, the whole world seems to be moving toward unlettering. But unlettering in Ibn ’Arabi’s work is very different from the decline of literacy brought on by digital media today. For Ibn ’Arabi—and for Powe after him—unlettering is a spiritual insight: a literate awareness of how literacy distorts perception and an effort to reach a pure, mystical way of seeing the world without letters. On the Internet, “unlettering” is an unintended effect of the reversal of text into texting. With emojis and predictive keyboards, along with interactivity and impulsiveness (hence digital orality), texting draws minds and cultures into unlettering without any promise of spiritual or artistic insight.
Media, migrations, and pandemics
Great media cause great migrations, and great migrations cause great epidemics.
Before printing, manuscript copying accumulated errors. Printing enabled market-driven correction feedback, increasing the accuracy and uniformity of literate production. The precision of maps increased drastically, turning sea exploration into the Age of Discovery. A new wave of global migration followed, bringing syphilis into Europe and numerous deadly diseases into the New World.
Telegraph and radio made the exchange of news and prices instantaneous, creating a global market and leading to imperialism and world wars. Information about overseas opportunities triggered a new global wave of migration. About 30–35 million Europeans moved to the US alone between 1870 and 1920, the largest and most concentrated voluntary migration wave in recorded history. The stress of migration was aggravated by WWI, leading to another global pandemic, known as Spanish flu.
The internet not only supplied information about opportunities abroad but also let people share it directly with one another across borders. Through friends and relatives, millions could get a sense of how people like them live in better places. Additionally, the emancipation of authorship shattered authority around the world, leading to Twitter revolutions and religious conflicts, destabilizing the third world and producing millions of refugees. Finally, digital systems increased bureaucratic capacities for processing larger volumes of people.
As a result, the internet led to a new global wave of migration and displacement, setting a new historical record. According to WHO, about 1 billion people (one in eight humans) now live outside their region of birth, including 281 million international migrants—and these are just official data.
The Covid pandemic followed.
But this was also the pandemic that set up a new global migration—the human resettlement into the digital. Forced by fear and lockdowns, millions of people relocated their work, social life, and leisure online. Many have never fully returned to the real world and have remained digital for most of their time and in most of their activities.
The pandemic was a historical digital event, a culmination of the 2010s’ long digital decade (from iPhone and the “like” button in 2007 to ChatGPT in 2022) that switched human evolution from a biological path to a digital one.
The final frontier
While everything cries, wires, leaves, screen savers, street debris, rivers, seeds, mists.
The world barding, signalling and hymning, suffering and breaking.The Covid made Southerners into Northerners.
But the Covid also made hundreds of millions into Southerners—digital Southerners.
Just as Southerners live exposed to sensation, digital dwellers perceive digital reality in its nakedness, impulsively and emotionally, through instantaneous interactions. Online, people react to everything immediately, through the digital sensorium enhanced by the affordances of click and like. They express emotions using digital surrogates of faces, gestures, and even YELLING.
The digital South does not open the body to nature and others—it exposes the soul and the mind to everything, as everything is just one click away. Users remain numb to physical sensations, as in literacy, but at the same time they are environmentally immersed, as in orality—but the environment is digital. That’s why it’s digital orality.
Digital immersion overwhelms perceptions and numbs conceptions. Text reverses into texting and enables spontaneous and self-driven unlettering – cognitive, not spiritual. “What took several thousand years to complete has taken us only a few decades to reverse: the West now bathes in the emotions of postliteracy,” said McLuhan observing the “empathic involvement” brought by electricity 50 year ago as if about today.[1]
Poetically driven unlettering that seeks making sense of perceptions may be a meaningful alternative to senseless, “organic,” platform-benefitting unlettering, driven by digital media.
making up my mind to give this mystery to you inside the waves and crowding of our days-nights encrypted available spaces doomsday scrolls bubble rooms Al and iClouds collating our spirits and names, while infections permeate fragile barriers, I send greetings from a town outside Toronto... far near
speaking from inside vibrations seeking to interlink us, when we’re communicants thru satellites and screens and Instagram profiles and earbud murmurs, expressing the wish that we could find each other in person... near far (B.W. Powe, Mysteria, 2025)
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
[1] McLuhan, Marshall, and McLuhan, Eric. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. P.4.