Orality...who'd've thought

I was thinking about what has made this class so fun compared to most other classes I have taken in my four years at MSU. The wild epithets, the class atmosphere and participation, the brilliance of Dr. Sexson, everyone’s extremely unique final projects…all of this comes to mind. But where I really think we need to delve, in order to understand the success of this class, is back to the beginning. And I mean, the very beginning. To the tradition of orality, upon which this class is, after all, based.   

I think we underestimate how the ‘oral tradition’ really seeps into our class. We talk about it as if it is something that exists in the past, or something that cannot exist under the designation of ‘tradition’ unless all the elements of an oral culture are present. But we engage unconsciously in the tradition of orality every day.

You think we’d be more aware of what is going on around us. But precepts of the oral tradition are so subtle they are hardly worth noticing. It’s not as if the oral cultures of the past stopped themselves one day and said “Hey, wait a minute, we’re an oral culture”. There was no designation to make; orality was culture. And still largely is. It is difficult to take notice of that which is inherent to us as humans, we associate everything that we do, think, feel, sense as us. It is only by the absence of orality that we would even recognize it had been there in the first place.

Orality is erratic, ever changing, permeating, evolving—it is hard to pin down. Those lists of things that we were set to memorize—Foer’s 15 random items, the nine muses, twelve tribes of Abraham, Ong’s nine processes of orality, Kubla Khan, everyone’s epithet, and now, Grace’s five things—may still seem random, though I think many of us understand the concept behind it, because, after all, they are no longer random. They have been integrated into the class psyche, into our individual memory palaces, and into our future associations. When anyone mentions the muses, will you be able to think of them without also thinking of this class? Without thinking of Megan Mother of the Muses? Or envisioning the palace in which you placed your muses? Which might getting you thinking about your grandmother’s house, and then perhaps the smell of that really great ravioli dish that she used to make, which would lead you to think about what you were going to have for dinner, then to thinking about your refrigerator, then maybe to Seth’s refrigerator, then to the horribly antagonistic character Jennifer of the Falling Waters modeled off of Seth for her story, then to Mikelby Sharpe, and then… what do you know…you are right back to this class.  

This is the essence of orality; the patterns of associations and relationships that weave together EVERYTHING; the underlying structure of the earth, which permeates all forms and is revealed in the psyche. Myth is the song the earth sings to itself.

We have been initiated not only into the timeless society of the mythtellers, but of the myth-listeners, too. We have become aware of the constant hum of the earth, which reverberates with all stories ending and beginning, crumbling and extending, renewing and restoring.  We have touched upon something here in class that is eternal, and that we are only a piece of, but that is all of us.

So go forth from this class, feeling refreshed in your initiation, in your understanding of the traditions which make the earth what it is. Never let the epithets die (sorry Ashley). And always remember to THINK MEMORABLE THOUGHTS.

Potential quiz questions from Yates ch. 7-17

Q: Where did Camillo originally erect his memory Theatre?

A: Venice

Q: Rather than coming out of the classical rhetoric tradition, Lull’s art of memory comes from ________.

A: The philosophical tradition

Q: What does Lull introduce into memory?

A: Movement

Q: Which letters of the alphabet does Lull use in his memory system?

A: B to K

Q: What three geometrical figures does Lull’s Art use?

A: Circle, triangle, square

Q: According to Yates, Lullism has become inextricably associated with ________.

A: Cabalism

Q: What is Bruno attempting to organize through contact with the cosmic powers?

A: The psyche

Q: Who deliberately gets rid of Imagination in his art of memory?

A: Ramus

Q: For Ramus, the return to dialect is a return to _____ from _____.

A: Light, shadows

Q: In Bruno’s view, the whole process of cognition is really only what one process?

A: the imaginative process

Q: Who is the only person to have left us with a visual record of the stage at the Globe Theatre?

A: Robert Fludd

Oh that Bruno, always picking and choosing what he wants

 I fell intently upon this paragraph while reading Jennifer of the Falling Water’s most recent post:

‘I find it interesting that Bruno admired Thomas Aquinas, but not as a religious leader, as a Magus. Oh that Bruno, always picking and choosing what he wants, and bending it around for his purposes. Perhaps we all do that to some degree.’

It reminded me of this quote from Yates:

 “The Renaissance occult philosopher had a great gift for ignoring differences and seeing only resemblances” (165).

Yates is referring to the flexible way in which the Renaissance occultists constructed their systems of memory. To use Camillo as an example, his memory theatre synthesized the occultist hermetic and cabalistic influences with classic rhetorical and mnemonic practices. (The point of synthesis between these traditions is a major destination in this chapter). Present still, is the Dantesque imagery which acts as “vestiges of older usages and interpretations of artificial memory” (163). But rather than serving a scholarly, moralist purpose—which is inherently narrow and self-containing—Camillo extends those artificial conceptions to inhabit a space that reaches beyond good or bad, heaven or hell. Flowing from Ficino’s use of talismans in his magic, Yates believes Camillo imbues his images with talismanic virtue—meaning—the images of his theatre contain a power that is both cosmological and unifying. Rather than using images as mere signifiers or end points in his art of memory, Camillo utilizes them as a vehicle or conductor through which memory is unified with the higher world. 

"his Theatre is the first great landmark in the story of the transformation of the art of memory through the Hermetic and Cabalist influences implicit in Renaissance Neoplatonism" (162).

“When Viglius asked Camillo concerning the meaning of the work as they both stood in the Theatre, Camillo spoke of it as representing all that the mind can conceive and all that is hidden in the soul—all of which could be perceived at one glance by the inspection of images” (158).

I believe this puts into perspective all we should be doing for our Museyrooms; picking and choosing what we want to incorporate from Yates, and the class discussions, and other’s suggestions, and bending/weaving/layering/mixing (to take advantage of Seth’s cake analogy) it all to create something that represents us individually; is representative of our imaginations.

-------Be like Camillo and Bruno, put together things like Thomas Aquinas and heliocentrism that don’t initially appear to mesh. Don’t be afraid that you are misinterpreting, it’s not possible—any interpretation involves the use of imagination, which is exactly the cylinder you should to be firing on. Be fearlessly imaginative; create something awesome--------

And as always, do not forget that this is a final project, the culmination of all we have come to learn in this semester. So cull and compile! Through the process of creating your museyroom, you are already engaging the one crucial tool that this class revolves around: your imagination.

Antony and Cleopatra Act II scene II

Here is the passage from Antony and Cleopatra that we spoke about in class, and which Walter gave a lovely summary of:


MECAENAS

    She's a most triumphant lady, if report be square to
    her.

DOMITIUS ENOBARBUS

    When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up
    his heart, upon the river of Cydnus.

AGRIPPA

    There she appeared indeed; or my reporter devised
    well for her.

DOMITIUS ENOBARBUS

    I will tell you.
    The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
    Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
    Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
    The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
    Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
    The water which they beat to follow faster,
    As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
    It beggar'd all description: she did lie
    In her pavilion--cloth-of-gold of tissue--
    O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
    The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
    Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
    With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem
    To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
    And what they undid did.

Movement for memory

It was interesting to hear Jennifer speak about how she was unable to memorize Kublai Khan by sitting still and going over the words. Instead she was compelled to move and pace around, encoding the words in her speech as well as her movements in order to internalize them.

I don't know why I hadn't thought of this before, but Jennifer reminded me of how I used to do something very similar. In the fifth grade, we were was tasked with memorizing definitions and sentences for six new vocabulary words each week. So brutal. Everyone hated it. But I had a method that kept me entertained while I memorized, which ensured that I aced every Monday morning vocab quiz.

I'd have the list of word and definitions written out before me on a piece of paper, and one by one I would repeat continuously the definitions out loud to myself, until I found some underlying rhythm in the words. From here I turned the definitions into a little jingle or sing-songy chant...which then of course I couldn't help dancing to...out on my front lawn (where I did my memorizing) for all my neighbors to see. Back and forth I'd hop, or from one foot to another, swaying side to side as I sang my vocabulary definitions.   What. a. sight.   I'm sure the neighborhood imagined me to be some sort of heathen child, chanting incantations to the earth spirits or some other imaginal being. When if they'd listened closer they'd realize all they were hearing was the definitions of some lofty fifth grade words; Calamity. Caprice. Static. Aloof. Etc etc.

In any case...all that bouncing around and rhythmic stressing locked those memorizations in my mind. It was really the only way I could do it. I guess I figured that if I had to memorize all those super boring words I might as well make it entertaining. What I didn't realize--of course, how could I?--was that by engaging both my body and voice in the act of memorization, I was channeling the traditions of ancient oral cultures. 

To skip back to Ong ch. 3, he states "it should be noted that oral memory differs significantly from textual memory in that oral memory has a high somatic component...The oral word, as we have noted, never exists in a simply verbal context, as written word does. Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body" (66,67).

Rhythmic movement, like rhythmic or stressed speaking, helps to structure mnemonic processes. Much as images act as visual signifiers to trigger the memory, so the sensations of movement and speech create alternate sensory reminders that can serve a similar purpose. It's amazing to me that as I child I was able to understand this connection. Then again, as we have mentioned before, children have a special capacity for these things which diminish drastically over time. Included in that, is the development of a certain self-consciousness. Could I go out in front of my house now and chant my verses of Kublai Khan in the same free and unabashed way I did my vocabulary words? Probably not.

And now that I've mentioned it...I'm sure I have just encumbered myself with an assignment for next week...

"Ong"-liners

To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance (81)

Writing heightens conciousness (81)

technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life (82)

everyone lives each day in a frame of abstract computed time (96)

Texts assimilate utterance to the human body (99)

the alphabet, the ruthlessly efficient reducer of sound to space (99)

The word in its natural, oral habit is part of a real, existential space (100)

Writing is a solipsistic operation (100)

'the writer's audience is always fiction' (100)

Ong's one-liners

I scanned through the text I highlighted in Orality and Literacy so far and picked out these gems:


"Written words are residue" (11)

"Writing separates the knower from the know" (45)

"Sound exists only as it is going out of existence" (71)



Surely there are many more to come...

A Passage from Ong

I found this passage at the end of Ch. 3 in Orality and Literacy extremely striking in terms of Ong's reflections on the reality and movement of both Time and words:

"Sound is an event in time, and 'time marches on', relentlessly, with no stop or division. Time is seemingly tamed if we treat is spatially on a calendar or the face of a clock, where we can make it appear as divided into separate units next to each other. But this also falsifies time. Real time has no divisions at all, but is uninterruptedly continuous: at midnight yesterday did not click over into today. No one can find the exact point of midnight, and if it is not exact, how can it be midnight? And we have no experience of today as being next to yesterday, as it is represented on a calendar. Reduced to space, time seems more under control--but only seems to be, for real, indivisible time is what carries us to real death...Oral man is not so likely to think of words as 'signs', quiescent visual phenomena. Homer refers to them with the standard epithet 'winged words'--which suggests evanescence, power, and freedom: words are constantly moving, but by flight, which is a powerful form of movement, and one lifting the flier free of the ordinary, gross, heavy, 'objective' world" (Ong 75-6).

Sound is fragile and fleeting, and thus too are words. Yet, at the same time, they are powerful and resounding. "Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body" (Ong 67). Words are an extension of ourselves, an extension into another dimension of time which never stops or is divided. If we continue in time, up until our 'real death' of course, how far do the words continue, how far do they carry? As Ong refers to sound as an "event in time", I am inclined to believe that it is only that, a momentary burst of sense and thought, ended as fast as it happened. That is the greatest difference between the oral and written cultures: the immortality of words.

Where the chirographic tradition preserves its past and present through the written word, the oral tradition is necessarily more selective in the preservation of its culture. What the oral poet creates evaporates, if not repeated and internalized by another. And even then, it can never exist as it did the moment it was spoken. It is impossible to preserve the inflection, gestures, and emanating emotion that accompany an individual word or phrase in an individual moment in time.  They represent something more active and essentially human than a scribed sign. Spoken word walks a line between sense and thought (in a way that written word cannot, is completely unable); ultimately, it is the culmination of the two.

While reading the above excerpt from Ong, I couldn't help but think of this passage from Burnt Norton:

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

Memory (mneme) and recollection (anamnesis)

    I heard that we were beginning to discuss the concept of anamnesis in class on Friday, and while it has been introduced in my previous classes with Dr. Sexson, I find it important to think back (hah) and reexamine my conception in light of the theme of this class: memory.

“What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?”

    Prospero asks this of Miranda when she is trying to recall her childhood before exile on the island. The simple way for Prospero to initiate this conversation would been to have said, “What else do you remember?”. But as we know, Memory isn’t about what is simple. It is about the memorable, the extraordinary, the convoluted imagery and phrasing of such things as “what seest thou else”. Prospero is asking Miranda to pierce the surface of her consciousness and dig for something deeper and essential to her existence. (Miranda remembers that she once had four or five women that tended her, “Thou hadst, and more, Miranda” Prospero replies. How many do you think she had? Probably nine)

By ‘thinking backwards’ we are thinking of the past as the source of the present. We are reaching past a temporal frame into the realm of the mythic.  

    Anamnesis is derived from the Greek roots ana (meaning “re”) and mimnḗskein (meaning “to call to mind”) (dictionary.com). So it denotes the recollection or remembrance of the past. What then is the difference between memory (mneme) and recollection (anamnesis)? I think, most basically, if anamnesis is the process or act of remembering, then the memory must be what is represented by the culmination of those processes of recollection, or the faculty of an individual in regards to those processes.

    Where does ‘memorizing’ fit in then?  The verb for “learning” or committing to memory? And further, the act of recitation, which delves into the recollection of what was memorized?  I’m not sure.

    From the Wikipedia article on Anamnesis: “He [Socrates] suggests that the soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is actually in the soul from eternity, but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the shock of birth. What one perceives to be learning, then, is actually the recovery of what one has forgotten. (Once it has been brought back it is true belief, to be turned into genuine knowledge by understanding.) And thus Socrates (and Plato) sees himself, not as a teacher, but as a midwife, aiding with the birth of knowledge that was already there in the student.”

    Through this understanding, knowledge is not something to be learned…but to be regained. The initial discussion centers on the existence of universals and universal understanding. Is there a source other than the accumulation of perceptions that creates for us a basic understanding of our universe? Is it the structure of nature and the human brain that guides our senses and perceptions, or is it the immortality of the soul that allows for progression from sense perception to reasoning?

These are obviously huge questions.

    More lucrative for our purposes than the deliberation of epistemological and/or ontological assertions of anamnesis though, I think, is the consideration of remembering versus forgetting. The two initially seem opposing, but are yet both integral to memory and anamnesis. Anamnesis is remembering that which you have forgotten. And is not memory affected by that which you remember as much as that which you have forgotten?

 You already know everything, you have just forgotten it.

“In one way or another, recollecting implies having forgotten…forgetting is equivalent to ignorance, slavery (captivity), and death” (Myth and Reality, Mircea Eliade).

You all must go out and read Mircea Eliade, it is seriously imperative.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a mythological lesson of the day (gathered from wiki, of course):  

·         River of Lethe, one of the five rivers of Hades, and whoever drank from it experienced forgetfulness.

·         Lethe was also the name of the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion, with whom the river was often identified.

·         In Classical Greek, the word Lethe literally means "oblivion", "forgetfulness," or "concealment". It is related to the Greek word for "truth", aletheia (ἀλήθεια), meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment".

List of 51 things

Being so 'Sweet & Spicy', I figured it was all too appropriate that I memorize...what else but...a list of spices. I'm going for practicality as well as being outrageously apropos, because it happens also that I love to cook, so the memorization of this list will undoubtedly prove to be useful. The strategy? For spices that are more difficult to memorize I'll try to incorporate their actual properties in the image I create for them. For example, Marjoram, which has grayish-green leaves and is a member of the mint family--so I'll picture a soldier in his gray-green colored uniform saluting and saying "Major I am" while marching in place on a pile of York peppermint patties. Yeah, this can totally work. (Note: The actual list here is 60 things long, but it pains me to give up the symmetry)
Allspice Alum Arrowroot
Anise Seed
Basil
Bay Leaves
Black Caraway
Chamomile Capsicums Caraway Seed
Cardamom Cayenne
Cinnamon
Celery Seed
Chervil Chile Powder Chinese Five Spice
Chives
Cilantro
Cinnamon
Cloves
Coriander Cream of Tartar Curry
Cumin
Dill Seed
Dill Weed
Fennel
Garam Masala
Ginger
Horseradish Juniper
Lavender Lemongrass Mace
Marjoram
Mustard
Nutmeg
Oregano
Paprika Parsley
Black Pepper
White Pepper
Peppercorns
Peppermint Pumpkin Pie Spice
Poppy Seed Red Pepper
Rosemary Saffron
Sage Salt
Savory
Sesame Seed
Spearmint Star Anise
Tarragon
Thyme Turmeric
Vanilla Bean