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.