Sigur Ros

I love Sigur Ros, they are the soundtrack to many special moments in my life, so when Sexson mentioned them in class the other day my heart fluttered a bit. Last year Sigur Ros came out with a new album, their fifth, which was I would say a little more rock than the others, which have an ethereal, ambient sound that lulled me to sleep many nights. They sing in Icelandic- their country of origin- but also in a language called "Hopelandic" that they made up (to date, only one songs on all 5 of their albums is sung in English, although they have a huge fan base in the US and UK). Sigur Ros says that their music is meant to convey the beauty of their homeland; a "sound-scape". And As you can see in the video link to a song off their album "Takk..", the sound does seem to be tied to the earth, perhaps in the rhythm and movement of the earth and the volcanic landscape of their country. It makes me think of what Sean Kane was saying in "Wisdom of the Mythtellers" about how originally, myth served to express the emotions of the earth. To me it seems like with their music, Sigur Ros is expressing the majestic volcanic beauty of the landscape of their home country. In that sense, they are making mythical music.

http://sigur-ros.co.uk/band/disco/takk-glosoli.php

(Oral) Tradition and the Individual Talent

My Paper:

As a poet and a critic, T.S. Eliot filled two seeming opposed roles in the literary world. In both his poetry and his critical works, Eliot expressed a belief that the nature of time is cyclical, and that the past, present and future influence each other. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is one such work of literary criticism, wherein Eliot argues that a poet does not write in a vacuum, but rather with every new piece of literature he writes, he dips into the tradition set before him by the literary canon of the past. That is, his new work would not be possible without the old. However, Eliot, in writing about the inevitable all-inclusive nature of poetry, excluded something very important. In referring to capital T “Tradition” in this essay, Eliot confines the term to the literary canon, ignoring the fact that without the Oral Tradition set before it, the literary tradition could not have possibly came into existence.
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot seeks to define the notion of “Tradition” as we know it. While he acknowledges that an “existing order” constitutes capital T “Tradition”, he fails to mention an essential part of that order: the Oral Tradition on which it was built, the Oral Tradition which we delved into in class this semester.
“Tradition”, Eliot explains, has historical connotations. However, it doesn’t limit “history” to what’s behind us: “it involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Eliot, “Tradition”). Why would Eliot stop at literature? The reason why a course like “Oral Traditions” is offered for English majors and why the topic of “Orality and Literacy” has been analyzed by a multitude of scholars is because our oral past is so very pertinent to our literate present: a vital part of that “simultaneous order”.
We spend the majority of our studies as English majors being trained and taught in the tradition of great authors like Shakespeare and Milton; the authors of great literature whom Eliot pays homage to in his essay. We take survey courses in order to discover “the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors” (Eliot, “Tradition”), courses wherein we encounter works like T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. Most of the time the tradition we study in pursuit of our English degree is, like Eliot’s concept of tradition in the essay, limited to the chirographic and typographic canon. We don’t pay nearly enough attention to all the unnamed storytellers for which the literate tradition arose in the first place. We need to continue in the interest of this class and keep investigating into the Oral Tradition, extending our definition of Tradition beyond Eliot’s, and rediscover our oral roots.
One might ask themselves why, in a class called “oral traditions”, have we ended up devoting so much time to memory theatres, memory systems, discussing the phenomenon of memory and traditions of memorizing. The answer would be because memory is something we own as individuals, but also collectively, on a cultural scale. The way remember can be a personal thing- reflecting on our lives memories, etc- but it is also something we experience collectively as human beings. In remembering our oral roots, we gain deeper insight to our modern minds today, as well as where we are going. And when all this is considered, we can see time, memory, and tradition as Eliot saw it: completely infinite.
Every piece of our culture needs a memory device to keep going; to progress. Data is kept and history is recorded so that we have something to refer back to, so we don’t lose the knowledge we’ve established, so we can keep moving forward. Without the past in mind, we couldn’t exist in the present or advance into the future. We are perpetuated by memory. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot makes this assertion in the context of authorship.
What Eliot didn’t say in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” he made up for in “Little Giddy”, the fourth poem of “The Four Quartets” where he acknowledges the interconnected nature of the written canon he analyzed in that essay. “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning; Every poem an epitaph” (Eliot, “Four Quartets”). He closes the poem with some of the most important words to any English major: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (Eliot, “Four Quartets”).
This statement shares the theme of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in asserting that the past is not confined to history, the past is in our present and our future. In all that we read, and learn, and do, the goal is to “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (Eliot, “Four Quartets”). This is the deepest essence of remembering: to recall, in light of our most current selves, in our most current mindset, notions of the past. We bring the past to the present.
The past, the present and the future play off of each other in all aspects of human existence; “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new” (Eliot, “Tradition”). We have learned that our current transition from a literate culture to a cyber one mirrors the initial transition from orality to literacy. In studying that long-sense crossed boundary between oral consciousness and the literate mind, we better understand the modifications that are currently taking place in the literate world. It’s all relevant. Past, present, future; Oral, literate, technological: it’s all relevant.We are on the verge of completing a course in “Oral Traditions”. At this time I, like Eliot, feel the desire to analyze what constitutes this “Tradition” that we refer to. When Eliot defines “Tradition” in his essay as “the existing order” I think he leaves something vital out of the order he refers to. In speaking of the literary canon and the literary tradition that haunts any new author, he fails to mention that this order began in the oracular and progressed from there to the literate world as we now know it.

Cleaning up my rhetorical act

One of the many ways that this class has forever changed me will be in my word choice. iIt has been months since I have used the word "literally" when I am speaking. I cannot do it! Every time it springs into my mind, I must replace it with "actually" or another substitute before it leaves my mouth. I guess I have gained a new understanding of "literal" in Oral Traditions, and suddenly statements like "That book was so good, I literally could not put it down" just sound silly to me.
Unless it's on paper, of course.

March 5, 2009

I was working at the coffee shop thursday morning when a man came in (an eccentric art proffesor of a man) announcing "Boodles blew up". My co worker and I looked at eachother confused. He said "Yea, I just drove by there. Shook my car.There's a big crater where Boodles and the Rockin R Bar used to be". From there on out every person who came in was talking about it: "did you hear there was an explosion downtown?" From the windows of the coffee shop, we could see a huge smoke cloud coming from the downtown area. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach the whole morning, thinking that there was going to be more bad news to come. In an explosion that demolished 8 businesses, surely there would be various casualties. Also, thinking about how this could have just as easily happened 12 hours later- 8:00 at night- when those bars would have been jam packed. That really made me feel sick.

My coworker brought up how this made her think of September 11. Imagine how we are feeling now hearing about an explosion in downtown Bozeman, how many times that would be amplified if we were in downtown New York City when we heard the planes crash. That the twin towers exploded rather than a local bar. I remember where I was when I heard about the crash on the news. Imagine being in the immediate vacinity.

The first day I was in class, we talked about how something that we wanted to work on in this course would be to remember every day like we remember those days when history was altered. I will always remember thursday morning, finding out about that gas explosion while I was working. And an event like that happening sparks the memory to other times when we felt the same sinking feeling of tragedy taking place: September 11th. I think that all of us will remember where we were that day.

Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Julian Jaynes asserted in his book "The Origin of Conciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" that we can pinpoint the distancing of human beings from their innate bicamerality to the invention of the alphabet- which happened only once- around 1500 bc. What is bicamerality and what does it have to do with "voices" in the mind? Where did those voices go upon invention of the alphabet?

"Bicamerality may mean simply orality" states Ong at the very end of chapter 2, on page 30. He has not made further reference to bicameralism since then. Jaynes description of ancient bicameral humans makes them sound something like a modern day schizophrenic: hallucinating and hearing voices that they would have to obey. These voices were actually their own internal stream of conciousness, of which they were not aware, heard as the voice of gods or spirits. For example, the nine muses that we have memorized for our class. We understand them to be a symbol or a personification of erotic poetry, history, sacred song, etc. Jaynes believes that ancient people actually heard the muses, passing on their powers of dance, song and poetry.

Some evidence of bicamerality and these voicings which Ong talks about in "Orality and Literacy" is found in the Illiad. The Iliad lacks the inner thought processes and introspection that are evident in the Odyssey which was written centuries later. This suggests that in the time period in which the Odyssey was written, human beings had not yet developed accute self awareness.

The breakdown of bicameralism means the aquisition of human self-conciousness and awareness. The Odyssey is evidence that a breakdown occured between its creation and the Iliad because there is an emergence of introspection in the hero and absense of "voices". This mentality seems crazy to us, a literate culture, who puts people that hear voices away in mental hospitals. But we have never had a chance to develope an oral mentality. The mentality we claim, that of literate people, came into existense centuries before we did. We will never experience the bicameral mind.

Speak, Memory

from Nabokov's "Speak, Memory"

I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchment on the smooth sanded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage, exaggerated, no doubt, by the same faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depth of the park —as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent steps of a prodigal, faint with excitement.
Through a tremulous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and familiars, mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech. I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts. I note the small helicopter of a revolving samara that gently descends upon the tablecloth, and, lying across the table, an adolescent girl's bare arm indolently extended as far as it will go, with its turquoise-veined underside turned up to the flaky sunlight, the palm open in lazy expectancy of something —perhaps the nutcracker. In the place where my current tutor sits, there is a changeful image, a succession of fade-ins and fade-outs; the pulsation of my thought mingles with that of the leaf shadows and turns Ordo into Max and Max into Lenski and Lenski into the schoolmaster, and the whole array of trembling, transformations is repeated.
And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties —smiling, frivolous duties —some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats; the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause.

Synaesthesiacs

I mentioned that in the fall of 2007, I took my first class, American Lit 2, with Dr. Sexson. It was the first class I took within the English department, and probably the one that led me to declare an English Literature major that same semester. I remained relatively disengaged with the material (as I was accustomed to being in class at MSU, having only enrolled in CORE classes up until that point). Until: Lolita. From the first words of the first chapter "Lolita, light of my life, fired of my loins. My sin. My soul", I started engaging. We could probably say that my decision to devote the rest of my education to studying literature was spawned in that moment: before Lolita, I don't remember much about American Lit 2.
As if the sensous writing of Nabokov were a mystery to be solved, I felt like I had cracked the case when Sexson mentioned in class that Vladimir Nabokov was a synesthesiac. When I looked up "synaesthesia" on google later (i believe Sexson told us to look it up on wikipedia with that mention), I had a defining "ah-ha" moment. Of course! It makes so much sense that a person who "suffers" a disorder like this would write as Nabokov does. I felt envy for him, for all synaeshesiacs. Look up the terms of this illness and I think you'll understand what I mean:
http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/UBNRP/synesthesia/main.html
What I would give to experience the world for a day (no, a week, at least) as Nabokov or other synaesthesiacs do. I would spend the entire week writing I think! Or painting, or widdling, or something! I found an interesting website that states that all art is a manifestation of synaesthesia, a "blurring of the senses". In this way, all art has a "synaesthetic origin". It makes sense to me, check out more about this theory at the following site:
http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/art2/index.html

Well, the reason why I am bringing up synesthesia again, 3 years down the line in Oral Traditions, is because this book I borrowed from Dr. Sexson, "Why Life Speeds up As You Get Older" by Douwe Draaisma, mentions a case study of a man with extraordinary memory who was also "synasthetic in the extreme". "The impressions of his various senses ran together" he writes of the man, who was a mathematical genius with almost absolute memory. It brought my mind back to American Lit and I wondered, how do synasthesiacs remember?

In my memory theatre, I have associated the names of the gods with visual pictures of objects in the coffee shop. If I were a synasthesiac, I would have associated the names not only with visual pictures, but also with sounds, smells, or tastes. That would give me a whole extra set of associations. Imagine the capacity for memory, then, that these people have. The man in this book, when trying to recall mathematical calculations from 10 or 15 years earlier, could reproduce the equations in moments because he recalled the "sensory impression of the original test"; the "taste" of the occasion.

Think of how powerful of a memory aid smell is to us. How sometimes a certain smell brings you back to an experience you had at, say, the beach when you were a child. Well, what if you could recall math equations by the stimulus of a smell. Or poetry. These people have 5 different overlapping storage units of memory. I wish I could experience that!
When you think about it, memory happens by sensory associations: by synasthetics. We all have the ability to remember, so we all have something of a synasthetic in us. To be a person who experiences life in a constant state of synasthesia, memory is all the more powerful. For as strong as our memories are, there are humans with almost absolute memories as a result of psychiatric disorders (that makes it sound like a bad thing!). But it's interesting to think that in all human beings there is something of a synasthesiac, in the "blurring of the senses" that memory is.