cabinets of curiosity

I googled "Cabinets of Curiosity" like Sexson suggested we do in class today, and I was surprised to find out that Cabinets actually meant "rooms", not like the cabinets that Sutter drew on the board today. But after reading the entry in Wikipedia, I had trouble seeing the connection between "Cabinets of Curiosity" and the memory techniques we were talking about in class today. The introduction alludes to them as a synonym for memory palace, but beyond that, the definition/description sounds makes the cabinets out as something of a natural museum, rather than a "memory theatre". Maybe we will discuss this further in class...

I also looked up the names and jobs of the nine muses and will be on my way to memorizing them using the methods that our classmates demonstrated on the board. I read that Mnemosyne- the mother of the 9 muses- was very important to them because before there were books, before literacy, poets had to carry their work in their memories. Today in my reading of Ong, I read some fascinating passages about the Homeric poets and the debate about how and who is responsible for these epic poems. His assertion is true that "fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like" (ong 31), myself being an example of that. It never dawned on me that a person who never had contact with literature or writing, like the homeric poets, would have a different mental capacity for memorization. Perhaps even to the extent that they could hold volumes of epic poetry in their minds (with the aid of mnemosyne, of course). I think the most shocking thing that I have read in the book so far was in the section on "oral memorization" that begins on page 57. An oral culture is an illiterate one, and "learning to read and write disables the oral poet" (p. 59) because he would begin to rely on text as the controlling device in memorization. In light of all this, I think, so we don't stand a chance then, as the offspring of a literate society, at performing these impressive feats of memory. Our minds are constructed differently.