My "Testimony" to the Oral Tradition

Yesterday Mr. Sexson came to visit me in my memory theatre- the international coffee traders- the place where I decided to put my 50 characters from Ovid's Metamorpheses because, after four years of working there, I can say I know the nooks and crannies of the place as well as if it were my own house. Well, it was an incidence of synchronization when Mr. Sexson showed up, because I had Ong's "Orality and Literacy" sitting out on the counter intending to read it in the down time at work. i ended up talking about it instead, because the first customer who came in that morning spotted it and started interrogating me about the topic. This is a regular who is a writer stationed in Bozeman writing a book. He told me that if this topic interested me I should look for a book called "The Bicameral Mind" or something to that effect. I told him we just had that a question about the bicameral mind on our test (still, I was provoked to return to that section in Ong for a reread). That was only the first instance, throughout the morning, I'd say about 5 more customers commented on the book. Some asked what it was about, others had something to say on the topic. In any case, I was surprised at people's interest in this topic, and that our Oral Traditions class is not the only demographic that ponders issues concerning orality and literacy. Many people seem to be aware that we're making a shift right now into the digital age that is equivalent to the dawn of literacy and the printing press in human society.

Likewise, it was convenient that syncronicity that Mr. Sexson came by because all this success in memorization (which I testified to today in class) sparked a new question in me that only he could answer (because I don't know anybody else who can quote from such a wide range of classic literature): I see how the memory theatre works for namings off lists of names, spices, top 40 hits, etc. But what about for those long quotations from James Joyce or Nabokov that Sexson has been reciting word for word since my first class with him- American Lit 2- almost 3 years ago ("Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins..."). I wondered, is the memory theatre technique his esoteric method for this type of memorization as well. Sometimes these lines from literature plant themselves in our heads simply because they are so beautiful and... unforgettable. I haven't forgotten those few lines from Wallace Stevens "Sunday Morning" that moved me to tears, especially when I walk down feeling "gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights. All pleasures and all pains. Remembering the bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul". But in every class I've taken, he has always been able to repeat passages from the books we read without referring to the text. How does one do this?

I think of how I went about assigning names to objects in my memory theatre. Originally, my intention was to assign the name to something that would remind me of the story. But I only hold true to that in a few cases... for example putting Jason and Medea together because they share a story in ovid or Achilles and Agamemnon. But those were only vague associations... i know they appear in the story together, but i can't retell the story for you verbateum. It just didn't work out as I was moving along in my memory theatre. But see, I realize now that I could have done that. I could associate names with objects in the coffee shop that remind me of the stories, and use that as means of memorizing the stories of Ovid. So I can see how in this way, literature and stories can be memorized.

The customers who inquired about "Orality and Literacy" ended up getting a testimony similar to the one I gave in class today. I explained how it was a required text for the Oral Traditions course that I am taking right now, which is turning out to be the most fascinating and useful (read: practical) class that I've ever taken because I am discovering a mental capacity that I didn't even know I had, that I wouldn't have known that I have. That is I'm discovering my own capacity for memory, my own divine connection, a place where I find myself "trafficing with the gods".

-"Trafficing with the gods" on Mt Olympus-

Making my Memory Theatre

Before and Afterthoughts on the memory theatre: I anticipated that memorizing 50 names without a written list to fall back on or act as a security blanket would be very challenging. I decided to follow the suggestion I read on the wiki article, and first create my memory theatre and walk through it without assigning anything I was memorizing to different places. I ended up choosing the coffee shop that I work at because I have a routine there when I go in to open, and also there are lots of places to put things. I walked through there a few times in my imagination, then let it go for a while. Yesterday, I started assigning names to different points in my memory theatre. Right now I've gotten through the first 30. When I ride up to the coffee shop on my bike, I put my kickstand down with my foot, and that is achilles (achilles-heel, most obvious connection) I pust my bike into the bike rack which is Agamemnon, because Achilles and Agamemnon have a faceoff in Ovid's Metamorpheses. Then I look up at the moon, Apollo. I go to open the door, I see a spider, Arachne. I put my handle on the brass handle to open the door, brass reminds me of Atlantis, Atlanta. Inside the first thing I see is the world map. Atlas. I go over to open the door on the opposite side of the shop and notice the first light of the dawn. That takes care of two- Aurora Boreas (instead of Aurora Borealis). I look at Joe's Parkway market, a seller of fine wine, Bacchus. And on and on like this until I get to Mars (our coffee roaster) which is where I left off. But what was absolutely fascinating to me about this whole process is that I didn't need that written list for a security blanket at all. After the first time I initially put a name in its place, it stayed there in my memory. When I walk through the first thirty names, at no point do I get stuck and I don't leave anything out either. This is really fascinating, its as if a force beyond my control is at work. The best way to describe it is as a phenomenon much like flying through an infinite cavern, to quote St. Augustine.

Intimations of Immortality: Wordsworthian Memory

I thought that "Tintern Abbey" was the poster poem for romantic memory. " Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" contains the whole idea in its title: Immortality, Recollection. Remembering makes us immortal. This is Wordsworth platonic mind writing, calling us to remember, because as Plato would lecture, to forget is lethal. In rememberance, we live on.

http://www.bartleby.com/101/536.html

"But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" -Wordsworth, "Intimations"

Loci and the Memory Palace

Interesting finding, this is what I got when i wickied "art of memory". This isn't the outline I expected to find for the Yates book, but this is still very interesting. Our classroom memorization technique has a name, its called "The Method of Loci". Now, i know this is the method we are all expected to implore in order to memorize our 50 lists. And I'm going to do it, I feel especially prepared after reading this write up in wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

But I have to admit, for me (as I imagine for the rest of the class as well, save Claire) this is unchartered territory. When I have had to memorize anything before- my Abc's or "The Idea of Order at Key West"- I've always gone about it literally: by gazing at symbols or words on a page. A is for apple. Rereading a line of poetry over and over in my head until it sticks. This is like putting a blindfold on, memorizing 50 things without imploring a piece of paper. And I am really going to try not to, for the sake of orality!

And FYI, when constructing a memory palace and your "loci", it is advised that the place be well lit and architecturally complex, providing many rooms and compartments in which you can stowe your memories. It should be set out in a particular order, and each loci should fall at moderate, set intervals.

Also intersesting, it says that the images you associate with your loci can be replaced with new ones. It's all part of a "working memory". Like what we've done with the 9 points in our classroom: they went from muses to Ong's 9 points, and I have a feeling we're not done with them yet....

Ong's 9 points

Some thoughts on Ong's 9 points: 9 ways in which the Oral culture is distinct from the literal

1) Additive not subordinate
thermostat
Literature changed the style of storytelling from additive to subordinate. In oral cultures all the details of the story had equal importance. When the "ands" were removed in translation, some parts and details were implicitly more important than others. Oral cultures do not like to subordinate.

2) Aggregative rather than analytic - chalkboard
Instead of simple integers like "soldier", we are given epithets that pay homage to his nature. Basic "soldier" becomes "brave and valiant soldier". As in this example, the epithets can sometimes being repeating the same idea twice. But thats better than leaving out the fact that he was brave all together, drawing the line at simply "soldier".

3) Redundant or copius - Quiet Desk
Because in oral cultures a phrase dissapears as soon as it is uttered, it is important to repeat details that were already said to keep the listener and the speaker on track in the course of the story. In a literal scenario this would not be necessary: you just turn back a few pages if you feel you missed some important detail. In an oral epic this is not so. It requires constant repetition.

4)Conservative or Traditionalist - Screen
Since oral storytellers are constantly repeating what they've been saying for ages, they tend to hold onto the ideas of the past and maintain a conservative sort of mindset.

5)Close to the human lifeworld - Overhead projector
Without manuals or lists to rely on as a memory aid, oral cultures must create elaborate schemes for recalling lines of lineage and names of persons, places and things.

6)Agonistically Toned - Brown Desk
This is what we have called "flyting" in class. Writing "seperates the knower from the known" (Ong 44). This is still considered an art form today, "Stylized verbal tongue lashings" (Ong 44).

7) Empathetic and Participatory -
I think we have all experienced those moments when you get to the end of an assigned reading having no idea what you just read. Your mind wandered. When someone is talking to you, telling you a story, we feel more obliged to listen and have a response (although not always). Because oral cultures are more engaged in the stories told, there is a deeper sharing and understanding of the teller's and listener's emotions.

8)Homeostatic - Snowman
The snowman can adjust his body to never melt. Memories that no longer have relevance to the present, in an oral culture, are no longer mentioned and thus forfeited. Like we explained in class, the past without relevance to the present, disappears. Ong's example of the dictionary in this section was interesting I thought. There is no need for a dictionary in an oral culture, because words are only defined by their relevance to the immediate situation. Word meanings come continually out of the present. They are retained through current use.


9)Situational rather than abstract -
I forget which item in the classroom is supposed to mark this point, but what I will always remember is that this is the point Sexson used the phrase "like, uh, bitch" to explain. Although re-reading this section in Ong, I'm not totally sure how we got there in the class conversation?
Anyways Oral tradition is exceedingly concrete. In a written culture, you live continually in abstraction. Objects are concrete, the terms that we apply to them are abstract. Oral cultures use frames of reference that are close to the human lifeworld and thus, less abstract. I understood this difference better after reading the findings of A.R. Luria, who gathered extensive data on the differences between oral and literature cultures by interviewing subjects in different stages of literacy. Illiterate subjects identified shapes by objects that took that form, say, a plate rather than a circle or a door rather than a square. Circle is an abstract term that can be used to describe a wide range of circular shaped objects: thus, it is a very abstract word. A word like "circle" comes out of a literal, and thus, abstract culture.

And those are some very obvious psycodynamics of orality, in briefing. This is a topic in which extensive research has been done: comparing oral cultures to literate cultures. Mainly, the pysycodynamics of an oral exist and are linked to the fleeting nature of sound, which "exists only when it is going out of existence" (Ong 71). This makes an oral culture a very situational, up to date, existence.

My Top 50

I haven't decided in which order i'm going to do this (probably by books), but for my 50 items to memorize I want to memorize the names of 50 characters in Ovid's Metamorphoses. I might need some help in pronunciation, but here goes...

1)Achilles

2)Agamemnon

3)Apollo

4)Arachne

5)Atlanta

6)Atlas

7)Aurora

8)Bacchus

9)Boreas

10)Caeneus

11)Calliope

12)Cornix

13)Cupid

14)Daedelus

15)Daphne

16)Diana

17)Echo

18)Europa

19)Galantea

20)Hercules

21)Herse

22)Icarus

23)IO

24)Iphis

25)Jason

26)Juno

27)Jupiter

28)Latona

29)Lichas

30)Mars

31) Medea

32)Medusa

33)Mercury

34)Midas

35)Minerva

36)Narcissus

37)Neptune

38)Orpheus 

39)Pan

40)Paris

41)Prosperina

42)Pythagoras

43)Saturn

44)Sybil

45)Tiresias

46)Triton

47)Ulysses

48)Urania

49)Venus

50)Vulcan

Idle Minds and Mythtelling

Sean Kane admits in the introduction to "Wisdom of the Mythtellers" that "I am aware that I am an individual shaped by modernity, an outsider to myth" (p. 15). That is how this class is making me feel.

It is difficult to really grasp myth in the age we're living in, centuries outside the time of oral traditions. Kane condemns literacy as "inactive reading", on the grounds that it is pathetic compared to the mythtelling tradition, where telling involved action, telling is doing something. I just can't bring myself to accept this sort of condemnation. The way that Kane refutes literature echoes my feelings about the media today. Whenever I watch movies, I do so with a sense of guilt (with a few exceptions, of course) because I think: "I should be reading". Mindless movie watching seems so bad for me and my mind because I'm not intellectually challenged the way that I am when I read. Watching movies and TV is isolative and easy and presents me with no intellectual challenge... and I can't imagine somebody truly feeling the same sort of resentment towards reading. If reading is inactive and unengaging (how can reading be unengaging?), then what our we subjecting ourselves to when we put on the television?

Kane explains that storytelling and myth require a kind of performance that engages both the reader and the teller. Reading and writing stories, by contrast, is done on an individual basis. But I, reading alone, still find myself intellectually engaged. I just wonder, if reading and literacy are second to storytelling, what can we call the multimedia entertainment that is taking over? Is it the same, effectively, as reading? We can't possible equate watching a movie with reading a book can we? Just because they are done individually?

We said in class today something that was a little daring, something I never thought about but is an interesting way to look at things: To literalize is to materialize. Like Citizen Kane's house in the movie, which was a literal memory theatre, a collection of all his life's memorobilia. Literature takes something that was oral, and thus invisible, and makes material out of it. We can't deny it. And I think that is something I really dislike about the media and hollywood, it is the culture of a very materialistic society. A very literal society. But I can't say that I dislike literature or its values- I am a literature major for crying out loud! I love literature, and I'm getting worried here that we're putting it in the same category as film, television and technology. Are we?

some of us may connect the term "Myth" with myths of the greek gods- "today they lend their names and aura to makes of cars" (p. 32 Kane). Oh well, at least that's a "starting-point" for an exploration of myth time.