Some thoughts in the memory palace

Here are some interesting things that I have found in some extracurricular reading. Lynda Sexson lovingly gave me a book by cultural anthropologist Jack Goody called The Technology of the Intellect. Here is what I thought was interesting in terms of how orality and literacy affect me.

He says, "What the individual remembers tends to be what is of critical importance in his experience of the main social relationships. In each generation, therefore, the individual memory will mediate the cultural heritage." Goody here is basically saying that in an oral culture, people remember what is most important to their individual lives, and as time passes those individuals mediate their heritage through only a selection of images.

But was is most interesting is the ultimatum he poses several pages later, which he relates to Nietzche's idea that we are "wandering encyclopedias", it goes, "literate society, merely by having no system of elimination, no 'structural amnesia' prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition to anything like the extent possible in non-literate society...it becomes apparent that the situation fosters the alienation that has characterized so many writers...The literate individual has in practice so large a field of personal selection from the total cultural repertoire that the odds are strongly against his experiencing the cultural tradition as any sort of patterened whol...THE CHOICE IS BETWEEN THE CULTURAL TRADITION--OR SOLITUDE."

I relate this to the way I feel when I walk into a Barnes & Noble. I feel lost, stranded, given the feeling that there is more information in these books than can be leared in 100 life times. Where do I start. I know I'm going to leave out something important, something intresting. If I were in an oral culture, however, there would not be such astronomical amounts of information because only so much can be passed orally and through memory. Isn't this interesting stuff? Ong says on page 106 "Into it [grapholect] has been hammered a massive vocabulary of an order of magnitude impossible for an oral tongue. Websters Third New International Dictionary states in its Preface that it could have included 'many times' more than the 450,000 words it does include.

Also. I built my memory palace this weekend. Its the current house I live in. Its primary rooms are the garage, laundry, entrance, bedroom, office, living room, kitchent, bathroom, bedroom. I have found that the technique really does work! I'd like to do an infomercial about buying your very own memory palace at a great introductory price. Anyways, here is a video that explains how you can build you memory palace. It's very modern and very brief and very helpful (click the video link). My little brother, who is not so little any more, as a toddler had an interesting time with the letter "B". Instead of saying "because" he would say "b", so a typical sentence of his might sound like, "We gave the dog away b he taked big poops!" He said "b" so frequently that it caught on with my dad without him ever knowing it. We also liked to play the "Obserbe" game. You can play it anywhere you like. First tell someone to "obserbe". Give them a few seconds (10 seconds max if its a kitschy room) and then tell them to shut their eyes. Once shut, ask them a particular question like "What color are the flower near the fountain?" If they get it wrong it proves that they are unobserbant and need some obserbe skills.

renegade blogger

** Hi my name is Samantha Clanton and I accessed Sutter's blog because I'm jealous that he has a blog and I wanted to blog about something I thought might have some relevance to the class. **

Even though I am not in the Oral Traditions class I cannot help but see things that I would blog about if I were in the class. I don't know what you have been discussing, but I was reading chapter one, From Folklore to Technology, from the book The Origin of Writing by Roy Harris for Dr. Lynda Sexson's class Text and Image. I couldn't help but want to blog some of what I read in relation to Oral Traditions. Within the chapter it talks about whether writing came into existence as an extension of speech or as an extension of drawing. Roy Harris favors the idea that writing developed as an extension of drawing, but you will have to read it for yourself if you are curious about the writing aspect because we want to talk about oral traditions. What are the pros and cons of the oral traditions vs. writing?

Roy Harris refers to Socrates in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, specifically when he tells the story of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth who invented various arts, including writing, Thoth said: 'This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.' The king was not impressed and replied: '....For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant...." (page 19 of The Origin of Writing).

To some extent the arguments against writing here from the king reflect the incompacity of written words alone to convey ideas. Do we get more meaning from the spoken word? How does that happen? The problem is in order to make this argument.....it has to be written down in Phaedrus to make it an argument that survives beyond the lifespan of Plato that we can talk about today.

Just a little something I read that made me think of the Oral Traditions class.

Memorable Thoughts from Tintern Abbey...

Are thinking memorable thoughts and creating memorable thoughts the same thing? You can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, the ephemeral to be mythological--and therefore memorable--by writing it down and immortalizing it throught the tactile and erotic arts of painting or writing or whatever. But how do you make a memorable thought through the art of memory? A thought that is, from its origin, naturally memorable and not made artificially memorable by contractualizing it, further removing it from the ideal? A thought that is memorable as soon as you think it, like an epiphany. A thought that is, perhaps, spontaneous. For this, let's go to the Romantics.


Though absent long/These forms of beauty have nott been to me/As is a landscape to a blind man's eye/But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din/Of towns and cities, I have owed to them/In hours of weariness, sensations sweet/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart/And passing even into my purer mind/With tranquil restoration...Nor less, I trust,/To them I may have owed another gift/Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood/In which the burthen of the mystery/In which the heavy and the weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world/...Therefore let the moon/Shine on thy solityar walk/And let the misty mountain winds be free/To blow agains thee: and in after years,/When these wild ecstasies shall be matured/Into a sober pleasure, when they mind/Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms/Thy memory be as a dwelling -place/For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh!

I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd/A host of golden daffodils/Beside the lake, beneath the trees/Fluttering and dancing in the breeze...For oft when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude/And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the daffodils.

The first poem is part of William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbery. In this poem, where he actually goes to an unfrequented church, he recalls, among other things, how, though it has been 5 years since he has been here, he remembers its natural beauty of Tintern Abbey when he is feeling blue in the city in order to make him feel restored and fresh again. The second poem is from I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Picture a guy walking around the English Country side (as Wordsworth was reported to have walked many thousands of miles in his life) and he sees a sea of dancing daffodils. So he remembers the scene that later, when he is alone, recollecting emotion through tranquility, the image of the daffodils flashes on his inward eye. I notice how these poems both consider memory to be ignited. as in certain flashes, or "fluxes and refluxes of the mind". Well, two years ago in Classical Literature Dr. Sexson asked a philosophical, rhetorical question, "What is the lightning bolt that pilots all things?" I would say, Dr. Sexson, that the lightning bolt that pilots all things is memory. The flashing of the sea of daffodils upon the inner eye allows Wordsworth to have a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, or...a memorable thought.

To Everyone, especially Lynn Doyle

Lynn, I know that you watched the inauguration at some point yesterday, and most likely the evening post-coverage with Stone Philips and limited commercial interruption (I hope I'm not assuming too much?) Did you, or anyone else who watched the "historic" coverage notice something about this event as with all other important events in American history that happened over our life time? "We always remember where we were when this happened..." The media stressed this point, unrelentingly at times, that we, or at least my parents, not I in particular, know where we were when JFK was assinated (my mother was as Catholic boarding school in California), where we were on 9/11 (I was in my first class, history, of my second freshman year in high school at 9a.m, at a boarding school in New Hampshire. Where were you on this inauguration? I was in the most nondescript place I have ever known, my Denmark, Wilson Hall.

In order to remember the event, we remember where we were. You think to yourself, "Obama is being inaugurated right now, and this is important stuff." And you look around you filing the elements of this bureaucratic mausoleum into the Loci of your brain so you wont forget this unprecedented day: pale mustard colored walls, no windows (which took me three years to realize), a lectern, a chalk board with residual textuality smeaked across it, some speakers with their flagellum wires in a tangle, and lots of chairs with no lumbar support.

Tongues and Simulacra.

A couple of semesters ago I did an independent study with Dr. Minton where I wrote a 30 page paper on what it means when someone gets their tongue sliced out in Renaissance drama. And I'm writing this post in utter befuddlement that I am referring back to any of this. In Carla Mazzio's Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England, one of the most informative articles on the subject, she says a few things about the tongue during this time. Because it is responsible for directly communicating the self with society, it is often an "unruly member", unstable and able to hurt and slander, among other things. But Mazzio's final point is the most interesting and revelant to this class:

"The invocation of the mobile and independent tongue (the agent of speech) in printed texts and contexts, I want to suggest, constitutes less what Walter Ong has termed "residual orality," the rhetorical traces and aftermaths of an oral culture, but an aggressive orality, an anxious response to the unsettling dispersion of languanges and identities in an increasingly textualized culture, a response to the movement of representation away from the body."

Residual orality is essentially the orality that is left in a culture that is becoming a textual culture. As a culture embraces and adopts the technology of literature and computers, the "oral residue" diminishes, but it never vanishes completely. (A literate culture does, however, produce shallow relationships between people, with text messaging, lol). Carla Mazzio believes that the tongue is excised from the body not to mark the shift from orality to literacy (as I said in a previous blog that Shakespeare certainly straddls that line), but it marks hwo nervous people in the 1600's were becoming after realizing that feelings and emotions of the individual are becoming textual in an ever textualized world. The problem with writing, Plato said, it that it does not have emotion, you cannot have a conversation with it. Certainly we've all experienced these types of anxieties. When I lol, am I laughing at you or with you? It is difficult to unterstand the intonations of a conversation, like the cooler conversation, when it is written; but when it is spoken it has the true meaning, the meaning that comes from the speaker's own conscious and is not just another far removed description in writing of a bed.

I also mentioned simulacra earlier as a post-modern coinage. Here is something I know now that I didn't know before I had read the Ad Herennium on page 6 of The Art of Memory. In describing artificial memory, the memory that is improved and not natural, "Images are forms, marks or simulacra of what we wish to remember." In the hyper-textual world in which we live we do not choose the simulacra to remember, but it comes to us, unavoidably so, principally through the images on our TV screen. I might suggest, were I to write a term paper without any further reading, that our artificial memory is becoming our natural memory. I bet we could all describe the inside of a MacDonalds and probably could have done so since we were very young because though we do not make a conscious decision to remember these places, they impose themselves on us. Our memories, our realities, our consciousness is now a result of the constant barrage of simulacra that force themselves into our memory, making it natural because it is a part of our environment which we have not chosen to memorize, but that has memorized itself.

My morning blog

I was thinking about the importance of names this morning in the shower. I was bid calling and I thought back to when I went to auctioneering school. In some states you need to have gone to an "accredited" auctioneers school in order to be an auctioneer and there are only 3 in the country, and the best one is in Billings, interestingly. (In the southern states, auctioneers still refer to themselves as colonel. Colonels, the highest rank in the military, were the officers who sold confiscated pieces of land during the Civil War. But now we only to a colonel to be the inside of a nut!) In any case, the first thing they "stressed" on day one of ten, was how to have a conversation. A smile, a good handshake, and the importance of person's name. There were a little less than 30 people in the class and we had one day to remember their names and those of our "instructors". When someone remembers your name, it makes you feel good about yourself. (Look at Zachary Morris's blog). Does anything else lend itself so much to your identity as your name? Especially when it is spoken (Listen to Destiny's Child's "Say my name"). Later in the class we were taught how to allocate time with items, when needing to sell 600 items in 4 hours. So in a profession that depends on orality, a person's name is the most important thing to remember, but, like all of orality, time is also an auctioneer's worst enemy.

On the streets of Macondo (with Michelangelo)...

In chapter 4 of Ong's book Orality and Literacy he, with the support of Plato, says that literacy and writing are artificial, secondary acts. Orality comes directly from our consciousness, but literacy comes from somewhere else, from what someone else has written. Relating to my previous blog, literature, then informs our consciousness whereas with primary orality, communication is informed by consciousness.

This brings me to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Macondo is struck by an inescapable plague of insomnia. The not sleeping part is good because it allows the Buendias and the inhabitants of Macondo (which, as of this point in the beginning of the novel, is an oral culture) more hours of productivity. The side effect of insomnia is a loss of memory. Because they cannot cure the insomnia, they must combat memory loss. They do this first by labelling everying. Then, as their memory continued to fade, they labeled everything with descriptions of what it is used for. In essence, a culture whose reality was oral, and therefore a direct result of their imaginations and consciousness, becomes literal where what has been labeled informs the reality of the insomniacs. Maybe literacy is to blame for the rise and fall of Macondo?

And what a difference written words make, heh? Even the little letters and punctuation in them. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion was caused by comma misuse. I learned from Lynda Sexson of one little slip that had extreme social consequences: St. Jerome, the man who translated Hebraic scriptures into Latin used the word "horn" instead of "beam of light" (as they are the same word in Hebrew), and, as a result, Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with horns instead of beaming with light from having met Yahweh. Most classical art of Moses depicts him with horns and Jews have suffered the bigotry of being said to have horns. The above was done by Michelangelo

Scheherezade

Scheherazade is a Persian queen and the storyteller of "One Thousand and One Nights).
It is a story told in a frames, stoies within stories, or mis en abyme, where every day Shahryar would marry a new virgin having found out that his first wife was betraying him. He had killed three thousand such women by the time he was introduced to Scheherazade.

Against her father's will, Scheherazade volunteered to spend one night with the King. Once in the King's chambers, Scheherazade asked if she might bid say goodbye to her sister who had secretly been prepared to ask Scheherazade to tell a story during the long night. The King lay awake and listened with awe to Scheherazade's first story and asked for another, but Scheherazade said there was not time as it was morning, but the next story was even more exciting.

And so the King kept Scheherazade alive as he eagerly anticipated each new story, until, one thousand and one adventurous nights, and three sons later, the King had not only been entertained but wisely educated in morality and kindness by Scheherazade who became his Queen.

Scheherazade was an extremely smart girl, who had read the books and memorized the stories, which come from an old Persian book called Hezar-afsana or the "Thousand Myths". The story 1001 Nights is about the power of stories, the way in which, like a Shakespeare play, much of the viscerality of the story comes from the story tellers themselves.

Yummm...Oral Hash

I saw master blogger Chris's blog today and am responding the the title: "Oral Hash". Hash is the coming together, the hodgepodge of many different elements (the elements in the food have not yet been identified). Or, hash is a bricolage. Post-modernism is one of my favorite genres to read and study, and critics use the term bricolage to describe how, in an imaged based world, we rearrange, or rehash, old images (often of nostalgia) to try and create somthing new. I'm sure I will talk about post-modernism all semester, so I don't want to get too excited. But a principle idea is that there are no facts, only images, which have taken the place of reality. We communicate through images, the powers of suggestion, and the technological advancements that have done more to enslave us than emancipate us.

In class it was mentioned that language is ephemeral, to capture it, make it concrete and contractual we must write it down. It would seem to me then that there is an inherent freedom in orality and a restraint in textuality. Maybe that is why Shakespeare did not intend for his plays to be written, but spoken. Here, also, is were I see an example of "oral textuality". By reading a play, something that is meant to be spoken, the words are captured for our study, but they are spoken for our fancy. It is language stuck somewhere in between. It is text with more freedom and orality with more restraint. But even text has "free play", and an author may give it that in order to try and create somthing new in a world where metaphors have become hackneyed and trite. This is a type of bricolage, a sort of empty parody, or pastiche, on previous convententions--not intended to villify but to create something new. But in this post modern world the images, the textuality of it all, is controlling our voices and our actions, not the other way around. Whereas our reality used to be a result of our consciousness (speech thought provided for text), our consciousness is now a result of our reality (text provides for speech and thought).

The First Day of Class

Though I don't consider myself to be a veteran of Dr. Sexson classes, this will be my third class with him. For those of you who are new, here are a couple of things that might help you this semester:

1) Write down everything he says! Amidst the chaos of information it is all connected and it provides good blog material.

2) Keep up on your blogging. It is easy to forget about, but it is usually the only homework we have. Explore the little abstractions he mentions in class, go off on tangents, and engage the material and the rest of the class.

Here are a couple of thoughts about our first class. The Muses are the 9 daughters of Mnemosyne, or Memory. The daughters, and you can wiki their names are, for the most part, the muses of some type of oral communication. They are the muses of heroic poetry, lyric poetry, erotic poetry, singing and rhetoric. We might have to evoke them later in class when discussing any one of these forms of communication. As with alliteration, we can make our stories and words poetic and florid to make them interesting.

This is an interpretation of the goddess Mnemosyne. Her counterpart is Lethe, which means forgetfulness. Alethe (like the aletheometer in the Golden Compass) means an "un-forgetfulness.

We will at some point discuss Primary Orality, which is not a term exclusive to the unwashed masses, but it denotes communication with the spoken word rather than with text and images (other than those we imagine).

We need to go to an unfrequented church in order to create a memory system. The developing of a memory system is the LOCI, which means location.

And "It is all about the stories". Stories obliterate time. This might be something to come back to later in the class: how do oral stories obliterate time? How do these stories conceptualize time as they are passed from one generation to the next?