I would like to start out trying to answer Alex Emery's blog. He was wondering why, and understandably so, one would want to create a mnemonic device such as Mel Gibson eating a pomegranate when it could be easier to cut out the middle man and just remember Melpomene. Ong, on page 69, says that "colorless personalities cannot survive oral mnemonics", that in myth we create heroic and bizarre figures in order to "organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form." This idea is the basis for Helena's Memory Palace, who said that it takes the ordinary and makes it something imaginative and different. In this way, everything is a parataxis as Kevin made a brilliant reference to, everything is important and nothing is subordinate. In John Nay's blog he talks about James Joyce's novel Ulysses and about the annual celebration in Dublin called "Bloomsday". John, in what I think is a memorable, if not genius, thought, connected Bloomsday with the Bill Murray movie Groudhog's Day, where everyday is memorable as each is effectively his last. James Joyce, says John, says that we are living in myth, whether we know it or not, and it is about making the ordinary extraordinary and mythical. James Joyce understood this, and recreated his own myth. Joyce made colorful personalities and places that organized experience in a completely memorable form. Tai mentions Marshall McLuhan, and in Understanding the Media, McLuhan says that Joyce orgainzed Ulysses "by assigning the various city forms of walls, streets, civic buildings, and media to the various bodily organs. " Kary Bowles in her blog mentions that the closing chapter of Ecclesiastes uses a house as a metaphor for the body and soul (which is why we want to keep our memory palaces clean!). What McLuhan said that was provocative is that the current technological man "prefers separateness and compartmented spaces, rather than the open cosmos. He becomes less inclined to accept his body as a model of the universe, or to see his house...as a ritual extension of his body." Considering this, I would have to tell Steve Crawford not to be apologetic for leading the class on to believe the glow in the dark stars on his bedroom ceiling were "fabulous". They really were because it is symbolic of you, Steve, trying to become a part of the cosmic oneness of an oral culture, a valiant attempt to accept your house as a model of the universe and an extension of your body. McLuhan also says that an oral culture is an "open system" whereas the textual, technological culture, whose tools are but extensions of sense, constitute "closed systems" which are incapable of interplay (as we have learned of the constraints of textuality and writing).
But it is the interplay of an oral culture which makes it so mythical. On page 134 of Wisdom of the Mythtellers, Sean Kane calls "dreming" the larger mental entergy, saying that "myth vibrates with this energy of life which is felt to be mental." At the end of my somewhat particular and overwhelmingly sensory version of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage there is the Caterpilar asking Alice "Who Are You?", with Alice responding "I-I hardly know, sir, just at present--at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then." McLuhan uses this as an example of the effect the media has on our notion of individuality, saying that there is "no doubt how electric technology shapes, works over, alters-massages-every instant of our lives." Pair this up with Kane, who on page 134 says, "[physical beings] flash in and out of [consciousness] like animals caught in a headlight beam at night, just as, in the larger unconscious Dreaming of the world, the animals flash in and out of existence. But their enduring mode of being is in the spirit, which is to say the state of dreaming" one might say, like Alice did, "Life, what is it but a dream?" We are living in perpetual myth, like Joyce and John Nay say; but it is about structuring and organizing our homes, our memory palaces, and ourselves in such a way that is memorable, and, ultimately, exists as a dream punctuated by brief momements of the recognition that you are dreaming . At this point in time, the media, our hyper-textuality, would suggest that nothing is real anyways.
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