I handed in my finished term paper this morning, which is also the last day which we can post blog entries before the grading begins. So, having arrived at the end of the line in regards to this class on oral traditions, what do I know now that I didn't know before taking the class?

For one, that Francis Yates makes for dense reading, but contains very evocative pictures in the book in addition to evocative theories. But I've also come to see that the oral tradition, while in the past, still influences the present(as the past seems apt to do; the reason for this is memory). It seems that most everything to some extant or another is interconnected with everything else, which is what the ancient myths understood and articulated very plainly, and which the literate culture would do well to remember.

So what were the chances of my figuring this out? One in three, of course.

Today was the first day of the individual presentations of our term papers. Those that went were Gerad of the Open Plain, Sutter the Sacker of Cities, Kelsey of the Late Rent, Keen Kenning Ben, Brandon, Zazen Zach, Quick-wit Nick, and Crazy Coffee Carly. All of them offered piquant topics, though I was interested to see that there were seemed to be a trope of music running through this batch. This probably is a comment in and of itself on the importance of music within the oral tradition and beyond.

It was also mentioned that for the final exam, we will need to be familar with what Yates has to say about Robert Fludd(who hypothesied that Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was actually constructed as a memory theatre), and Chapter 7 in Ong, which relates heavily to literary criticism.

Groups 2 and 1 gave their presentations today. Group 2, on the Kane chapter 'Boundaries' was very impressive; detailed and informative and humorous, which always helps. The principal idea to be gleaned from it however, is that in mythology boundaries are crossed but can only be done temporarily, and one returns to the 'real' world having benifitted enormously from what they have learned in the other world. You see this motif frequently in children's literature(hence the references to a rabbit-hole and a great glass elevator, and Oz).

Group 1, 'Maps", my group, set out to accomplish the mapping of landscape locations without tangible types of maps which one would find in a literate context. Hence, a story out of stories was formed. How successful or entertaining it was in this endeavor I will leave to other commentators to surmise.

Today was the day that always comes before a test, the day on which the test questions are prepared. I will rattle them off down below, although not in a terribly oranized order.

Nietzche says "we are all walking dictionaries"
Lull: motion, no images, non-corporeal, ladder, tree
The triangle is to the boxes as the literate is to the oral
mis en abyme translates to "into the abyss"
Reformation happened because of the printing press
The mandala relates to FW because its a squared circle
Democratic through alphabet?
Ong, page 142, quoting Rilke "song is existence"
Page 224 of Yates--description of Bruno
Solomon's 7 pillars of wisdom built into memory theatre by Camillo
Alphabet invented how many times? Once!
Triangle reached peak at the detective story
Ty and Robert both used their bodies as memory theatres
Yates: connection between Lull and kabala
Hypertext(layered language) used by Joyce and cyber space
Hebrew alphabet has no vowels
Yates pg. 203-- Bruno rushes out of the convent
George Herbert's Easterwings
Ong pg. 126-- Tristram Shandy portrays silence with blank space.


I'm thinking that's most everything. We'll see when the test time comes.

We now know that our group presentations are the week of April 13-17, and that we go in reverse alphabetical order for our individual presentations, which will take two forms: the oral form in which we speak of our topic in a demonstrative way and the print form which will adhere at least in part to the restrictions of grammer nazis(which Christine of the Laughing Rats admits to being). Grammer nazis do have a foothold in the literary tradition, since as Ong points out on page 128, print reinforces an urge for "correctness" of language.

But even within the literary tradition, correctness of language usage and organization doesn't necessarily win out all the time. Finnegans Wake is a whopping example of why, as is Tristram Shandy(from which we get the phrase 'cock-and-bull' story) in a slightly different vein.

And then there was discussion of Bruno's insanely complicated and vast memory system, which as Yates says on page 124, would require if not yield, the memory of a magus with divine powers. This is really the assertion that Bruno's memory system carried; that human beings don't reicieve messages from the Divine, they in fact become or are Divine. Which was considered heresy and resulted in Bruno being burned at the stake. There is apparently an interesting children's fantasy inspired by Bruno's memory system called Little Big by John Crowley. Yet another thing I'll have to read.

Something that will be of note for us to know: chapter six is the most important chapter in Ong, and the one which will be most important for the next exam. The contents of chapter six in Ong is the shaping of narrative.

He discusses, on pg. 144-145 Freytag's triangle, as contrasted with boxes within boxes. The former, which is a product and crux of the literary tradition, has a precise dramatic unity with a beginning, crisis and denoument. The latter is oral tradition influenced and has layers and layers of story and story details going on. As such, the boxes-within-boxes stories tend to sprawl on and on and seemingly go on forever. But, I've gotta say that I was heartened to hear this in class today, for its something I've felt for quite some time: lengthy novels give us something short stories can't. I know, the reverse goes for short stories as well. But the depths to which Les Miserables and Don Quixote can carry us!

It has been suggested that Sutter has to add the beginnings of The Crying of Lot 49 and Tristram Shandy to his memory theatre.

And, I now think I ought to read David Malouf's An Imaginary Life.

Sutter started us off with introducing a piquant little book entitled The Little Black Book of Colors. Which is completely black and yet still contains all the colors of the rainbow, predominately through its Braille text. This was offered up as an example of synaesthesia, or the melding together of senses--so, you read colors, or taste sounds or hear smells. Intriguingly enough, Vladimir Nabokov was a synaesthete.

We then proceeded into a discussion of how oral culture, in its treatment of stories, tends toward being open-ended and ongoing as opposed to providing closure. Schaherzade(sp?) in The Arabian Nights is the paradigmatic instance of this--the story had to go on for her life to go on--. And I've gotta say, it wouldn't have occured to me to consider day-time soap operas as related to instances of open-ended secondary orality but it turns out that they are. And I'm suddenly reminded of a really great line from Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn which relates so well to this: "There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends."

We then ended up taking once again about Finnegans Wake and how, within it, we have the presentation of language almost as it was when babies make it--it makes no sense, it just exists for the mere sake of existing--, and the moving along of this to the application of sounds toward the names of things which one finds in the world, such as the one-hundred letter word attempting to be an onomatopeia of the sound of rolling thunder. Woweeeeee.

* the three members of Group 1 who were not present today in class were Checkmark Parker, Sweet Smiling Melissa and Brian the Eldest.

Matters of deadline first but not foremost: by Monday we must have decided upon the topic for our term paper and come prepared for the thesis statement for this paper. We have more or less complete free-rein with the choice of subject, save for one thing; the title must contain the phrase "oral traditions".

We then ended up discussing the oral culture's privelaging of sound over image--discussed by Ong on page 32-- and the fact that an elite hold-on language, which the advent of the printing press help to break, in fact is still with us, as evidenced by the difficult esoteric legal phrase "in testate, without issue".

We then had Jeff, Brandon, Christine and Gerad of the Open Plain explain the mechanisms of their memory theatres. They were, in order: a series of beaches, a numerical system with 10 groups of 5, an office building in Iraq, and a giant warehouse in Grand Forks North Dakota. It's really quite intriguing, the variety of spaces, tangible or no, in which people constructed memory theaters.

Having returned from Spring break, this session was devoted to the memory presentations of those who did not go the week before, both of them very impressive. Christine of the Laughing Rats who memorized the names of 50 Mishnaic(sp?)rabbis(which are really quite evocative names), and then had to do them again with the lights turned off, adding to the mystical encantatory nature of the recitation.

And Sutter the Sacker of Cities who memorized first and last lines of great books. Various classmembers were asked what books they recognized, and Sutter repeated the line from book in question again. It was impressive and surprisingly participatory, which of course is an apt adjective for the oral tradition.

Something else that these presentations brought out was the privelaging of the aural in 'oral' traditions. You frequently don't see something, you hear it instead, particularly with manifestations of the divine. In fact its quite possible that Yahweh, the Hebrew name of God in the Old Testiment, is the result of an onomatopeia(sp?) of the wind blowing. I find that very interesting.

Apparently the film Synecdoche New York relates very pertinately to this class.

It was yet another session devoted primarily to the power of names. Helena of the 10,000 lakes related the story of her "prayer" of family names, which including the names of past family members and pets, ends up being almost seventy in number. This in and of itself was intriguing to me, but ended up being even more so, because of the dual component of her recitation: in the oral tradition the speaking of a name conjures one in the flesh, and prayer is an act of name conjuration any way; Helena's prayer of names is sort of like the ultimate example.

We also paid great attention to the episode from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in which Humbert Humbert is entranced by the sixth grade class list because of Dolores Haze's inclusion in it. Here we have a banal list, on the surface of it, and yet it ends up being beautiful in the way it is spoken and in the allegorical way the names are shaped. I myself did not really catch the refrence to the Song of Solomon implicit in Dolores having "a bower of roses" around her. Really Nabokov fits into this class well, since the central theme of his work is memory.

Jaques Derrida, the patron saint of deconstuctionist literary criticism, has said that, even to this day, speech has been priveliged over print. This was then followed up by quoting Ong, who believes, according to page 119, that the typographic is more important ultimately than the cyrographic(ie. print is more important than writing itself). It was after all, the printing press that ushered in the Bible being written in the common peoples' language rather than Latin and thus transfering power away from the Church and onto the Book. However, we(and in particular Jana the tamer of horses in her blog) declared thus: Ong was wrong! And this is why: the dichotomy between the oral and literate culture really does not exist, much as it has been claimed otherwise thus far in this class. It really doesn't.

Presentations of our memory theatres will be next week, with the layout planned for Monday and Wednesday for the actual demonstrations and Friday for the explanations behind them.

Apparently the most important epithet in literature is contained in the final sentance of The Illiad: "Thus was concluded the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses." This great epithet has now been bestowed upon Jana. This also led into a very piquant discussion of the magic of names, discussed by Yates on page 177 of Art of Memory. This is also the basis for the school of Jewish mysticism called the Kabbala, which revolves around the names of the Divine and the magic carried by letters and words in the Hebrew alphabet(literary critic Harold Bloom's mode of criticism is based on the Kabbala). Kabbala's foundation is the Zohar a book written in Spain in the twelfth century, and was actually contemperanous(sp?) with Ramon Lull.

It's fascinating how, if words and names contain magic, then one's who wield words end up being the harbingers of powerfull forces(kind of like how in Celtic mytholigies poetic satire could actually kill, or how speaking 'the magic words' figures so predominately in fairy tales and the whole spectrum of fantasy fiction). Which is why it always falls to 'the scribe' to tell the story. And how when the final page of Finnegans Wake are recited, it becomes musical. It was Walter Pater who said "All art aspires to the condition of music". So when written up words become music, that says something. I'm actually wondering if maybe I wouldn't mind doing my term paper on this subject now.

And apparently the alphabet, outside of the Semitic tradtion, has a strong Celtic heritage. There's a book by Robert Graves called The White Goddess in which he traces this Celtic heritage, and how it in fact relates to trees. I did not know this.

Sutter presented the rest of his previously short-cutted(is that even a phrase)talk on the memory work of Ramon Lull, from whose system the alethiometer in His Dark Materials was taken. Interestingly, the aleth in Greek translates literally as "un-forget" (the river of forgetfullness is named Lethe after all). So "alethiometer" is literally a measure of un-forgetting.
Anyway, with regard to Lull, the only artificial memory technique he puts to use is that of frequent meditation. He does not use corporeal similitudes(ie. memorable because they are grotesque), but rather the nine attributes of God(which he says can be applied to anything) and names, which obviously can be applied to anything as well.

Speaking of names, we were granted our epithets in our groups today. I was pegged with Charismatic Kari of the Curly Hair.

We also must begin to brainstorm on a topic we feel affectionately for to propose for our term paper.

We broke into groups for the stated purpose of percolating on epithet possibilities at the end of class today. The majority of class had been spent discussing memory systems and how they may in fact simply change from a literate from oral tradition rather than disappearing.

There's a passage from Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame(or Notre Dame de Paris which ever you prefer)in which a medieval scholar is working in a room from which he sees the cathedral from the window, and bemoans that the book will supplant the cathedral(that is to say, the memory theatre). And this is partially true of course, since a Catholic church in and of itself is replete with images which serve as something of a memory theatre for believers(ie. the 12 stations of the Cross). Even the rosary is a mini memory system.

But is this really the case? Is it actually possible that the book can now do the job that the cathedral did, and that there is nothing really wrong with this? I shouldn't speak too quickly perhaps, being as a tradition that vests authority in "the word" or "the Book" is fraught with peril of its own in ways related if not completely similar to the perils of the institution, since the book becomes the institution or "the law". Catch-22 provides an example of this in a literary context. But enough of that.

We also passed around and read random passages from Finnegans Wake, in which plays upon the whole foundation for what written literature is supposed to be, and what levels of linguistic reality can be held(the title itself plays upon at least four different meanings for both of the words). In this book, words are not fixed or stable in their meaning.

We also had an impromptu presentation from Sutter on Ramon Lull, who introduced the concept of"movement" into the art of memory according to Francis Yates. We will be spending more time with Lullism as we go on(not to be confused with "luddism", though they are both isms that begin with an L).

It would be advisable to begin considering epithet choices, because on Friday we will break into our groups and epithetize each other.

A great deal of ground was covered in discussion of chapter 4 in Ong. According to Ong, writing is a solipsitic operation. Which is to say, it cuts one off from the community, and is oriented toward and through oneself. But, perhaps it was a such a specialized, profoundly individualistic activity, it actually turns out that when people from a state of primary orality find books and writing to be magical. In fact, the word "glamor" derives from "grammar". So "glamor girls" are really "grammar girls". Turns out there's hope for me yet.

But then, as opposed to oral storytelling, a written text "says" the same thing perpetually(I mean it is written). Unless of course it's Finnegans Wake, which actually says something different every time one comes to it. It is an instance where the concepts and precepts of orality have been directly applied to a literate product. Which is possibly why much of it very nearly resembles gibberish. As to written texts in general saying the same thing perpetually, I might suggest that we(if we are decent readers)derive sayings from the text that are different each time. But what do I know? It's also been recommended that we google an essay by Mr. Sexson entitled "Re-membering Finnegan".

There was also some discussion of the alphabet; there is and was only one, says Ong, and that is the Phoenician-Semitic alphabet which originated 14000 years ago. We then had an illuminating presentation from Chris, linking written Hebrew(which has no vowels) with personalized license plates. I found this marvellously interesting.

The majority of class was spent correcting the exam, though there were a few other items wort mentioning.

Carly came up and talked about her memory theatre(which is the International Coffee Traders where she works) and how she has already memorized her fifty items, which are characters from Ovid's Metamorphisis. She shared with the rest of us her astonishment at how ultimately simple the task was, once one had their memory theatre established. I've had some issues settling upon a space for my memory theatre and this has caused me some concern. However, I feel a renewed sense of reassurance after Carly gave her brief talk. Thank you Carly.

And we move into chapter 4 in Ong, for the rest of the week.

Today was the day of compiling questions for the test. I transcribe the material that was placed on the blackboard(by Carly with her very lovely handwriting).

Here's what we need to know.

Kane:
"moonbone" (repition)
property
agriculture
practical
white berries
Caribou, Frogs
Defines myth as: song the Earth sings to itself.


Ong:
primary orality
secondary orality
chirographic
typographic
vision vs. sound
discussion of Phaedrus pg. 79


Yates:
Simonides
Rhetoric--ethics--cosmos
St. Augustine pg 47

And the questions supplied by we the students:
7 liberal arts( GGRAMAD)
NeoPlatonism
Feb. 20--John's birthday
Anamnesis
1600- when Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake
Parataxis
Bicameralism(from the index of Ong)
Imagination as the "1 hour photo for the soul"
Scherazade(10001 nights)
Difference between artificial and natural memory
Collective Unconcious vs. Personal Unconcious
Green blood
Memory, imagination, soul
epithets: beautiful princess, brave soldier, sturdy oak

All right, I think that's probably enough listing for all of us for now.

Class began today with Kevin delivering a dissertation on chapters 2 and 3 in Francis Yates, which pay particular attention to Plato and Aristotle and their linking together of three principle things: memory, imagination and soul. In general we find that Yates is perhaps more intrigued by Plato, but she does spend time with Aristotle, connecting him to the Scholastics(scholars in the Middle Ages). Yates quotes Aristotle on page 33 as saying "Memory belongs to the same soul as the imagination." She also quotes Plato's Phaedrus on page 37--"Memory is the groundwork of the whole". Memory is a crucial component of rhetoric, for Plato. It was pointed out by Kevin, quite perceptively I thought, that you can't develop memory without an imagination. And both memory and imagination are integral components of the soul. Which leads into something that Plato certainly believes and that Yates is apparently intrigued by as well: great use of memory is ulitmately divine.

This notion of memory having divine or spiritual significance is something that carries through to many other venues. Such as Neo-Platonism, or the influence of Plato after Plato( Marsillo Ficino is an example of one, and the author of a commentary on Plato's Symposium), which in itself has links to Gnosticism in believing that there is a divine spark within human beings and that the way to nurture it is through knowledge and the exercise of memory.

It is in the Phaedrus that Plato develops the myth of anamnesis: which is recollection of everything that has been forgotten. Jung was clearly influenced by this when he started talking about the Collective Unconcious, nut-shell version of which is: you can remeber everything, even before you were born. This is in contrast to Freud who said you can remeber everything, including being born. This is essential, because we have all drunk from the Lethe, the river of forgetfullness, from which the word "lethal" is derived. For Plato, it is lethal to forget.

And Augustin, after his self-rightous conversion from a profiligate life-style, adapted the notion of memory imagination and soul into the basis for the Trinity--memory, understanding and will.

And I think I will close this long-winded blogg with a quote about eros, fitting since tomorrow is Valentine's Day. It was Dante who said "Eros drives the sun and stars."

More discussion today on the differences between oral and literate traditions. A big thing that oral traditions honor old people--because they are the ones who will have amassed the stories. And again with the repition thing, repetitively. A poetic trope along these line is repetitive parallelism, or saying one thing then saying it again. Its a big thing in Hebrew poetry, such as "David was good-looking and handsome".

We also had our attention drawn to the chapter near the end of The Odyssey , which details the encounter with Hmaeus(sp?)in which the poet enters the story himself, so empatheic and particitpatory is the telling.

We closed with noting that IQ tests do not measure intelligence, only what IQ tests were invented to measure(the taking of IQ tests), and the words of the Ghost as it leaves Hamlet--"remember me"-- and Hamlet's reaction to them.

Today's class was largely monopolised again by cliches, namely seeing how many we knew by heart. It seems that cliches are the link of the literate culture to the oral culture. And as such, they frequently corporeal in their imagery, and deal with animals(ie. keep your eyes peeled, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush etc. etc.). The oral tradition also tends toward being hyperbolic and loves redundancy(because hearing something over and over and over again helps cement it into one's mind).

And we find that literary styles were once deeply entrenched in the oral tradition, and gradually became less so as time went by. For example, the 1610 English version of the opening of the book of Genesis relies heavily on parataxis("and" "and" and "and"), while the more recent translations of the Bible add in subordinative conjunctions--therefore, than, became.

We have also been directed to page 37 in Ong, were he lists the nine primary differences between the oral and literate cultures.

And to close, a quote from Nietzche: I'd never believe in a God who couldn't dance.

A great amount of piquant ground covered today, resulting appropriately enough from Shaman Sexson asking questions about the contents of everybody's blogs. One of the first observations that came up was that 'originality' is a plot of the print culture, which frowns upon cliches. In oral storytelling cliches were a valuable aid, epithets for characters(ie. 'fleet-footed Achilles') a case in point. We've apparently been assigned to think up an epithet for someone else in the class.

There was also Zach's story of his high school teahcer turning off the lights in the room and 'performing' Plato's allegory of the cave. This notion of 'performing' is an important one in oral teachings, rather than simply telling someone something. This is something Kane is certainly aware of. It was observed that Kane's book actually has something of the "Noble Savage' idea in its romanticising of the oral history. So Kane would be more apt to line up with Jean Jacques Rousseau than with Hobbes(the misanthropic philosopher not the quietly wise tiger)? This is potentially heavy-duty territory of philosophical debate, which I choose simply to pass over right now.

Than there was Carly's interest in an idea from a Dutch writer with an unpronouncable name regarding the inaccuracy of auto-biographical memory. This posits that memory is defective, or (more positively perhaps) active imaginative construction. This is something that ought always to be kept in mind with aut0-biographical writings, however objective they may strive to be.

There was a literary critic named John Ruskin who coined a term called the 'pathetic fallacy', the giving of human characteristics to creatures that don't have them. This lead into(for me) a delightful and charming story from Chris about her three rats, James Roger and Tony, who travelled with her in the car from New York to Montana, and how Roger was disconcerted because it was a longer drive than was usual for when he and Chris would go and visit her rabbi's house. Chris, I've gotta say: this could make a great children's book.

It was recommened that we check out page 41 of The Art of Memory, which provides examples of discreet items that were memorized in classical times and by those of classical persuasion. But many of us already have ideas for our fifty discreet items in mind already: Chris plans to memorise the names of rabbis from the Talmud(which is a collection of commentary on the Torah, by the way), and Jared plans to memorise the names of superheroes. As for myself, I will probably try memorising the first fifty films on AFI's top 100 list(or perhaps some other film list, we'll see).

It is somewhat daunting, perhaps. But it is not an impossible task. Richard Burton(the translator of The Arabian Nights, not the British actor)learned to speak thirteen languages fluently. Whoa-ee.

There was also more discussion of Groundhog Day, such as the suggestion that it is actually similar to The Tempest. And how Bill Murrey's character becomes an artist, in the amount of time devoted to one day that he has.

This led into a dissertation on an early moment in The Tempest in which Miranda is prompted by Prospero into 'imaginatively actualising' her early childhood. She remembers that four or five women attended her, leading Prospero to ask if perhaps there were a few more. Is it possible that there were four others, whihc would link the childhood attendents to the Muses?

We also had a note from Ted Hughes, analysing Shakespeare's lines, which he describes as two nouns joined by "and" animating a third noun. A bit formulaic, but still intersting I thought.

*Note> I had a few errors in my previous blog. The Shakespeare sonnet with the line 'remembrance of things past' is 30, not 130. And I forgot to note the overhead projector in the list of items in the communal memory theatre*

As today was February 2, a significant portion of class was spent discussing the deep importance of the film Groundhog Day(the literary critic Stanley Fish recently published an article were he lists the Ten best American movies and Groundhog Day is one of them. I'm gonna have to read it). Not only is it an example of how ancient rituals (in this case a festival of the annuciation of the virgin)are reduced to the ordinary, and a microcosmic illustration of Nietzche's Myth of the Eternal Return; it is also an exhaltation of the ordinary day. How the most boring uneventful day of the year can in fact contain one's whole life, and in fact all the mytholgical foundations of the universe. James Joyce's Uylsseus is an paradigmatic example.

We also noted down Kyle's system for memorising the Muses for the communal memory theatre.

thermostat- Erato(heat)
chalkboard-Clio(old)
screen-Urania(astronomy class)
"quiet" desk- Thalia(comedy)
overhead- Polyhemnia(hymns)
brown desk- Terpsichore(dance)
bulletin board- Calliope(epic poetry)
snowman-Euterpe(song)
weird "F"- Melpomene(tragedy)

It has also been announced that we must have our selected 50 discreet items by Friday.

Much ground traversed through discussion today. Among the points of importance was the note to watch out for clutter in our memory theatres--systematizing is necessary for the sake of precious memory space. House-keeping is essential, and when we note the associations that vast memory systems had with the sacred, it is surpisingly fitting to find that the closing passage of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible using a house as a metaphor for the human body and soul.

The notion of flyting(insulting in a very entertaining) is found to origins from the oral tradition(really colorful insults would possibly become incongruos if one tried to write them down) and continues on through the centuries, from Shakespeare(we used an example from King Lear of all plays) to Mickey-and-Judy MGM musicals to Abbot and Costello(and a host of other comedy pairs descending from the archetypal pairing of a 'straight man' and trickster) to rap contests. It all is about dissing.

The importance of the olefactory senses in unlocking the gateways to memory was brought up. This is something that is central to the construction of Marcel Proust's wopping novel In Search of Lost Time (also known as Remembrance of Things Past which is a blatant lifitng off of a line from Shakespeare's sonnet 130).

The use of a rhetorical style known as parataxis(stringing things together, linking them with "and") is a residual thing from oral culture as well. Which is way it can be seen as unsophisticated and simpleminded. But on the other hand this is how Hemingway wrote and he won the Nobel prize. So let us not be hasty in our judgements.

Today we harped more on the necessity of images for the memorization of things and events. And if it doesn't have a memorable image in and of itself, you create one for it: such as Mr. Sexson having green blood(Saint Patrick's Day is the day he can give blood again), or a ram's testicles(for a test).Because the word "testicle" and "testimony" and "test" are all interrealated. As evidenced by Dame Francis Yates in the story of the court-case she relates in chapter one of The Art of Memory. This book was much admired by Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials(of which I am a big fan), so much so that he has a character near the end of The Amber Spyglass, Dame Hana, who is specifcally modeled on Francis Yates.

We also learned today that the seven liberal arts are actually very similar to the nine Muses, and had images crafted to represent them by Hagad(sp?) a twelfth century prioress. Because of course folk would be more apt to remember them this way.

We've got the first nine items we have to form the group memory theatre in the class room: thermostat, chalkboard, screen, quiet desk, old desk, bulletin board, snowman, and the weird "F' symbol.(Mr. Sexson says it resembles a swastika. I actually thought it resembled a diagram of a cervix. Just to compliment the testicles; but never mind).

And Kane, who would point out that in the oral world it's all poetry. And the word curiosity derives from "cure" or "to care for". I did not know this previously.

Today both Sutter and Ty laid out their memory-palace technics for memorizing the nine Muses(Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Thalia, Terpsichore, Polyhemnia, Melpomone, Urania). Sutter used his home, Ty a synagogue. Both impressive in the description of the details. The same technic, yet idiosyncratic in their designs. Most memory systems are, but in this class the aim will be to try and have them work for everyone. Perhaps there is a way to have a memory system work for everyone, just as all memory systems are artificial. My method of remembering the Muses, it is somewhat embarrasing to say, is being helped along by hearing them recited in class by more skilled mnemotechnicians(sp?) then myself.


They also tend to, classically speaking, have an element of the sacred. Which means implementing them can be dangerous, as Giordano Bruno(a monk who developed a very provacative,vast memory system) found out the hard way; he was burned at the stake in 1600.

We also must begin constructing a communal Memory theatre from elements in the classroom, preferable those of a fixed position, such as the thermostat and chalkboard.

We were assigned our groups for the class today, who will make presentations on individual chapters in Wisdom of the Mythtellers after chapter 1. I am in group number 1, and we will be doing chapter 2 entitled Maps.

We ended up enlighting upon something that Ben blogged about; he always goes back to, and reconstructs, a cabin in Juno Alaska. Apparently, we all have 'cabins in Alaska'. There what would be called memory palaces, or memory theatres; places we go to in our minds to reconstruct or rediscovery what we remeber. And if we don't have one we'll be building one for the class.

In chapter four of his book Ong summarizes Plato's Phaedrus which is an impassioned attack on the newfangled thing called writing. Plato has Socrates say "writing is inhuman...it establishes outside the mind what should be in the mind." And once more, it destroys memory, because supposedly once you've written something down, you don't have to remeber it anymore. This stance(remarkably similar to the dismissal of computers in our age, as Ong notes) has been supplanted by a piety towards writing and reading in our day and age. Which I think is often a moot point more than anything else, but never mind.

But this is also an intriguing thing that comes up; what does make something memorable? As Yates says, sometimes we remeber things because they are terrible. They force themselve upon our memorys, just as traumatic events in history do(ie. September 11, the Kennedy assisination). But then very often we memorize things that are meaningless(I should now; my mind is a plethora of meaningless trivia). But maybe this is alright, because it forces one's little memory-muscles to exercise and prevents us from having a one-minute long-term memory, as some inverbrate creatures are supposed to have. I've actually met a few homo sapiens for whom this could be true, but that's beside the point.

We were assigned to blog about a passage from one of the books for the class. This following snippet from page 19 of The Art of Memory caught my eye. It trails off of a lengthy quotation from Cicero which I had no desire to double-quote.

"From these concluding words of Cicero's on the art of memory we learn that the objection to the classical art which was always raised throughout its subsequent history--and is still raised by everyone who is told of it--was voiced in antiquity. There were inert or lazy or unskilled people in Cicero's time who took the common sense view, to which, personally, I heartily subsribe--as explained earlier I am a historian only of the art, not a practioner of it--that all these places and images would only bury under a heap of rubble whatever little one does remember naturally."

I found this interesting, that Yates seems to be admitting that she doesn't really believe in the type of memory training she writes about. And yeah, we all wonder perhaps if it could be truly possible for someone to recite Virgil backwards without a mistake. Wouldn't the mind at some point in time just crap out on you? I suppose it was just the difference of tone that she has from ,say Kane, who appears to 'believe' thouroughly in the brand of human communication and storytelling he is writing about. But I could be jumping the gun here on Yates; we'll see how the rest of the book goes. And of course, most anything is possible, some things are just more common than others.

A great deal of material discussed today, with much of it revolving around the human tendency to, according to McCluan(sp?)whom Ong discusses at length, to interiorize and sentimentalize technology(not necessarily in that order). Meaning, we become so accostumed to certain modes of communication, such as letters and the telephone and email, that the just end up seeming completely natural and normal to us, whereas those who have absorbed past technological forms decry the new forms as unnatural. But of course McCluan also states that all technology(including language) is an extension of the body, and therefore interiorizing it becomes "natural".

Janna's blog quoted a great phrase from page 34 of Ong , about the need to "think memorable thoughts." This begs the question of what consitutes memorable thoughts. Francis Yates brings up in her book the notion that memory is helped, if not cemented by, associations that are flat-out grotesque and disturbing. This may be one of the reasons why art in the Middle Ages tended to focus on horrific things like the tortures of hell and formidable gargoyles and that sort of thing(this could lead into a whole other issue about the nature of the human imagination, and about how things that are horrific or threatningly horrific, like a hell of eternal torment, holds greater mnemotic sway than the possibilties of heaven. But never mind). This also reminds me a bit of a book I read during break called Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. Don't let the title fool you. It's very creepy.

I learned what the term luddism means today. It means being actively opposed to technology, and was named for a 19th century Englishman named Ludd who revolted against all technolgy. But of course, his contribution to chirographic(writing) and typographic(having to do with the world of print)worlds has being the coining of a word, which we write and discuss. Rather ironic really.

I can also add to the inexhaustable list of things to read Italo Calvino's Castle Across Destinies(awesome, no, epic title!). And we are to blog about a passage from Kane Yates or Ong.

The central point of discussion in today's class was the paradox to be found in the teaching of a class on oral traditions: we're learing about methods of storytelling and memorization by cultures with no writing system by reading books. Hence, a remembered conversation about emptying out a cooler by the window(or not, because there was nothing important in it) has different cadences when it is recounted verbally than when it is written down with a bunch tiny little marks called letters.

According to Ong(who was a Jesuit, and therefore already a scholar of some making), of the 3000 spoken languages in the world, only 78 have a writing system and therefore a form of literature. This is of course what is noted in his book which was published in the early 80's, but still, its a fascinating glimpse into the still far reaching expanse of orality, even in an intensely visualized culture as ours is or has become. Here we could probably move into lamentations about how technology is a vile thing, with how it is increasingly removing us from the world and the world's essence(and there would be some truth in this). But then, it was an observation made by Ong that language itself is a technology. So, we might want to watch trashing everything technological.

I close with the observation that I am now reassured: I'm not unique in being prone to fondle the covers of books in a creepily erotic way(those with tactile tendancies, appeal to the muse Eroto).

Day one of Oral Traditions class. We've been told to think of this as an elite class, unfit for the unwashed masses. Which may not take very much, since I know more than a few people who often can't remember what they had for breakfast, let alone the nooks and crannies of an unfrequented church(the location favored by Peter of Rivenia(sic?) for conducting exercises in memory, according to page 113 in Yates' the Art of Memory).
The two big things that help with memory are loci(or location) and image. I've been told and various times in my life that I have a good memory, but I have the sneaking suspicion that this class may end up challenging what vanity I have on that count.