My Three

So here are three things that I have found interesting in each of the three books.

Starting with Ong, in Chapter 2 when he is talking about Homer and the different ideas surrounding his work, I really found this to be interesting. Mainly, the idea that the Homeric works were written in patterns and formulas. This is expressed in the book as surprising. However, more than anything it made me begin to think about the collective unconscious as applied to tales and stories and epics. He then gets to that somewhat on page 25.

"The clusters constitute the organizing principals of the formulas, so that the 'essential idea' is not subject to clear, straightforward formulation but is rather a kind of fictional complex held together largely in the unconscious."

It was at this point that I threw up my hands in a 'what an awesome connection' sort of way. Of course Homer's epics are going to show patterns! The mind processes that wrote the story at one time are still going on - through the collective unconscious.



Ok, next with Kane.
In the first chapter, Kane brings up some very interesting things. One of these is connection. When reading about this in chapter 1, I realized that I have often been influenced in some way by connections that are invisible to me. On page 40 Kane says, "The whole world seems alive with relationships we cannot see, except as they make their presence felt in other relationships which we can see."

I really love this quote, and it provokes my mind in wondering how far the connections go. Why the connections exist. etc.


And finally with Yates.
In chapter 2 Yates talks about the ideas of memory in the ancient Greek culture. One of the things she mentions is that, "Imagination is the intermediary between perception and thought." This line found on page 32 struck me as beautiful and poignant. I read this line over about four times just to get it through my head. For some reason something about it made me mull over the words. I first thought of Kant and the perception thought relationship, but with the addition of imagination i was unsure. This is just provoking for me, because maybe I don't think about imagination in sufficient terms - maybe my ideas about it are limited and narrow.

Those are just some quick things that were underlined in those books. Interesting stuff.

The Enormity of Our Task

The impossible nature of studying orality struck me when reading Ong's book, Orality and Literacy. In the first chapter, Ong discusses the difficulty of separating orality from literacy. The example he provides describes how the word 'nonetheless' is nearly impossible to think of without the context of the written word. As I started thinking about this I found that this was nearly impossible with anything I thought of.

The essence of orality eludes me. Even if I wanted to capture it I wouldn't be able. Spoken word, to me, is the product of letters - symbols invented to drown out memory. Well, at least that is what Ong would say. He claims that literacy must be "carefully monitored" or else it "even destroys their memory." I am not certain how one could "carefully monitor" language so that it does not alter memory though I wonder at Ong's use of the word 'destroy.'

The end of Chapter 1 left me questioning Ong's argument. He claims that, "Literacy can be used to reconstruct for ourselves the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all." I have a hard time with this because the system (literacy) from which we come blinds us from the "pristine" essence of the true oral culture. I challenge Ong, with the impossibility that he explains, to prove me wrong and give me a view of orality not in terms of literacy. I love his quote - "In the end, the horses are only what they are not."