Greetings:
I kinda posted on Ong in my first posting, because I read part of his book this summer after I picked it up in one of my trips dredging for books in the coop. I like to go through and see what books are being taught. I don’t normally care what classes. I have done this for years, trolling mainly through education, English, Lit Crit and philosophy, my fields of interest. But back to the topic ( I don’t want to be like Deena and get corrected by the teacher). The Ong has sent my thoughts all over the place. I think I can imagine an oral culture: it would be nothing like the one I grew up with. I think we have lots of residual orality free floating in our world. People tell stories to each other still. Many of the stories are just variations of other stories, not just in the way Joseph Campbell says that it is all one story, but that too. In the scheme of time, we have not been literate that long. I don’t think we can shake off the oral residue that quickly. I think you can see it in the way we talk in conversation. As I tried to say in class the other night, but I feel incoherently, we all use various tools, stories, puns, bad jokes, riffs of thought like jazz musicians whenever we talk to anyone. Conversation is improvised. But again like in jazz, the musicians are not just making it up as they go. There have been hours and hours of practice from which they build their licks. This, I believe, is similar to the fragments of iambic or whatever meter the oral poets used to fill in where needed. “Originality consits not in the introduction of new materials but in fitting the traditional materials effectively into each individual, unique situation and /or audience.” I am not sure this is any different for text based writing. Yes, originality is stressed, but how far out of the norm can something be and still be included in a language system. Yes, Finnegans Wake is wacko, but it can be unpacked to some degree. No, it could not be done solely as an oral text, but it has to be read out loud to get even a portion of the multi-linguistic puns embedded in it. I also like the physicality brought up on page 67. It brought to mind a story about a very text based poet, Wallace Stevens. He was described walking to work with a very noticalbe rhythm to his step. He would stop frequently and rock back and forth keeping the rhythm of his walk. Then he would move on. He went to work early to dictate his poetry to his secretary who he paid extra to come in early, because his wife would not let him write at home. It has been proposed that when he stopped he was working out a problem with a line. If you look at his typescripts there are very few corrections. Was this a kind of orality? I am rambling: there is a line at the end of one of Wittgenstein’s books, The Tractus, I believe where he says that we can’t really say anything, and we should keep silent when we have nothing to say. Which brings up the old John Cage standard: I have nothing to say, and I have said it and that is poetry.
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