Some final thoughts

While this class has brought me one step closer to being a person with a great memory (err...or at least up to par with average) through the study of memory palaces and the human potential, I think that the most beneficial gain from this class has been the knowledge of the differences between literal and oral culture. Before this class, I had a pretty narrow view of literacy as "better". While literacy is "better" in some aspects(such as allowing the writer to explore on another level of consciousness because of the slowness of the process), there is a lot we have sacrificed by giving up our primary orality. I hope to become a more rounded member of a literate culture by expanding the oral traditions I hold within. By exploring the realm of myth, our human connection with nature, and the possibilities of my own memory, I would like to re-remember what I have always known and have always forgotten. 

Picture People

Picture People

He stops talking. I feel like I should say something, but instead I just make my face smile.

Well. That’s my plan anyway. Whatever. We’ll see if it happens that way. He drops from the couch to inspect the vinyls. What should we listen to? Neil Young? Yes? He tips the heavy black disc out and places it on the turntable. He throws the cover back to me. I love that picture, he says. I tried to draw it once. Do you like taking pictures? Are you like, a picture person? I shake my head, no. Really? I feel like most girls go through this phase where you want to take pictures of everything. You never went through this phase? No? Well, if you haven’t gone through it already I don’t think you’re going to. He sits with his legs hung over the side of the arm rest, swinging slightly. He nods for a moment and starts singing along to “Heart of Gold”.

I don’t like pictures, I say. I watch his mouth pull in to shape the words “keep me searchin’”. His eyes are closed. I mean…I don’t know. I like looking at other people’s pictures.

I like pictures because I can’t remember everything, he says.

It just always feels like it’s detracting from the now. I guess. Like you’re pulling out of the present in order to document it.

So you don’t like staged pictures, he says. The line-everybody-up-and-smile pictures. His eyes are closed again. I wonder if he can feel the hum of the drums and bass through his chest.

Well, no. But all pictures feel staged to me.

He shrugs. They don’t always to me. Maybe you’re just a staged person. He uncaps the 40 and clicks it against mine. Grins. Points the bottle at me. There’s one moment where he looks like a batter pointing to the fence before the pitch. I uncap mine. Somewhere behind me, Neil Young is getting old and the harmonica is crying for him.

                Time to drink up. Yes?

With the wind catcher moving like that I keep thinking someone’s coming to the door, she says. I keep seeing it out of the corner of my eye. It freaks me out every time. I keep thinking it’s the FedEx man at the door with your dad’s package. I hate the days where he comes because I never know when it’s ok for me to shower.

                I look out the window. I don’t think it’s the wind catcher, I say. I think it’s one of the pillows you hung up this morning.

                She squints with her hands still on the apples. With each wedge the knife comes through the thick skin almost to her thumb. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I suppose that’s it. Can you go grab it? And the rest of them too, she says.

They are hanging on stretched satin loops. I unhook each of them carefully. The sweatshirts are still up and so are the coats, swinging limp on sixteen penny nails nailed to the beams. I don’t touch the rough hewn wood. I’ve had too many splinters from them.

Did you get all of them? She asks when I come back into the house. I just love that smell. So fresh. I know you guys probably miss the scented detergents and soaps, but it’s just too bad for your skin. I miss it too. But that air smells even better. I know you probably think I’m crazy. But I’m just trying to do what’s right for you guys. I feel so bad for all the people that don’t know any better. I know I don’t go into town very much anymore, but I look at all these people in the supermarket and when I smile at them they smile back. And it makes me feel like there are good people here.  I know I don’t think like that as often as I should, but they seem like really good people. I can tell by their faces. You can tell a lot by looking at people’s faces, she says. She gestures with one hand, water dripping. I put the pictures you sent me up here on the fridge, she tells me. It’s so good to finally see the people you talk about.

I look out. The dog’s moved away from the porch and found a spot in the yard with the snow and yellowed grass. He’s lying against the aspens in a matted circle of lawn. He’s chewing on something with ears.

I think Georgie’s eating a goat head, I tell her with the pillows in my hands. I watch her run to the lawn with white grocery bags and scold him, but the wind and the windowpane takes away the noise she makes. He stays serious throughout the whole thing. When she bends down the flimsy plastic bags thrash and her lower body is slanted far away. He just watches her. He lets her take it in the bag but one paw stays on the goat’s face until the last possible moment.

               

So I came in yesterday and Berg is in my basement, just standing at the head of the ping pong table. And I’m like, Um, Berg? How’s it going? And I can tell he’s not all there, just standing and swaying slightly. What are you doing in my basement Berg? And he’s like, acid. That’s all he says. So we stand for a few minutes longer. And then I’m like, ok. I have to go to bed now because I have class at nine, so you’re welcome to stay in my basement if you just stay quiet. And he just nods. It was a Tuesday night, he says, and shakes his head. He tells me this while a drum throbs somewhere over me. Someone is yelling about something spilling behind him, but I try to focus on his eyes anyway.

What? I say back. I focus hard on talking.

He says something else. His features are captured in those harsh puppet movements, those quick pictures strobe lights and drunk memories make. I blink and try to get to him.

Well, I had to send it back of course. The white of the fridge doesn’t match the white on the walls. I reordered macadamia beige. It should be coming in next Tuesday. It will take a little longer because Todd ordered it for me on the internet, but it was nine dollars cheaper than the same model at Vanns. But it does have an ice maker. I don’t know what I’ll do with an ice maker. Ruth Drummond says she likes hers, but I think I won’t use mine when it comes. Do you want lunch? I know this fridge doesn’t work as well as it used to but it still keeps things cold if you don’t open the door very much. Do you want some Pollack? I think it’s still mostly frozen. Here, and we have some tartar sauce. The expiration date? No, don’t worry about that. Well, I blacked it out. Your mother worries about me eating things past expiration, and I don’t want to worry her. No? Well I think we still have some ham and potato salad left over from grandpa’s funeral. I remember how you liked Ruth Drummond’s potato salad. Well, yes, I suppose that was last February. Or we could make some salad greens…oh. I guess it’s gone bad. So hard to cook for one person. Here, just tear off the wilted and wet pieces, you can’t even tell. Salad dressing? We have some Kraft Bacon Ranch that’s good. Oh, what’s that? It expired in 2004? Oh no. Is that bad?

She shuffles Tupperware with one hand with the other on the door of the fridge. It’s colored macadamia beige. There are patches of dark color from the pictures she removed while waiting for the new one. She never put them back up on the old one when the new fridge wasn’t right. The yellow light is on her head and veined hands. I can’t see her face. She’s got it buried in the tub of potato salad.

We’re walking when something occurs to him, and it doesn’t make him happy. I watch it come over his face. It doesn’t seem like you’re having very much fun, he says. Wait, why? I ask. You’re not taking any pictures, he says. We step around a pigeon. He raises his arms and tilts his head. Come at me, he says to the pigeon, but the pigeon shuffles to the left and we walk by.

I’m having fun, I tell him. He doesn’t seem to believe me. No, I am, I say. If I was taking pictures right now I wouldn’t be having very much fun. I inhale cigarette smoke as we walk into a crowd and start coughing. I’m still coughing while we wait for the light to cross.

Hey, I tell him. You like taking pictures. If I opened that traveling bookstore slash tea emporium, I would offer you employment as a photographer and salesman. You could take pictures of Peddlers at all of its locations. Get it? Because I’ll peddle fine teas and books. And the logo will be a distinguished man on an old fashioned bike and books under his arm and a teacup in one hand. And I could paint things on the side of the road while people browse my wares. I would have a pet raccoon, and it would ride on my shoulder and eat pretzels while I walked around. That’s my dream for the future, I say to him.

He stops to throw soggy leaves at my head and I stuff dry leaves down the back of his jacket. And later I try to help him pull them out, but I can’t get all of them and he crinkles and itches with every step.

You flew on a plane! You left the state! So proud of you. She screams most of it and hugs me. Did you take lots of—she stops talking and mimes a camera button being pressed, grinning. From the laundry room the whine of the rinse cycle is raised to a higher pitch.

We snake skinned the road with bicycle tires and tried not to fall where salt ate the snow in cigarette burns.

I think I’m going to start writing down my thoughts, he says when we come back down. He’s turning the moleskin notebook over in his hand. I’ve been thinking about what you said about how you’re not a writer, but a reviser. I think we’re all like that. We go through these gray areas to get to the black, or as close the black as we can get, but we forget where we’ve been. That’s a lot of the problem, he says, and puts the notebook in his backpack. People can’t remember everything.

Copper is already there, tail against my knees and nose in my crotch and then finally under my hand, frantic. Gaga crosses the room to hug me. She smells like her perm and the cedar chips she puts in the guinea pig cage. She tries to feed me an orange creamsicle. The scrapbook is out on the table.

Papa moves slow now. His back is bowed, the top of the head red and painful looking with age spots. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, he says. He laughs after he says it, but it’s not the usual hacking Papa laugh. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it’s not what you hear. I was out for two days, and it was only black. I don’t remember any of it. He smoothes back some of the white hair with one hand. His eyes are back deep besides the crooked bird nose. He grins. I grin back. But anyway, he says. Enough about that. If that’s all it was, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t bad at all, he says. He points to my wrist. You still wear that old wind up watch of your dad’s?

Yeah, I say. I found it again when I came home. But it’s not much of a watch when it doesn’t tell time anymore.

That’s my girl, he says.

My chickadee is here, the boy says in the afternoon, grinning. His eyes are still half closed and swollen from sleep. Every time I move a little he wakes up and says the same thing. My chickadee, he says, like he just realized that I’m there.

 We sleep for a while. I keep waking up to the sun dimming in fragments, this long set of stills taken through the gaps in the blinds. It’s always a little lower than before. The sun changes but his cheek stays against my shoulder, and when we wake up I can feel his mouth smile even when I can’t see it.

Notes 4-4

Test is moved instead to finals date
Sublime powers are also the darkest powers--Shakespeare
Wisdom does not come in "how true" thoughts but thoughts of "huh??"
Joyce Carol Oates "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

Please see Rio's blog for test questions.

Presentations for Maps and Boundaries next time!

Questions for Ong

_______moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space, but _______locks words into position in this space. (Writing, print)

What is the upward slope, followed by downward slope, climactic linear plot known as? (Freytag's pyramid) Do oral culture narratives follow this diagram? (No, because without writing, there is no way to organize a string of episodes in strict chronological order)

What is in medias res? ("In the middle of things": to plunge the reader into the action)

What two qualities encourage the reflectiveness and growth of consciousness of unconscious in writing? (isolation of the writer, slowness of writing process)

What is a character type that is deeply interiorized in motivation and powered mysteriously from within? (Round)

What character type is used most widely in the oral tradition? (Flat)

A few one liners: "Every text builds on pretext" (159)
"The writer's audience is always a fiction" (174)

While western thought thinks of language as a _______, oral cultures believe that language and thought grows out of ________.
(structure, memory)

Human communication is never one-way. The sender must not only be in the sender position but also in _______ before he can send anything. (the mind of the receiver)

Notes 3-30

Look at Jennifer the Charmed, Shelby, Levi, and Kyle's blogs.
For next class meeting, please generate some test questions for Ong and/or Yates material.

It is impossible to speak a word without any intonation
By putting it into words, robbed of harmful power--Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"
The whole world is a work of art. We are the thing itself.
To rob the event of the power it has in its past life is to put it into written word--you write about these things, you own the story. You have taken power into own words.

Telling stories is not a demonstration of talent or lessons--it is always a matter of life and death.
Richard Wilbur's "The Writer"

Ong vs Derrida: Derrida is text centered
Phonocentrism--the oral dimension of language

Freud's couch--decorated with material whose pattern is reminiscent of Arabian Nights.

Notes 3-28

Jennifer recites Kubla Khan poem in a manner that illustrates the concept that language comes from the rhythms of the body.

(pg 128) Moonwalking with Einstein--Chapter 6, memorizing poetry (rhyme and alliteration will help)
First Chapter of Kane (pg 21) Human history divided into different "liths"...Kane romanticizes the Stone Age.
With agriculture come property, and then state, armies, class system, hierarchy, HOARDING.

Read the entirety of Sexson's article "Re-membering Finnigans Wake"
Read Jennifer's blog--her purse as a portable memory theater

Joyce's book is different every time you read it--ultimate oral tradition/high brow mix
Carnal--words that turn into flesh
FW is meant to be read with 15-20 people out loud.
Other authors with this mixed quality: Samuel Beckett, Vladamir Nabokov.

Nabokov: author of Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada
"Speak Memory": Nabokov's autobiography--artful. Ch6: he describes his lifelong obsession with lepidoptery
Most autobiographies are artless...why?

Kane's work hearkens us to return to the hunter/gatherer stage...to deal with animals on a daily basis.
Agriculture mythology centers around death and rebirth in the earth.

What separates us from the ecstasies of those initiations?
Do not speak of gods, but animals...the knowledge of patterns is key.
Proust "In Remembrance of Things Past"

Notes 3-26

Read Ashely, Seth's blog

We tend to dismiss Oral literature because it seems to lack depth.
Banned words: exactly, like, just

For the Musey Rooms:
Don't think about what Sexson wants for the Musey Rooms--what can you do? No model to follow, but take into consideration the examples of Bruno, Camillo, etc
Musey Rooms should contain both archetypes (model/form) and signature (your own)
Language tends to originate with heartfelt, guttural sounds that are fundamentally rhythmic (music)

Eleusinian Mysteries--a Musey Room where people are inducted through doing, seeing, and showing--creates something that is memorable.

Empathetic--one of the nine Ong traits
You enter into the same world and participate sensuously through language

Even the sounds that you might otherwise dismiss are important
The artist, the magician: who hear the music in places where you might otherwise not hear it.

Kane's definition: Myth is not those stories we tell of gods/goddess as these are already literature. We need to get behind the stories to rhythmic grunts.
Myth is the sound, the music made when the earth is singing to itself.