More notes from Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy because he says so many exciting things, and I can only choose some to share with the audience at Mythcon. My brain is pretty tired, but reading and writing text allows me to continue to stuff more and more information in without worrying about actually remembering it all -- a significant difference from how oral cultures handle information and communication. If there is time, I will work on some of these ideas.
Sound exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but evanescent and sensed as ephemeral. Even as we speak aloud, each word must disappear as a sound to allow the next term to occur. There is no equivalent of a "still" shot for sound. It is always experienced in real-time. Oral utterance, which comes from inside living organisms, is "dynamic." Oral cultures almost universally consider words as having a magical potency -- as the word spoken, sounded, and power-driven—names conveying power over things.
You know what you can recall. Sustained thought in an oral culture is tied to communication. Think memorable thoughts -- using mnemonic patterns shaped for ready oral recurrence. Though coming in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, repetitive, antithesis, esthetic, etc., along with standard thematic settings, proverbs, riddles, -- all patterned for retention. Formulas help implement rhythmic discourse and act as mnemonic aids, often appearing in oral cultures because they form the substance of thought. ("The clinging Vine," "sturdy oak," Divide and Conquer." ) The law itself is enshrined in oral sayings and proverbs, which show up not as decorations but as evidence of the law itself.
Oral discourse looks to the pragmatic needs of the speaker, and written text looks to the synthetics, the organization of the speech itself. Traditional expressions in oral cultures must be kept intact -- it's been hard work getting them together over the generations, and there is nowhere outside the mind to store them. Unlike written text, where one can backtrack to keep thoughts together, oral cultures use redundancies and repetitions to save the hearers on the way. ***And this, which I will be doing when I speak: "The public speaker's need to keep going while he (she!) is running through her mind what to say next also encourages redundancy. Better to repeat something artfully than stop speaking while fishing for the next idea." (Lord help me! )
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
