On Fertility

Writing, the recording of language, has restructured the way we think and with its invention our learning processes along with our internal grasp of memories have reconfigured revolutionizing our conscience as a species. It seems that externalizing our thoughts has advanced aspects of our species, but rather we've emphasized in class as Ong insists that, 'literacy brought about the ills of mankind, not illiteracy' and it has inhibited our mindsets. The carryover of beliefs embedded in chirography from, in the big scheme of things, rather recent, previous centuries has caused much conflict amongst those who dig deeper into matters, such as critics. Last semester in Literary Criticism class we read an article about Claude Levi-Strauss (at least I believe it was him or another linguistic scholar) who proposed that the advent of language precedes our existence as humans or, in other words, that language is already somehow a part of our being before we come into the world. I believe Walter Ong is referring to something of this nature when he says "there are many scripts but only one alphabet." His proposal makes sense, but to take this further we have to go back to Phoenicians who first invented the alphabet. In linguistics they call it the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet), and with proper understanding of the letters audible articulations we may translate one language into any other. I took a linguistics course a couple semesters ago and we learned to translate Japanese, French, and a few other languages into English by knowing how to pronounce the word without knowing what it means. The tricky part is that not all languages contain every sound, or should I say phoneme, specified in the IPA.

Along with these matters, in class we've briefly discussed another paradigm shift which greatly affected us as a people--the revolutionary discovery of agriculturally-based means of subsistence--which transitioned us from our initial hunter-and-gatherer livelihood, an alteration of seeking out our needs into the learning how to have control over nature and cultivating it. Taking this further, when we were hunters and gatherers the real world must've seemed absolutely fantastic because the creatures and plants which we're being found all around would seem to 'magically' appear because there was no explanation for it, but then once we discovered how to harness fertilization that's when we began to lose this sense of wonder--an answer passed on from previous generations. This gets me thinking about the nature of art of storytelling in the oral tradition. It's quite amazing that each person in our class went up in front of the class, and even if they were nervous (like myself) they still managed to pluck each and every piece of information from their imagination and prove it in speech. It's simply amazing because even though the random items weren't necessarily stories to the audience we in the audience knew with absolution that the presenters' creations were structured as a theatrical narrative even if it wasn't communicated as so.

At last I'm going to discuss the presence of alchemy in the art of storytelling and memory. I'll call this 'mnemonic alchemy'--the art and science of turning experience (something raw) into knowledge (something of value) als ob it was turning lead into gold. We all know it's impossible to turn lead into gold, but mnemotechnics capture the concept of alchemy. Our imaginations allow us to, without consequence, inflate the value of something (being an experience or piece of knowledge) by means of metamorphosis.

For example, if I want to remember the word 'buxom', which is descriptive and qualitative, not a concrete thing, then I must use its definition to my advantage by attaching it or incorporating it with another element which will change its essence. Thus, for 'buxom' in my memory theatre I saw a floating pudgy cherub, a winged cupid-like boy ['Cherub' initially was on the list but was removed]. This process is alchemical because you have a new piece of knowledge (or worthy experience) becoming locked in our memories after having been remade into something else richer by substituting, aggregating, altering, etc. their essence.

Or if I want to remember that Phoenicians are pioneers of the one and only alphabet then I'll think of them as, say, artists of language cultivation who are finished harvesting the A's and moving onto the B's, a description which carries all the components of articulation.