Over the years

Over the years, since the dawn of chirography, as a people brought up within this tradition which we well know as literacy. Although it's only been this way for a rather relatively short amount of time, and since this certain time as a people our perception of the world as we know it has been ill-perceived. This certain time supposedly came around the time of first stories of the Bible, a symbol for the beginning of 'life as we know it' and the creation of the world. It's interesting to look at the Bible from this perspective because it makes it easy to believe that there were people before this chirographic 'beginning of time' because, as Kane says in his prologue, "the ancestors of human species evolved a new organ, called culture: it allowed patterns of behavior to be transmitted variably in stories" (15-16). This idea of culture is a man-made creation and separation from nature which eventually, over the millenia, brings us to the first (and second!) book in the Bible which is "written by agriculturalists" (19). Once we moved "from a forager to a producer economy" (18), that's when culture became valued so highly that people became believers in classism. Being able to stake a claim and having rights over that property led others to believe, let's say those without property, that they had to work, what Kane refers to as "a state of contest," their way up in society. If there's classism then there are those looking up (the lower class), those looking down (the upper class), and those contented (the middle class). Here's something to mull over, with agriculture comes the idea of property; I'll let Kane continue because his words are too clear to best: "A class system arises out of the necessities of agriculture. For agriculture to work, you need to have a concept of property. For a concept of property to work, you need to have a state. For a state to work, you to have armies to defend it. Consequently, developed agricultural societies evolve a new mythology featuring three classes of deities - deities who stand respectively for the functions of priest, farmer, and warrior" (21-22). If and only if you have agriculture then you have property which belongs to your stately ownership, employment, and management. It's hard to think that agriculture, containing idea of property which transformed into this aggregate idea of 'intellectual property' as well, has brought about most of the ills of men, that primitive ill being a 'defense mechanism'. A king must defend his territory, I suppose, or so it seems it must be that way. Then again, I don't want people stealing/using my stuff, physical or intellectual (I mean, at least until I'm finished with it and I've made [or attempted to make] a pretty penny from it!).

So, with that said, here's one more thing to think about concerning the preliterate and literary developments and revolutions of the world:

Oral tradition-->chirography (written word)-->printing press (mass production of written word)-->typography (typed word)-->internet (exponential availability of mass produced -graphics)

Also, do visual aids or pictures belong anywhere in these developments?

Ramon Lull & Giulio Camillo

Camillo was a genius. I never knew the guy personally, but what I do know is that his idea of making his master loci an actual theatre is ingenious idea because he flips the entire idea of a theatre around up on it's head. It seems that his role, being the subject and performer, stays the same but the focus isn't upon him, the lights aren't shining. You know that feeling when you're on stage and the lights are too bright for the actors to see the audience (forcing them to focus on the on-stage scene they're recreating), well that feeling isn't there; it's flipped and foiled. He's the audience, although he's the the one on stage. He can see it all and recall it all. In Camillo's memory theatre he's able to see all of his levels (from the peasant's ground to the press boxes), those compartments of collected and registered knowledge, with clarity because he's designed the lights in his theatre to shine on what should be the 'audience'. Typically, the performer should tell the audience a story, but in this case the audience is telling the performer a story. I think Camillo thought that the stories of those filling his [seemingly limitless, because the memory is a void,] seats are much more vastly variable than the subject[s] participating on stage. Camillo thinks that his theatre [beyond the stage], signifying what his imagination has imprinted on his memory, is far superior to himself [the occupant of the stage]. It's a brilliant reversal.

As for the latter, that being Lull, I'm going to attempt to focus on it's "philosophical tradition" and it's opposition being the "rhetoric tradition" (175). What interests me is his neglecting "effort to excite the memory by emotional and dramatic corporeal similitudes" (176) which avoids the "visual arts" altogether creating a disconnect from the utilization of grotesque imagination, a foundation based on arguably heretical rhetoric imagery, and practice of classical artificial memory-making (I hope I'm reading and analyzing this correctly, please right me if I'm wrong...). Simply, I believe his method is more deductive than inductive if we speak in philosophical terms. His method relies on "visual arts" but in a less disfiguring and purely creational sense, but rather a integrative and strictly recreational sense.

In my next blog I'm going to talk about the four classical liberal arts, those being: number, geometry, music, and cosmology; Altogether called the Quadrivium, and why Lull may have used them to his advantage.

For now we'll preemptively investigate a basic attribute of Lullism; being geometry. In Yates' book she says that Lull was interested in capitalizing on this idea of the Trinity, "three powers of the soul which Augustine defined as the reflection of the Trinity in man. As intellectus, it was an art of knowing or finding out truth; as voluntas it was an art of training the will towards loving truth; as memoria, it was an art of memory for remembering truth" (174) leaving out only one part of Prudence, the utmost necessity for artificial memory, being providentia. This is very interesting because we start with a triangle (as opposed to a sqare?), and then the geometric figures develop thereforth within his system of concentric circles which nevertheless potentially provide an infinite amount of combinations (call it a "revolutionary...movement in the psyche" (176)). Beyond the geometrical, Trinitarian starting point he uses what Yates calls a "derivation from cosmological 'rotae' of the wheels of Art" (178).

I can't make much more of the geometric Art, although the picture above may interest others furthermore. Take a look at the geometric figures within a circle, there are too many possibilities, then check the letters on the outside circles which tie into what's said on page 177-78...

Next we'll investigate further into the already quoted or stated geometry, cosmology, and Art [or what I'll assume is Liberal Art].