We discussed Ong today in class, in relation to speech and wisdom. An English major, each piece of literature I read I try to gain not merely knowledge, but wisdom through the text. I seek wisdom to give me guidance and reveal truth. It’s an endless range of wisdom we literate people try to obtain- there are no ends to it!
We have access to an innumerable amount of information. All this information we have is nearly impossible to fit in our own mind’s. We can always access literature and study it for meaning. In oral speech we cannot retrieve what we say; we can only process through practice. This is why people in primal cultures process and practice wisdom but do not study wisdom. The words we speak are never static. They are not easily transcribed; some words always get lost in the translation of speech from the mind to the mouth. I can see how theater would be an important art form to an oral culture. Oral peoples associate meanings with movements. These gestures can be performed to a group of people, as Homeric literature has been done over and over throughout the generations.
There is a connection between performing and learning stories as there is a connection between singing and learning a language. With a ready stock of sayings and epithets, oral people, like poets or jazz musicians, only need to weave them together to remember stories. A story is an effective tool for gaining wisdom. Within stories, allegorical motifs and symbols give meaning and message. Within a culture, a symbol of something might always mean the same thing, so when hearing a story, an immediate association is made. It doesn’t matter if the person only picks out a few sound bites to remember, what matters is the meaning the community, together, derives from a story.
No comments:
Post a Comment