I Should Really Post More Often

I have, once more, neglected to write anything for quite some time. I even found a paper from at least a week ago with various comments I gathered from my reading of the texts. At this point I doubt I'll understand them much but I want to take care of them as best as I can so as to be capable of moving on.

Yates
-Camillo's memory theatre drew from many ideologies as he attempted to contain the entire universe in his memory. He illustrated this goal with imagery of finding oneself within a forest and being unable to form a clear picture of the forest or one's place in it without climbing to the top of a high hill that overlooks it all. Yates quotes Camillo as saying, "in order to understand the things of the lower world it is necessary to ascend to superior things, from whence, looking down from on high, we may have a more certain knowledge of the inferior things."

-A memory system of this scale, particularly the seven parallel gates, is a systematized version of the traditional memory theatre we've seen before. Although Camillo deals with symbols and concepts I do not easily relate to, I would consider creating something like this for myelf for the purpose of exponentially expanding my capacity to remember. My current theatre works very linearly and simply. This is good for contained stories and lists. I would like to accomplish a more wikipedia-like memory system without simply complexifying each locus. How, precisely, i don't know yet.

-One last thought with this. Yates sums up Camillo's feat not simply as "a highly ornamental filing cabinet" but as an idea "the Idea of a memory organically geared to the universe." This brought to mind an image that has always fascinated me known as the "Flammarion woodcut" which I will not explain but have posted above.

Ong
-Print is imbued with a sense of closure, which is part of the reason I have trouble getting myself to write things down, yet can talk forever. I have "communication commitment issues" in that respect.

-The relationship of sounds and words and letters brings to mind waveform. Waveform is the most literal visual interpretation of sound (though it would be next to impossible to read and write with it). Most people are familiar with how it looks, the squiggly lines you see on music visualizers, and in some of our classes for film we had to edit these patterns. You have a general pattern (flat means silence, spike means a loud noise) but the more you zoom into it the more detailed it becomes. Words are rarely tidy little pieces like they are when printed, everything mushes and slurs together in waveform and reminds me of the early texts where the idea of spacing hadn't come up yet.
"My Book and Heart Shall Never Part"
-I borrowed this short film from Professor Sexson (which he and his wife, Lynda, created). Using fictional and nonfictional elements the film examines 18th-19th century children's books, their origins, and how they shaped our culture. I found the subject very intriguing, but what best pertains to our class at the moment is the educational nature of most of these books. Of particular note are the books that teach the alphabet through simple images and sayings "The Eagle's flight is out of sight" for the letter E, for example. Books like these were a natural transition between the letter and image memorization aids we see in Yates chapter five and our often less compelling modern works "A is for Apple, B is for Ball." Going along these lines and the common class theme of using grotesque imagery I invite you to read through Edward Gorey's "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" found here.

Ken, Kenning, Kennings

On Monday we learned the epithet "Keen Kenning Ben." I had just posted a blog on the word kenning and at first thought this was the same reference. It soon became apparent that they were different words and that our mutual use of these terms was purely coincidental. Therefore, I would like to write about kenning more thoroughly.

As used in the epithet, kenning seems to be a verb (to ken) meaning to know or perceive. Ben thus understands things keenly, or sharply. If there is another definition or understanding of the word I do not know it.

My use of kenning is a noun (a keening, many kennings). I found the term by looking up the phrase "whale-road" as mentioned in Ong as he discusses using formulaic language, though I think it is mentioned explicitly somewhere.

A kenning is a figurative expression used to substitute a noun. We get them from old Norse poetry, particularly from Beowulf. They can be phrases or compound words. Whale-road means sea, storm of swords means battle, sea steed means ship, bane of wood means fire, and so on. Kennings can even be used within other kennings: A raven is a war-gull, a feeder of ravens is a warrior, thus a warrior is a feeder of war-gulls.

A kenning is a circomlocution, a longer, more complicated way of saying something relatively simple, somewhat like riddles. Using a kenning rather than the literal word, further attention is drawn to the word, further thought invested than normal. Kennings are like epithets. They create memorable elements that can easily be used again and again, thus aiding the oral storyteller. Finally, most kennings create a visual that outweighs that of the literal word.

Quote of My Day

"Where there is no narrative, there is no history."
-Bendetto Croce

In the Dark Backward and Abysm of Time

It has been far too long since my last post, yet this entire time I have been making notes as to what I'd like to talk about. With massive threads of interest I did what I always do, wrote them all down and tried to link them thematically, brainstorm style. This resulted in a very cluttered mess. So many of the topics blend with so many others that I really need a personal version of Wikipedia in order to sort through them all. Finally, though, I just need to start writing.

A little while ago in class we talked about being "spectators in our own skulls." This refers to the fact that no one sees truly from the perspective of anyone else. We tend to take for granted the fact that we have literally unique physical sensory experiences, the precise things "I" see, hear, etc. More so, we have individual thoughts, inner monologues, that nobody else can hear, though we must assume everyone else is as conscious of themselves as we are. Although the actual circumstances are vague, I remember a specific moment in childhood where I became aware that I could think inside my mind and thus became much more responsive to empathy. Everyone in the world lives an isolated life in this respect. We have no perfect way of knowing what another person is aware of, or even that they are aware. If all we have to go on is perception, how can we ever communicate love, hate, etc? Thus we must formulate from knowable imagery unknowable ideas.

Similar to this method of interpreting intangibles through physical means, the truth of stories is sometimes best received through less-than-true tales. A prime example of this is the film "Big Fish," which I strongly recommend watching. The point is, we all have knowledge, whether "true" facts or moral lessons, we wish to communicate to others so that they will remember them. As we continue to bring up in this course, as long as the essential truths stay firm, everything else can be entirely false. In fact, the more outlandish and bizarre the framing of the story, the more easily the story is recalled. Not only that, but describing something simple in a nontraditional way heightens our attention and invites reinterpretation. Similar to the epithet's we have discussed, kennings are strong recurring elements of story. Instead of fire say "bane of wood," instead of blood say "battle sweat," in this way even the most basic ideas are powerful.

A friend of mine asked why memories seem so much more emotionally charged than present experience. Like any story, the handful of things that keep a particular incident in mind in the first place are heightened as we draw in other references and remove unnecessary elements. That's not to say we simplify it infinitely. We don't remember being hit by a car and it hurt alot, we remember a person we had just spoken with, or a smell we noticed just before the incident. Insignificant details can become markers in the same way grotesque imagery does. Their inclusion in a story make the story legitimate, believable, even if other elements are impossibilities.

This leads me to cultural memory. Language is an organic, flowing link to the past. If you are reading this you understand written English, most likely you understand spoken English as well, which you learned from listening to others, who themselves listened to others, who listened to others still. You could potentially trace back a conversation (albeit a delayed one) from now to the dawn of language. You could also do the same thing between yourself and nearly anyone else on the planet. As far as history is concerned, this is my biggest interest. The connections that inevitably led to this moment, the way in which everything is connected whether we like it or not.

Connections and repetitions are fulfilling. In a film, there may be the huge twist at the end that makes the audience suddenly understand everything in a whole new light. There may also be something as simple as a subtle piece of music that is played and then much later under entirely different circumstances played again. Even if the audience is not paying attention to the score they will feel a link to the previous moment, and this will once more bring an element of interpretation that was not there before.

In class, the alethiometer from "His Dark Materials" was mentioned. Hopefully I do not spoil much (you've been warned) but it basically looks like a compass with a ring of small images instead of North, South, etc. The user can ask any question and can be told the answer through a spinning needle pointing at the objects. The objects are limited, but the answers are endless because any image has many levels of meaning. A cauldron could be literal, could mean cooking, could mean cooking up a plot, plans, etc. This is a perfect example of the storyteller's art. Yates mentions the memory treatises including long lists of objects (anvil, helmet, lantern) to be memorized and used in our memory palaces. Ong speaks of the recurrence of specific lines and epithets in Homeric poetry. Just like the images of the Alethiometer, there are limited elements but infinite applications. This is practical and simplifies a still impressive task when it comes to telling epics.

Recurring phrases and image inspire memory, we've covered this again and again. "The Divine Comedy" seems to exist less as a story of what the afterlife looks like, and more as a memory aid for virtues, vices, and the like. I wonder then, how we might apply these concepts to modern stories. I could definitely see a modern novel incorporating symbolic illustrations the way we see in medieval works. It would be similar to a text heavy picture book, only many of the images would not be literal. What I'm really interested in is the way this could be accomplished in movies.