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Note:
these excerpt threads are
subject to continual revision and updating as
opportunity and priority
permits
Barry Sanders: "Most people would agree that it is almost impossible to imagine life without a self... This book argues that the idea of a critical, self-directed human being we take for granted as the working foundation of our humanness develops only in the crucible of reading and writing. Human beings as we know them are products of literacy. In the West, alphabetic reading and writing begin to take hold some time in the fifth or sixth century B.C. What happens to the self several thousand years later, we must now ask, as today's young people find less and less appeal in bookish things. What happens, that is, to the creature to which we have grown so accustomed? That is the profoundly shocking question facing contemporary society, for the self that came into history as a result of literacy is on the verge of passing out of history. This agent called the self that came to life as a social and intellectual construct tied to the culture of the book is in the process of deconstructing and falling away entirely from the human repertoire. With its disappearance will go the human being we know now..." [xi] A is for Ox "Humans speak. Humans listen. But very few oral peoples in the world - the vast assembly of speakers and listeners - ever make the radically disruptive move into literacy. According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately three thousand languages spoken in the world today, only some seventy-eight have a literature. Of those seventy-eight, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience. Literates make up a very small minority of the world's population, but they make their force felt out of all proportion to their number. In a sense, that is the lesson that literacy teaches: it empowers people to speak their minds in a way that oral peoples can never know. Literacy - that mysterious, elusive force that carries human beings into a particularly powerful kind of consciousness - is the subject of this book. The great majority of people in the world today have the opportunity to walk out of orality and to cross into that other world of literacy. But vast numbers of them never even take the first step. Perhaps they sense the paradox underlying literacy: the bridge does not permit two-way traffic. Once a person makes it into that territory called literacy, he or she can never return. Literacy admits of no visitors, no tourists. It is a world with no exit, an experience which offers no possibility of ever coming back. The world of orality can barely be discerned from the other side. One can make out only the vaguest outlines, as if having dwelled there once in a dream. No wonder that the world of orality, where people live having no contact with reading or writing - what anthropologists term primary orality - baffles most literate minds. It's nearly impossible to fathom how non-literates think, or to understand how they actually perceive the world - a bit like trying to recall one's own life before reading and writing. The true feel and recollection of our earlier, pre-literate times gets eradicated by new categories of thinking and remembering. But it's important to try to enter the perceptual framework of orality, for that state that everyone has more or less passed through and forgotten provides the foundation for literacy. Literacy cannot be truly understood without exploring its relationship to orality." [3-4] a4ox "Stories are the lifeblood of oral cultures, and the storyteller is the heart of the tribe or group. He or she keeps the stories circulating throughout the entire system. His are not just ordinary stories, casually told at random, but stories that people wait for and expect, and whose outlines they know by heart. His stories reassure the people who they are and remind them what they believe; they bind the group together. In the net of his stories, he catches everything - history, truth, heroism, religion, philosophy, morality, love. The leader recounts these stories -- usually a man, usually older -- has arrived at his priviledged position through years of experience. He has earned the right to speak for everyone - to act as their mouthpeace... Storytellers in orality occupy the position of wise men in a sense that modern, literate cultures can no longer know... the storyteller holds in trust the sacred instrument of storytelling, the pipe, for his breath is sacred. The leader lights the pipe and puffs, the narrative imitating the shape of the smoke, moving out and curling back on itself, dropping and finally drifting far off amd disappearing. Because he holds the secrets to their very survival -- and shares them with everyone -- the tribe or group treats him with respect and deference. Every bit of essential knowledge that the tribe needs drops from his mouth..." [5] A is for Ox "Every tribe needs the storyteller, just as every storyteller needs the tribe, for storytelling means little without attentive story-listening. A story, no matter how interesting, must be heard to be effective: A loose tongue always craves a friendly ear. The storyteller, too, must be a person possessed of actute hearing. But he listens in a different way from the tribe, and he hears different things... Through magic -- in a trance or other ecstatic states -- the storyteller turns seer, and in that altered state travels to the edge of experience and beyond. A boundless traveler, the storyteller roams outside himself -- goes journeying -- without ever leaving his favorite spot. Indeed, ex-stasis means to move out of place to be beside oneself. The storyteller serves as the guiding spirit of the group: From the broadest perspective possible, he can describe the entire range of human imagination, and provide direction for the ultimate trip - life's grand journey. He allays fears and raises hopes. He changes without looking changed, If consciousness can be described as standing outside oneself and observing, then the storyteller offers a living embodiment in oral cultures of the consciousness produced within individuals by literacy. With such wisdom to pass around the storyteller must narrate the truth so that everyone -- from the oldest man and woman to the youngest boy and girl -- understands. His voice must reach the ears of the entire group no one can be left out. Even momentary interruptions, like rambunctious dogs and crying babies, will get woven into the fabric of the tale by a skillful wordsmith. He gives back to the tribe what belongs to them. What he tells them feels as familar and as necessary as a heartbeat... The master's stories are born out of the fluency of the group - the tribe. Fluency, a watery essence, best captures the nature of storytelling in oral cultures: Elements of the story appear with the regularity of ocean waves, and disappear in just the same way... The storyteller takes his audience sailing on its adventures by riding the crest of an endless succession of waves. Literary scholars call these wavelike patterns in storytelling formulaic phrases. Such phrases, repeated over and over in the same story and across stories, permit the tribe to store pieces of information for a time... In that unfamiliar world of orality, wisdom and dissemination of wisdom inhere not in any institution, but within the hear and soul of a single person - the storyteller..." [7-11] a4ox "This book is a plea to reestablish the connection between literacy and orality - and a warning that failure to do so will have catatrophic consequences. A rich experience of orality is an indispensable prelude to literacy. Orality provides a ground, a safe place, where a child's imagination can unfold without fear of judgement or censure. Authority and originality hold no sway there; tests and measurements have no place. Stories bring everyone together in a commonality of closely shared knowledge. In orality, knowledge is a social phenomenon, not an individual experience, so no one can be classified as dumber or smarter than anyone else. Myths and stories and poems for the tribe, fairy tales and stories for the youngster - that is how knowledge begins to weave itself among each and every person as con-sciousness, a knowledge arrived at with others. In orality, one need not memorize anything. For memory in orality functions quite differently from literate memory. An oral person, or a child, learns certain truths, so to speak, by hearing them repeated, time and again, in stories and poems and fairy tales, and learns also that, because the words so quitely evaporate, he or she must listen intently..." [12-13] A is for Ox "To the imagination in orality, all of reality hangs on to its life with astonishing tenacity... The story of Christ's death and resurrection also tells of the death and rebirth of the Logos... Orality basically erases the line seperating the living from the dead: every telling of a story brings its characters back to a fully animated life... In ancient Greece poets had the galvanizing power to bring the dead back to an animated and vigorous life. That poet in ancient Greece -- more accurately a rhetor, a person who stiches together -- would ritualistically invoke the mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne, in order to guide him in composing his poem. Mnemosyne bubbles and roils as the well- spring of life. She persists in ancient mythology as a limpid brook, babbling away for all those who chose to hear her song. In her waters float the remains of past lives - the memories that Lethe had washed free of the dead, so they could pass on, as transparent shadows, to the other side. At her banks, one could hear Mnemosyne sing of what is, what was, and what shall be. By drinking from her waters, the rhetor could re-collect the memories of an entire group that in the course of time had actually passed into individual forgetfulness. Every memory was a collective one, just as every ladleful of Mnemosyne's water consisted of an infinitude of droplets. The poet could then sing these memories out loud, chanting one event after the other in what would sound to us perhaps like a primitive call. The strum or the lyre or harp, the cadences of the poet's own singing, the rhythmic regularity of the narrative, the inhalations and exhalations of the poet's breath - all of these propelled the poet along on his narrative journey. He chanted the very rhythem of living itself. He introduced no surprises. His hero always wandered away from familiar ground; but the group could always rest assured that the hero would return home safely. The king might plummet into despair, stripped of everything but a remnant of power, but the group could rejoice over his inevitable recovery. Each time the poet recounted the story, he would tell it slightly differently. He would have to: He himself had heard different things; he had had different experiences; he felt differently. Every telling forever changed the teller, as well, for the poet ingested the story himself -- between each telling, he lived out its truths. He could only deliver a believable telling if he believed those truths himself -- and acted on them. That is, the story had to mean as much to the poet, each time he narrated it, as it did to his audience..." [16-17] A is for Ox "You can read the sentence you are reading now as many times as you like. You can pass it on to a literate friend, and he or she can read it, too - without ever having seen that combination of letters before. If you close your eyes, the image of that sentence will most likely linger dimly in your mind's eye. With only twenty-six letters, I have the unbounded freedom to write anything about anything else. Or I can pull off other tricks just as remarkable. I can fabricate lies - create a convincing fiction. And, according to many linguists and philosophers, two even more spectacular feats find expression in writing: I can compete with prevailing, accepted notions of the truth by constructing what philosophers call counter-factuals; and I can talk about events that might arrive some time in the future. This congeries of miracles has been made possible through just one simple act: the transformation of speech into a visual act. This transformation -- the one you are experiencing this very instant -- brought the Greeks into a consciousness they could never have imagined in their world of orality. What a breathtaking invention... Unlike heiroglyphics where meanings of figures must be agreed upon by the group in advance, alphabetic letters could be arranged in any order and deciphered by any member of the group who had committed its sounds to memory. A person did not have to recognize pictures, or recall ideas or syllables, but instead only had to recognize a series of characters and to remember what sounds they represented. The combinations could never be exhausted. Vocabulary could be expanded indefinitely. Hieroglyphics had to mirror reality; experience placed a cap on expression. If you had not seen the picture before, you lost the meaning. But with the alphabet only the writer's imagination limited expression. Vocabulary could certainly throw up no serious barrier to meaning. But pictures no longer had to match up with one's experience. The text no longer held a one-to-one correspondence with reality. The alphabet could expand the possibilities of experience by re-creating the world..." [49-50] a4ox "So Hebrew presents this special burden of responsibility for the reader: As one scans each root on the page, he must at the same time interpret it for all possible meanings, making certain that the word created will make sense in the context of the entire narration. Without this mental excercise ... the reader remains uncertain what vowel sound to add in order to transform a root into a word. Slight variations in vowel sounds can produce very disparate meanings from the same root. Tsahok, for example, means laughter, tsahak means sexual intercourse - two quite different, though perhaps emotionally related, meanings. The reader has the freedom of sounding both of these words from the same root. Only context will dictate the appropriate level... Reading is a God-like activity. Just as God breathes into dust and brings Adam to life, readers bring characters on the page to life by breathing them aloud. Voice must be taken as something quite real here, something palpable and physical: the words must be uttered... Because Hebrew must be read aloud, it appears to be a language of community: everyone overhears the same thing at the same time. But the appearance is slightly deceiving. Without the text in front of them, an audience has no way of deciding whether the reader has made the correct vowel selection. The audience must take the reader's interpretation on faith. A reader delivers the truth to a group the way Moses receives and then delivers the Ten Commandments. In fact, the Hebrew reader has decided what words will mean for the entire group in collaboration with a group of rabbis, who have argued over the choices of certain vowels until they arrive at a collective interpretation. Interpretation by committee implies, of course, that another committee can revise it later. Meaning always remains in flux. The alphabetic reader decides for himself in self-fulfilling dialogue, creating out of the reader both editor and authority. He takes his finalized interpretation to the group in the form of solid opinions and decisions, and not as proposals or tentative offerings. No one edits or revises with him, for his reading is a private affair. His interpretation is a reading... Vowels hold the key to the secret of the Hebrew writing system, and they hold the key to the Greek alphabet. To understand literacy -- to understand the rise of modern consciousness -- we must turn to the most ethereal of things, the human voice, and that means to turn to vowels..." [56-58] a4ox "Words do not come into existence until the entire range of spoken sounds can be written down. Only then can we actually see that one group of sounds begins and ends, and another string takes up. A speaker in orality merely utters a continuous stream of definable sounds called phonemes. But he or she utters no words. The speaker's sounds get defined in performance - make the sound for tree, for instance, and point to a tree. Oral peoples have no need for dictionaries, just as they have no need for grammars, for orality holds to no standards of correct usage - neither in syntax nor in spelling. Language not only makes sounds visible as words, it freezes those words so that a reader can ponder each sentence in an attempt to figure out meaning. Writing thus freezes memory. I can return time and again to the text, rather than try to recall what someone said. The reader can also recall those words or sentences in his mind's eye. He can even carry on conversations with that other alphabetically constructed creature - the most important construct of literacy by far - the self. This is to describe, in rudimentary terms, the way literacy sponsors and authorizes the process of reflective thinking - how it produces what we often term insight: a looking inward. A literate person ingests reality - takes it in, sorts out what he needs and does not need. A metaphor for reading is appropriate, for in reading one learns to be an omnivore, devouring every kind and substance and shape of idea. Reading and writing generate an interior where an active and sometimes contemplative life goes on carried out through those essential elements that constitute the modern human being: a memory, a conscience, and a self. Once alphabetized, people take on a particular metaphoric shape. They get characterized as deep or shallow, hollow or full of life. They can hide deep within themselves; or they can apppear self-concious or self-absorbed. Cut someone open and this space vanishes. It cannot be found amidst the muscles and organs and vessels of a splayed cadaver. It can only be suggested through metaphor... Internalized space houses feelings of all kinds. Certain feelings, however, remain unique to literacy, specifically those that get inscribed on an internalized text or page, and get carried through time by the person. Guilt and conscience, for example, inform a person's inner life with as much permanence, in effect, as a historical document. Periodically, a person can consult that text and make public its contents - in confessions, apologies, or as simple declarations... Literate people behave as if every act, every event, takes place in the outside world and, at the same time, impresses itself indelibly on an invisible text inside their fleshy selves. While the actual act fades, its outlines remain permanently imprinted inside the literate's conscience or memory. Oral peoples -- those who have no contact with reading and writing -- do not structure their lives around such an internalized textual system. Not that they do not feel. On the contrary. But oral peoples learn not by internalizing a set of rules or regulations, not by following the dictates of conscience, but through example. They fill out their emotional lives by listening to myths and stories of right behavior..." [69-73] a4ox "We do not have to wonder how human beings would behave if they lost the sense of self. We now face a significant portion of a generation of young people who have given up struggling with letters, or working their way through a sentence or a paragraph, let alone a book. They have abandoned the book, even express open disdain for it. They have gone beyond believing in the power and strength -- the efficiacy -- of reading and writing. At the same time, they enjoy none of the advantages of pre-literates: they derive no inner strength from an early immersion in orality. They fit neither of the standard categories. They might better be referred to by some new term like post- illiterates. I am describing something practically unthinkable only a decade ago: a generation dispossessed of language - both verbal and written. In the classroom and on the streets, this new kind of illiteracy is culminating in the worst tragedy imaginable: the spiritual degradation of America's youth. These children have altered what it means to be a human being at the most fundamental level. Not only have they been unable to construct a sense of self out of reading and writing, they cannot draw on the reserve of orality. Experience overwhelms them... Statistics tell the story: Reading abilities among young people have steadily declined over the past decade, high school dropout rates have increased. Newspapers and magazines meanwhile wonder about the possible decline in the number of books published, and the decline in the intellectual rigor of those books. But those issues only hit the most tangible, the most obvious signs of a decline in a shrinking pool of readers and writers. The more insidious changes take place inside each person who abandons the book. With the disappearance of the book goes that most precious instrument for holding modern society together, the internalized text on which is inscribed conscience and remorse and most significant of all, the self. Illiteracy leaves behind shells of people - ghosts who take to the streets in a terribly dangerous state. They are unable to feel remorse or sorrow or guilt about their actions, even those of the most violent and gruesome kind. Society needs to fear ghosts who feel no more real than the shimmering of an image on a computer screen. For them, others are no more real than they are... Whatever the problem, the post-illiterates crave a quick fix. They get high. When they come down, society locks them up. But surely that's a last resort. Prisons stand as a testimony to a colossal social failure. The solution has to lie elsewhere. It will lie -- in all its insubstantiality, evanescence, and invisibility -- in the human voice. In voiced breath. What those young people want is to feel and to be empowered through their own voices." [75-78] A is for Ox |