I find the various mediums of production, from oral to written to mass-produced, fascinating, and the observations people make about their conscious experiences of the medium, insightful. That’s why I chose this post for linking #5.
Aaron comments on a number of things that happen to him in orality: he gets nervous, talks too fast, mumbles, loses track of thought and so on. But is this an experience of orality? Or something else? Aaron’s experiences occur within the context, arguably, of performance. That is, he was performing for at least his recorder, and this brought on the physical manifestations. We do not hear Aaron complaining that these things occur every time he speaks, only within this particular context. To compare experiences, then, I wonder if Aaron needed to create a testing environment in which to write, one that creates the same pressure, to see how he would respond. Then, I think, the experiences are comparable.
I also had the same thoughts that Aaron did regarding punctuation. For me, it reminded me how some of our punctuation, such as the comma, comes from music. It also made me realize how much we use silence in orality to punctuate (pun intended) our word-sounds. Text, of course, that two-dimensional shadow, gives a feeble direction. Odd, though, as Aaron notes, that we do follow the ‘rules’ of the page, that unrelenting task master, in order to create (or to follow or to re-interpret) what those squiggly lines are trying to mean.
I found Aaron’s lack of confidence in oral recall curious, “when someone tells a story there is no perfect record or recollection of what was just said” and his seeming confidence in the written stories that have “a document that can be referenced” disconcerting. Perhaps memory is one way of knowing that story, and text, another, but both are fragments . . . of what, I am not entirely sure . . . the story? We are, in the end, nothing but the sum of all our stories, yes? And what about the memory of my heart? Are the words the only things that matter? It’s an odd thing that, in oral exchange, the story comes to us not only from the words, but also from the context, facial expressions, environment and our own emotional response in the moment. We move to the text and wrestle with the unreliability of language to re-infuse badly chosen words with the same meaning my bodily presence conveys so unerringly. Yet, when done rightly, I linger over those words, feeling their pulse and depth impress on my heart, and soul, and mind.
And perhaps that includes our dreams. My own have been strange mixtures of exterior sounds, the work I’m doing (including this one) and day dreams because I’ve been sick over the past 10 days. My sleep is disrupted, so I find myself nodding off, oddly, like just now, and passing into a strange Alice-world where I am doing my reading/research/writing with a large clock ticking behind me or an advertising agent calling on me to Buy this now! before a shorted snort (my dog’s, not mine!) wakes me to say, “Tick tock! ‘Tis past 9 o’clock, and another class beckons on the horizon. Set aside this silly reverie and move along.” . . . and so I shall.