Monday, April 27, 2009

In the response to the class that was...n't.

Dearest Nick of his poem so sure
of Tia Tai,
on line eight,
I'd persuade to hear more?

Specifically his "name-giving" and that "out-of-time?"
Fore I think theirs a riff in this printed line.

Oh! Illeterate Nick! How I'll Give You A Lick!
Tia Tai Had Never The Sense For Sexson's Nick'!

You're in for a flyte for memories you've left,
You're poem in the oral's is on "discount" at best.

Simplest Nick the whole "mind-games" a trick.
One Printed Line Brings You Down Like a Brick.


Let me slow it down a bit for you nick.




Does Last Semester
Cause Things To Register?

Perhaps an Assignment
Where You're Time Should've Went?

Shouldn't have written a poem
so easily disowned,

I think by now we know
that Sex's epithet's on loan.

A look at Christianity. (feel free to respond)

I have been thinking rather consistently about the Catholic Church. As I'm sure everyone knows Catholic stands for Universal (I know this because my fathers calls himself a Presbyterian Catholic) and in this it stands for all the people of God.

Whether or not you believe in God or another higher power is little consequence to me, but what i would like to look at is a few reasons for doubting it; this is as much for any of you as it is for me.

The church, as we have read, was the great teacher to the 'unwashed masses' as Shaman Sexson describes those who do not see analytically. Throughout the project I have been working on for my final paper and presentation I have continously came back to the passage in Ongs book underneath 'Empathatic and particapotry rather than objectively distanced' in Chapter 4.;


For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known, 'getting with it'. Writing separates the nower from the known and thus sets up conditions for 'objectivity', in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing. The 'objecticity' which Homer and other oral performers do have is not expressed as simply individual or 'subjective' but rather as encased in the communal reaction, the communal 'soul'. Under the influence of writing, despite his protest against it, Plato had excluded the poets from his Republic, for studying them was essentially learning to react with 'soul', to feel oneself identified with Achilles or Odysseus.

No other lines in the whole book, nor in any class that I have yet to take, or any book has better explained, or engaged me.

Being Objective allows us to continuely question what it is that we learn. We do not souly base anything upon what we heard. We do not believe because it has become uttered, but in a church, which has the soul purpose of 'saving' or bringing the people to Christ, if the community is mainly illetarate it has no way of teaching but through stories. The bible is a massive amount of stories, and parables. Everything in the bible that has been written, is the person who is speaking's best explanation of what is going on.

An example is the Theory of Evolution. Many atheistic friends and aquaintances use this as a straight out for christianity. They believe that since what was written down thousands of years ago no longer directly corolates with a scientific explanation, than the writing must be false.

Everyone in Shaman Sexson's class knows that this is not true. Writing is only the attempt of a human to explain something with what they already have on the plate. The fact is that the bible, when it was finally compiled was not in English. It was not in a language of a dominantly literate society, and so they did not have nearly as many words to use as descriptions. As the bible has was copied it changed little by little. When it was translated it was changed more and more from each language to each language, and when it was finally set down into print, it suddenly had a more fixed manuscript from which protestantism picked and chose from, changing this word and that, this book and that.

The Aramic word for day has many meanings, but i do beleive the latin, and greek have only one definition of day. I could very well be wrong, but what my point is, is that as things passed into history meanings became lost, and with this the church tried its best to cope with what they had, to explain as best as possible with what they have at there will. So a day became one day, and so as to better tie into the situation a day of remembrance, as the jewish have, Sunday, the last day, became the day of worshipping christ.

In Ong's chapter on Psychodynamics of Orality we see how hard it is to get analytically based thought process to those that are oral.

an example is where a barely literate 45-yearold chairman of a collective farm is told;

In the Far North, wehre there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zembla is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears?

The man responds, "To go by your words 'appears they should all be white."

It is extremely hard to imprint something as a truth into the mind of an oral human being when they have no proof but the passing of listening in and out of existance. This is why Galileo died in improsonment.

Galileo wrote an essay showing the two sides of a heliocentric and geocentric universe. Heliocentric, is the earth revolving around the sun, while geocentric is the earth at the center of the universe. Although the printing press has been around for a few hundred years at the time of this book, the masses were not generally all learned from what i've learned (feel free to correct me if i am entirely wrong)

The Oral (and now unlearned literate) community sees that an example that might possibly explain the church as wrong, and with the webbing that the whole church is a lie, and that everyone in the church is a liar.

IN CONCLUSION

The Church, its Clergy, having been stuck so long as the communal teacher of the church as a community, and not being open to the individual understanding of the bible for such a long period of time was its crippling. Like any institution, it was slow to change and up until the vatican II when the pope sat upon his chair and let out the decree of how things are that vastly reformed the Catholic Church there had been a giant gap in what Protestants and what Roman Catholics believed; but with the second vatican things have become much more aligned with protestantism and the analtical way of interprating the bible.

Coming from a wide variety of Protestant upbringings (Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian) as well as having not only Vatican II Catholic religion teachers in my private high school, as well as Prevatican II Religion teachers, I have constantly been up against a wall of misunderstanding and conflicting viewpoints that this class has cleared up significantly.

For Example of Prevatican II. My teacher used to refer to protestants (me) as Christians, while Roman Catholics as Catholics. For someone who knows the meaning of Catholic to be Universal, nothing else can be quite a slap in the face to a well-learned protestant.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Group 5 and 6

Notes from April 17 and group 5 and 6.

-Read Classmates Finals

-Critique at least one.

Group 5: Traditions

Soothing music; drums in the background while each member read a traditional Indian story retold in their own way; this was meant to show that oral stories change.

-funny thing is that everyone had a script. They were dependent on the written word to recreate the oral (Snake Haired Kayla).

Notable names:

-Creator Sexson

-Sun God Sutter

-Man Boy Ben

-Small Girl Lisa


Group 6- Context

Corporal Similitudes

Comprise (Compromise)

Hail the Printing Press!

Demeter and Presophes: a sotry of a mother only being able to see her daughter for a brief period of the year. Mythological Shared Custody.

Group six showed us that language is domestication, and the arrogance of the written word. John neigh posed as a new high school teacher who had been extremely flustered throughout college by a certain Shaman Sexson. Flustered to the point where he became blinded by his own reliance on what he had read. His students continuely mocked and pointed out his shortcomings while exposing the boundaries that we draw around ourselves with our artificial systems.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Boundaries

"Otherworld personalities resemble human beings in their thinking and behavior, and they burst spontaneously into the normal world, just as human individuals are always stumbling into the Otherworld."

In group two today we recreated the bursting of otherworld personalities into the normal world. The thing about boundaries is they are meant to be crossed, but not forever, and what you do their changes you drastically. Drastically to the point where you are forever changed when you return.

Kane says boundaries are the magical points where worlds impinge.

We used children books to show the impingement. The giant rabbit hole in place of a door is showing quite different entrances. One which we (my group) can see but that you yourself must build with your own imagination, which is every bit as real a boundary so it seems.

Frames.

These boundaries we cross through act as frams for our thoughts, excluding normal human thought process.

An example is how easy crazy coffee carly was weened off of her education paradigm, sucked in by Kevin and James who were already advocates of the margaurita.

Kane Says, " epistemological frames, markers of categories of knowledge, saying in effect: "Beyond this point is a zone where ordinary human thinking cannot go. You must make the sift to another kind of thinking. YOu must think like an animal now. Enter at your peril."

I wonder if Kane has the foresight to know my epithet was James the Rat, and that i would soon be thinking like a rat. Or Perhaps the reason Crazy Coffee Carly was so easily swayed is because men are thought of as pigs comically in todays social circles; perhaps the knew world was one where ideas come alive.

"Myth Structures itself so as to preserve its own levels of knowledge, yet it is an epistemolgoy that is remarkably sensitive to patterns in states of change."

"The framing of types and qualities of knowledge means that nature is apprehended in her variety, in her distinctiveness, in her unpredictablitiy, with energies crossing boundaries continually."

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Test Two Notes

1. Nietzsche says we are all walking dictionaries.
-context we have 'magma' vocabularies. P.104 Ong.

2. Lull: Motion, NO IMAGES, NON CORPOREAL. Uses the Ladder of Ascent and Descent, Uses Tree of Memory. BCDEFGHIK

3. Triangle : Boxes within boxes. Literate: Oral. Mis-en-abyme. P.139 Ong.

4. Reformation: Printing Press

5. Mandala- Reconciliation of Opposites. Circle within a box. Triangle within a circle, etc.

6. Democratic/Alphabet

7."Song is the remembrance of songs sung." Gesang 1st Dazeine (Song is existence). P.142 Yates.

8. "Finality/Closure" that the print culture demands. P. 13o Ong.

9. Bruno: "Did he intend that there would be formed in the memory using these ever-changing combinations of astral images some kind of alchemy of the imagination, a philosopher's stone in the psyche through which every possible arrangement and combination of objects in the lower world- plants, animals, stones- would be perceived and remembered from above, as it were, all his discoveries, thoughts, philosophies, productions?

"Such a memory would be the memroy of a divine man, of a Magus with divine powers through his imagination harnessed to the workings of the cosmic powers. And such an attempt would rest on the hermetic assumption that man's 'mens' is divine, related in its origin to the star-governors of th e world, able both to reflect and to control the universe." P.224 Yates.

10. What does alethiometer mean? -Truth Measurer, Unforgetting.

I believe on page 176 of Yates, in his explanation of Lull's Art of memory he finds the idea for this alethiometer.

"Think of the great mediaeval encyclopaedic schemes, with all knowledge arranged in static parts, made yet more static in the classical art by the memory buildings stocked with the images. And then think of Lullism, with its algebraic notations, breaking up the static schemata into nex combinations on its revolving wheels."

11. The Seven Pillars of Solomon's House of Wisdom

Rows. Upper Class to Lower Class.
1.Planets
2.The Banquet
3.The Cave
4. Gorgon Sisters
5. Pasiphe and the Bull
6. Sandals of Mercury
7. Prometheus

Columns By Planets, Left to Right
1.Diana
2. Mercury
3. Venus
4. Pyramind with invisible point, Trinity, represents the sun.
5. Mars
6. Jupiter
7. Saturn
(PlayBoy CenterFold)

12. Iliad: "Such was the Funeral of Hector, Tamer of Horses." Sutters Memory Theater.

13. How many times was the alphabet invented? 1. One. P.88 Ong.

14. What are the chances of anything, everything,, and nothing? 1 in 3. Sexson's Humor.

15.Tai and Robert Use their bodies as memory systems. Robert uses every bone in his body. Tai uses hand gestures. (Flipped off a wall.) Tai's Memory System. Roberts Memory System.

16.; Writing->Speech-> Gestures. Re-membering Finnegans Wake, Sexson.

17. Lullism And Cabalism.

"Lull does not combine Hevrew letters in his Art, but he combines B to K ( or more leters in Arts based on more Divine Dignities that those used in the nine form). SInce these letters stand for the divine attributes, or Names of God, he is therefore, it seems to me ((YATES)), adapting a Cabalist practice to Gentile uses. This would be, of course, a part of his appeal to the Jews to accept Trinitarian Christianity through the use of one of their own sacred methods." P.188 Yates.

18. Hypertext, (Layered Language). Portmant0s- suitcase. Doulbe, Triple, quadruple meanings to a single text.

19. Hebrew Alphabet Lacks Vowels. Shaman Sexson.

20. Ltrtr nglsh. Literature English.

Also did you know that if you scramble the inside letters of words but leave the ends normal humans tend to read at a normal pace through the words without noticing.

21. " Bruno is an ex-friar, infinitely wild, passionate, and unrestrained as he rushes out of the mediavelism of the convent with his art of memory magically transformed into an inner mystery cult."

-Camillo's Theatre considered a religious miracle.

-"Bruno's Hermetic book on memory is presented as a religious revelation." P.203 Yates.

22. Tristam Shandy uses "Blank Spaces" to show silence. P.126 Ong.

23. Easter Wings. Visual effects in print culture. P.126 Ong. 1><1.

24. "Most Notoriiously unread book." Finnegans Wake. Re-membering Finnegans Wake, Sexson.

25. Read Lisa's, Sutter's, Brandon's, Kari's, blog notes.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Blind mnemonic

"Tenberken herself had impaired vision almost from birth but was able to make out faces and landscapes until she was twelve. As a child in Germany, she had a particular predilection for colors, and loved painting, and when she was no longer able to decipher shapes and forms she could still use colors to identify objects. Tenberken has, indeed, an intense synesthesia. "As far back as I can remember," she writes, "numbers and words have instantly triggered colors in me...The number 4, for example, [is] gold. Five is light green. Nine is vermillion....Days of the week as well as months have their collors, too. I have them arranged in geometrical formations, in circular sectors, a little like a pie. When I need to recall on which day a particualr event happened, the first thing that pops up on my inner screen is the day's color, then its position on the pie." Her synesthesia has persisted and been intensified, it seems, by her blindness.

Sacks, Oliver. "The Mind's Eye." Miller and Spellmeyer, 480-1.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

My memory theater is a my highschool. I'ts mostly jsut the halls, common areas, gym, locker rooms. and office area. All the rooms i have dumped and replaced with other rooms. The newest room i'm going to put in is going to be my work place, Applebees. their is 47 tables in the restaurant and i already have them memorized which will make it extremely easy to put associate my memories with them. THe big bonus is i get to remember everything everytime i go to work. Studying at work. who'd of thunk it.