Machina Memorialis

As we all know, one of the problems of posting our work publicly is it can be taken by others and presented as their own work. In a post about Hugin and Munin, Dark Raven has incorporated my own musings on Odin’s two ravens as a mythic representation of the interconnection of thought and memory as understood in medieval memory theory verbatim and without citation.

A Google Alert drew my attention to the use of machina memorialis in relation to Hugin and Munin, and at first I thought, “cool, someone’s citing me, I want to see what they’re saying.” Quite disappointed to find that they’re not saying anything new. Dark Raven’s added an introduction to who the ravens are, the relevant passage from “Grímnismál” as well as the passage from  Snorri’s Edda that I included, added some cool images, and reversed the order of my two paragraphs. The plagiarized passages from Dark Raven’s blog read as such:

This legend is at least as old as the 13th Century when Snorri wrote the Prose Edda. We also find reference to the ravens in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius, the manuscript which contains the peom “Grímnismál,” “Grimnir’s Sayings.” We know, however, that the Codex Regius is a copy of another manuscript and it is believed many of the poems are much older than the thirteenth-century manuscript date. Likewise, exactly how far back Hugin and Munin date is unclear, but images of Odin and his two ravens are found in art dating to the Migration Period (ca. 400 - 600 CE).

In these two ravens I see a mythic representation of the connection between thought and memory. Our ability to think allows us to access and make use of our memories. And our memories, whether they are naturally or artificially stored, represent that which we know, what we call knowledge. Just as Hugin and Munin are separate but closely related entities, thought and memory are discrete but connected cognitive functions.Thought allows us to make use of our memories by means of reminiscentia, while at the same time our memories serve as a machina memorialis, as the engine of thought. Thought and memory being knowledge, must be shared, just as the ravens shared there knowledge with Odin.

The passages, from my web site, read thusly:

   In these two ravens I see a mythic representation of the connection between thought and memory. Our ability to think allows us to access and make use of our memories. And our memories, whether they are naturally or artificially stored, represent that which we know, what we call knowledge. Just as Hugin and Munin are separate but closely related entities, thought and memory are discrete but connected cognitive functions.Thought allows us to make use of our memories by means of reminiscentia, while at the same time our memories serve as a machina memorialis, as the engine of thought.

This legend is at least as old as the 13th Century when Snorri wrote the Prose Edda. We also find reference to the ravens in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius, the manuscript which contains the peom “Grímnismál,” “Grimnir’s Sayings.” We know, however, that the Codex Regius is a copy of another manuscript and it is believed many of the poems are much older than the thirteenth-century manuscript date. Likewise, exactly how far back Hugin and Munin date is unclear, but images of Odin and his two ravens are found in art dating to the Migration Period (ca. 400 - 600 CE).

Dark Raven hasn’t even bothered to fix my typos.

For the record, I don’t mind finding my words on someone else’s blog. Hell, some of my blog posts are little more than someone else’s words. Blogs can and do function as commonplace books. It’s the link, the acknowledgement, that I’d like to see.

While I often discuss mnemonic practices, I haven’t written about my personal mnemonic practices in quite a while. In marking the fifth anniversary of Walter Ong’s death, I told stories. While I’m not a good Storyteller, those who know me know that I relate to and understand the world through stories. I fully embrace John Niles definition of humans as Homo narrans:

Even more than the use of language in and of itself or other systems of symbol management, storytelling is an ability that defines the human species as such, at least as far as our knowledge of human experience extends into the historical past and into the sometimes startling realms that ethnography has brought to light. Through storytelling, an otherwise unexceptional biological species has become a much more interesting thing, Homo narrans: that hominid who not only has succeeded in negotiating the world of nature, finding enough food and shelter to survive, but also has learned to inhabit mental worlds that pertain to times that are not present and places that are the stuff of dreams. It is through such symbolic and mental activities that people have gained the ability to create themselves into human beings and thereby transform the world of nature into shapes not known before. (Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature, 3)

Story is one of the most important and powerful mnemonic practices we have. And here I refer not just to mnemonic as remembrance but as in how we think. I want to remember Ong, I tell stories about him. And those stories are connected to other stories. I chose to tell the stories of how I met him, but very much in the forefront of my mind as I wrote those was the fact that when Ong died my mother was in or just about to go into the hospital for systemic shock and would stay in the hospital or rehabilitation center for four months, followed by my father needing quadruple-bypass surgery. All of which took place in St. Louis while visiting me rather than at home in Colorado.

I also thought telling the story of the “Statement of Understanding of the interrelated Missions of the University and College of Arts and Sciences” I wrote this past January for my campus interview at Creighton. My understanding of the Jesuit tradition and Jesuit education came not so much from my experience as a graduate student at Saint Louis University but from my work with the Ong Collection. Over the years, Ong was offered endowed positions at other universities—positions that included no teaching requirement, large budgets for research and travel, and personal secretaries—and he turned down all of them because he was committed to Jesuit education. (To be fair, while I don’t think he ever said this explicitly, he was also a proud native Missouri, and while he was Kansas City, I’m certain he was happy to have spent his career in Missouri.)

It helps that I not only came to understand but believe in the Jesuit tradition, and I know I impressed the dean when he slid the University and College misions across the table to me and asked how I saw myself fitting within them. Without pausing to reread the two missions, I focused on three themes I found within both mission statements, the understanding of catholic as universal, the Jesuit ideal of Cura Personalis and motto Ad majorem Dei gloriam, and the interrelationship of secular knowledge and revealed religion, and talked about how all three of those intersect with my scholarshiop and pedagogy. And because I’m me, I could not talk about those issues without telling the story of how I came to know them and, more importantly, how I came to understand their significance.

And this is to say nothing of the little stories embedded in the stories of how I met Ong, stories about the reading group, stories about my discoveries in the archive, stories about Ong’s year in NYC, stories about how I became interested in orality-literacy studies and rhetoric and composition, stories about Bruce and I drinking beer and shooting pool and envisioning just what we’d include in hypercard editions of Old English poetry, stories about I came to Saint Louis University in the first place and why I so much wanted to come to Creighton. And those stories invoke other stories, such as how one of the members of that rhetorical theory reading group became one of my closest friends left SLU two years ago to start life as an Assistant Professor at Creighton, and how, starting next week after the English Department moves into its new digs, will be in the office directly across the hall from my new office.

Stories exist as nodes within greater networks, networks of stories, networks of meaning, and networks of culture. Stories are about connecting, about situating meaning into our lives and situating ourselves into the world around us. Stories are how we make meaning and stories are how we remember. And so, in remembering Ong, I tell stories. And here’s one last story:

In my favorite chapter of Ong’s unfinished book Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, Ong discusses the Greek terms logos and mythos. Ong explains that while we generally translate the Greek term logos as “word,” “voice,”  or “speech,” it’s of a specific kind. It means “computation, reckoning, account of money handled, hence treatment of cognitive matters in terms of discrete units—which are the basis of digitization. Logos, he tells us, comes from the Indo-European root leg-, which, Ong notes, means that logos is based upon “a spatialized, exteriorized visual and/or tactile metaphor” (2). The Indo-European leg-, he explains, gives us our English word “lay” and the ancient Greek word legein, which means “to pick up, gather, choose, count, arrange, and thus involves manipulation of discrete units” (2).¹

Like logos, Ong explains, mythos also means “word” and “speech.” But it also means “tale” and “story.” Mythos’ Indo-European root, meudh or mudh, ”signifies to reflect, think over, consider – activities interior to the human being” (1-2). So, while mythos and logos do seem to overlap in meaning, On gargues that they also seem to have real differences. Differences that both Plato and Aristotle made much of. Ong notes that both “undertook to oppose this synonymous use of mythos and logos and to draw careful distinctions between the two terms” (4). And it is this distinction, he claims, that leads to logic and dialectic on the one hand and poetry and rhetoric on the other (5).

While Ong argues that logos, as spatialized, visual/and or tactile conception of the word, of knowledge, involves the manipulation of discrete units, which in turn leads to the conception of knowledge in terms of discrete units, as data which can be stored, arranged, and manipulated, leading us to the idea of digitization (7), I want to suggest that we think of both logos and mythos as database processes. As a method, logos seeks to divide. Mythos, on the other hand, seeks to connect, to link. While logos, that is logic and dialectic, create data, mythos, that is rhetoric and poetics, gives structure and meaning to data.

1. All page numbers refer to the typescript of Ch. 10., “Logos and Digitization.” [back]

Ong tried to bridge the gap between the traditional Catholic world view and science’s view of the evolving universe. “God the Son took to himself a human nature in matter that was some 15 billion years old, and in a species likely enough some 150,000 years old. In such real-time perspectives, a Church founded only some 2000 years ago can be only in its infancy.”

Church leaders and theologians must teach and minister in this evolutionary universe  that God created and scientists now explore. He explains that  “a non-evolutionary secular history is simply false. A non-evolutionary understanding of the world…is theologically fatal.”  To put this positively, Ong writes that we must live and think and believe in this “evolving cosmos being continually created by God.” In this universe, he concludes, “computers were to be a part of God’s creation just as much as dinosaurs were.” [Read more.]

So wrote Peter Schineller, S.J. yesterday in All Things, the blog of America: The National Catholic Weekly. It was on August 12, 2003, five years ago this week, that Walter Ong died. Schineller notes that he met Ong in 1966 when Ong spent a year in New York as the Berg Professor at NYU. With the visiting position came a spacious, beautifully furnished apartment, which Ong turned down. He chose instead to live in the Jesuit community at Xavier High School.

What I find significant in Fr. Schineller’s remembrance is the focus on Ong’s understanding of the world. No, Ong’s understanding of the universe. I’ve argued the importance of Ong’s theology to his scholarship a number of times, such as in the posts “Ong’s Theology” and “Ong’s Theology, Part II.”

I like to say I was introduced to Ong four times. First, I was introduced to him through Orality and Literacy, read on the recommendation of my M.A. advisor Christine Rose. As part of our second quarter of Old English, she had us read a number of articles on oral-formulaic theory and Old English poetry, starting with Magoun’s “The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry.” (Much later, I would learn that Ong studied Old English with Magoun.) Throughout the two quarters of Old English, another graduate student and I talked about how cool it would be to create student editions of Old English poems using Apple’s HyperCard, where one could set the poem to display as much or as little information as the student wanted. There, in Orality and Literacy, I found Ong running the gamut from oral tradition to computers as one unified discipline. I was hooked.

My second introduction to Ong was through Vincent Casaregola, then Writing Program Director and eventually dissertation committee member and eventual chair. Within the first few weeks of my Ph.D. program, Vince introduced me to Ong as rhetorician and the idea of orality-literacy studies as part of rhetoric and composition. Again, I was hooked. Vince later took me a few other graduate students to visit Ong in Jesuit residence on campus. From then on, I’d try to visit with him, either at a department function or at Jesuit Hall, at once or twice a semester, depending upon his health.

My third introduction to Ong came a few weeks later, at the department picnic. Sometime during the event, I noticed a Jesuit off to one side talking to a couple of people. Not wanting to interrupt, and, I’ll admit, quite timid, I stood a ways off waiting for their discussion to end. Vicki Carlson, Vince’s wife, figured out what was going on and asked if I wanted to meet Fr. Ong. She introduced me. As a Scholastic, Ong had taught at Regis College in Denver. While he didn’t always remember my name, he always remembered I was from Colorado.

My fourth introduction to Ong began in July-2004, when I was hired as the processing archivist of the Walter J. Ong, SJ, Manuscript Collection. It was during that time that I finally came to understand the significance of Ong as Jesuit Priest and how one can not understand Ong until one understands Ong’s theology.

At one point I decided to distance myself from Ong for fear of becoming known as someone whose academic shtick was Ong. For a brief while I thought that’s what I was doing when I turned to memory as my focus. I’d conveniently forgotten Ch. 6 of Orality and Literacy, “Oral Memory, the Story Line, and Characterization,” until I reread the book with my rhetorical theory reading group. It was silly to try to escape him, I realized, and less than a year later I was working in the archive.

It’s been a year since I left the Ong Collection, and on the fifth anniversary of his death, I want to say that I miss him, but the truth is, while I got to visit with him on a number of occasions, I didn’t know him well enough to miss him. At least as a physical presence whose lack I can miss. But I did get to know him, through thousands of letters to friends, family, colleagues, and strangers; through seeing what he kept, from bullets he dug out some trees in Belleau Wood ten years after the famous battle to his mother’s rosary; and through the breadth and depth of his scholarship. As Kenneth Gergan would explain, I am a populated self and in that sense Ong will always be with me.

I had a lot of fun celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Orality and Literacy with sessions at MLA 2006, CCCC 2007, and Computers and Wrting 2007. Ong’s centenary is just four years away. I intend to do something to mark it.

From the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent:

The local investigative kingpin now runs Walter and Associates Professional Investigations, a private investigation agency. He retired from the FBI in the mid-1990s when turning 55 meant he could no longer be a special agent.

He’s conducted background investigations for various federal agencies and consulted law enforcement agencies with complex and sensitive investigations like homicides and internal affairs investigations, among other things. He’s currently helping investigate a 1975 cold homicide in another judicial district.

He’s studied and taught investigative tools like statement analysis and interview and interrogation techniques, which he has decades of experience using. [Read more.]

Kingpin is an odd choice of words, I think, but otherwise it’s a good article.

Thanks to a link from Deanya, I’ve discovered ResearchChannel, “a consortium of leading research and academic institutions to share the valuable work of their researchers with the public.” Essentially, it’s a educational video library.

Browsing the Arts and Humanities and Computer Science and Engineering sections of the site, I’ve come across a number of things I want to return to as possible teaching resources or just for fun. These include:

• How Does Technology Transform Thinking?
• Is Science Fiction Science?
• Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z
• Old Media and New
• Anansi Boys and Mirrormask
• A Conversation with bell hooks
• Browsing Around a Digital Library
• Computational History in Action: Discovering Gutenberg
• Computational History in Action: Gutenberg’s Printing Process
• Computer Graphics: Communications Media
• Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change
• Interactive Visual Media
  
• The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future
• The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness

I need to watch “How Does Technology Transform Thinking?”, the two “Computational History in Action” videos, “Future Hype,” and “The Perfect Thing” to see if I want to include them next semester.

via ONN (OldNorseNet) I’ve learned about Old Norse News:

Old Norse News is a new website that provides a hub for information relating to the academic study of medieval Scandinavia. Its aims are to provide a regularly updated overview of new developments in the field; to collate and link to useful resources elsewhere on the internet; to act as a notice board for news and announcements. Medievalists in Scandinavian Studies are a very disparate bunch, international and interdisciplinary, and often working in relative isolation. Over time, we hope also, therefore, to create a sort of virtual community for all scholars, students, and others who share an interest in the Old North. [Read more.]

Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) have released the NCTE-WPA White Paper on Writing Assessment in Colleges and Universities.

Martine Courant Rife points to and discusses the Center for Social Media at American University’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.

Looking to make your own contribution to I Can Has Cheezburger? The LolCat Build(e)r is for you. It won’t help you with the grammar, however. For that, take a look at Cats Can Has Grammar.

If I remember correctly, I came across this while looking for typography videos on YouTube, although I may just have see it on Johndan’s blog. Regardless, it’s a typographical performance of a scene of dialog from Pulp Fiction. In case it needs to be said, there is audio and it may not be suitable for work or around young children and others with delicate sensibilities. It is from Pulp Fiction after all.

The video is below the fold. (more…)