One of Rushdie's best known novels...

Tai the Boatman

" 'Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. Once I knew where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year. Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can't read.' Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping hand."
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

At this point in the story Tai, the speaker, and Aadam, his young listener, are great friends. However, when Aadam returns from Germany where he studied medicine there is a huge gulf between the two. Tai is unwilling to excuse the new doctors Western ideas and love of literature and Aadam is unwilling to give way to a foolish, superstitious ferryman.

In many ways Tai is a stereotypical member of the oral culture. He is one of the wise elders, so old that no one can remember a time BEFORE Tai was old. As noted in this quote, Tai has forgotten the location of the temple, but he remembers the location where water demons pull suicidal foreign women down and drown them. This information is more germaine and therefore remains. Homeostasis at work. Also, Tai has a general dislike and disregard for western thinking, especially western medicine because it means invasive, unnatural procedures. And of course, he's not illiterate- he simply can't read. He's a remnant of oral culture, not a failed literary scholar.

I came upon this quote while doing some for-pleasure reading and preparing for the Salman Rushdie master class. While reading Lolita I came upon a lot of interesting quotes on memory, but nothing quite as specific and demonstrative as this. Clearly it's kismet!

Some concerns...

I always fret over the first test and today's was no different. I especially had trouble with Ong's 9 ideas and the allegorical figure wearing parts of speech... In any event, I can't really seem to think clearly about the place of orality and literature in today's society, so this is gonna be a short post... But that is not my primary concern. So here goes, prepare yourself for a Conspiracy Theory style tirade...

When we had to list out the mini-memory palace activity Kory led us in on that second day of class I blanked for a minute. Probably less than a minute. Seconds. And then the words came barreling into my head like a mantra. It spilled out on to the paper, no trouble at all. Which is all fine and good since it was a test question. But what if They (you know "They", best friends of "Them", brother-in-law to "The Man") are simply using this course as a training ground for indoctrinated college students. What if, the next time someone manages to string together the phrases "dog, grapefruit, bottle of wine,etc" we get the uncontrollable urge to recite Joyce at some one and then go buy a copy of The Art of Memory? This is all a set up! And this seems a lot more sinister than when the KGB tried to contact me through a burn I got from a hair dryer, which may have been my imagination. Possibly. But not this!

Revel in your ability to memorize 100 hundred titles in your memory palace now, becasue soon you'll be a walking, talking, Ong-toting memorization super soldier with a dog-grapefruit trigger!

The Memory Poetry of Simon J. Ortiz

I was lucky enough to attend Mr. Ortiz's poetry reading tonight, and it was amazing. First of all, kudos to everyone who came out, I'm really glad they had to open up the second ballroom. Too often a great speaker gets a small audience and then EVERYONE loses out a little.

But back to main point: The reading was amazing. Ortiz's poetry deals FREQUENTLY with memory. Te two poems that stick out most for me were "My Mother and My Sisters" based on a mempory of his mother's from 1910 or 1911, and "A New Story" based on his own experiences during the mid '70s.

The poem about his mother gathering pinon was beautiful and very straightforwardly about memory; the memory was captured as an image of a dark valley and an older way of life. "A New Story" on the other hand was about a memory as well- here the memory of a silly woman asking indelicate questions and treating native peoples like float decorations. Throughout the reading of the poem, I was humiliated for every stupid white person who ever- even in a spirit of kindness- asked a native to join their parade for authenticity as a kind of curio. This poem was much more about feeling and emotion, but still couched in the memory form.

"My Mother and My Sisters" could have been written about the Acama-Pueblo people at anytime in the last two hundred years. It features pinon gathering in a very traditional way. On the other hand "A New Story" seems very clearly imbedded in the Native Power movement of the mid '70s. So the memories in these poems are both community oreiented and personally grounded. Which seems fitting for a poet who bothe writes in English and his native tongue and reads in both English and his native tongue. A merging of the literate and oral cultures in a single individual.

Lolita

Memory is a big deal in Nabakov's Lolita. Humbert is attracted to Dolores/Dolly/Lolita not on her own merits, after all he thinks her a disgusting example of improper hygiene and dull wits, but because she represents the little girl on the Riviera he couldn't have. And even the little girl on the Riviera he couldn't have, Annabel, was simply an exercise in his own ability to dominate and control.

Throughout the early stages of the novel, Humbert states that he loses interest in little girls after the age of, say, 15-16. However, Humbert is still obsessed with Lolita when he finally finds her two years after she ran away. She's seventeen, married, and heavily pregnant. She is in no way like the twelve year old he first claimed from Camp Q, but his passion for her remains. Humbert is in love with an Annabel/Lolita amalgam that has everything to do with his memory of them, his power over them, the Svengali-like image he created for them, and nothing to do with the girls themselves.

Humbert gives Lolita four thousand dollars and begs her to leave her squalid life with her husband and rejoin him. She refuses of course. Humbert rages against Q/Cue/Quilty for stealing Lolita away and for tainting her innocence, which is truly bizzare, but in reality he has lost nothing from his long absence from Lolita. Lolita is not even a real person; she is simply a construction of Humbert's psyche. Lolita is not her name. She is without history beyond how she met and was mastered by Humbert. After she disappears from Humbert's day-to-day life she is preserved as he last saw her, and even after seeing her Humbert refuses to realign his vision of Lolita with Dolores "Dolly" Schiller.

Humbert's memories allow him to keep alive a memory of the perfect nymphette, composited out of several girls, and truly corresponding to none of them. As Humbert says, "Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischevious of muses!"

The Alice Cooper Story

Dr. Sexson was talking about the stories we hear again, and again, and again... In my house that number one oft-told tale is "The Alice Cooper Story". As in most stories passed on by family (This one is my mother's... She's a great one for stories) this one has a moral. The story goes something like this (Try to figure out the moral if you can; I'll include it at the end, so no peeking.):

At the beginning of the story my mom is still living in Chicago, which probably places this particular episode of The Phil Donahue Show in '74 or '75, and she's watching TV and Donahue has Alice Cooper on the show. He comes out dressed in full regalia, with all his makeup on, and preforms one of his songs for the crowd. The crowd is aghast, of course. Little old ladies all over the country are SHOCKED!!! Now mom never includes what that song IS but based on time period and my own whimsy I always imagine "No More Mr. Nice Guy" (which segues nicely into the interview as you will see). Anyway, the performance is followed by a commercial break and when the show comes back on Alice has changed into regular clothes and is sitting on the little central dias for his interview. His hair is long, but he looks pretty normal and he says, "I'm just a regular old Jewish kid" etc. etc. and all the little old ladies are comforted and by the end of the show are saying he's a very nice young man, etc. etc.

If you hadn't parsed it out yet, this is the "don't judge a book by its cover" story. I don't know how many times I've heard it over my lifetime, but I do remember when I started glossing it as she would tell it. I started to listen to a lot of music, to read a lot about music, etc. and in so doing I learned a short biography of Alice Cooper. When it comes to the part where Alice says he's Jewish I always slip in, subtle-like, that he's actually a PK (Pastor's Kid, making it a little unlikely he's Jewish)and my mom just goes, "Oh, that's right, a PK," like that's how the story always went.

This last summer we're on Going-To-The-Sun Highway up in Glacier Park when she starts telling the Alice Cooper story again, and I slip in the PK thing, and suddenly she stops and asks us: "Have I told you this story before?" The car is dead silent, my sister and I falling apart with silent laughter and I say, "I think I've heard it a few times." She'll probably tell it again with this same surprise that we've heard the story before. But that's my mom for you. Ask me about the Osteoporosis story if you want a quick, silly insight in to my mom.

My Memory Forest

I've decided that I'd do a much better job of memorizing my book titles if it was tied not to my childhood home, but rather to my childhood yard.

I lived in a higly forested area in LP Michigan (I'm sure you all know what LP stands for). The whole area has Odyssey-like associations for me as there are specific games, some of them lasting years, tied to virtually every memorable tree, bush, or thicket in the area. I get warm fuzzies thinking about it, so I think as a whole my memory forest will work better for me than a tour of my house.

Had I lived in Montana I'd need the whole state to have a enough trees to make a memory forest. Shakespeare is the clump of junipers on the property line, the Bible where we found the dead squirrel, Don Quixote where I made the leaf chains... And so on, and so on, ad nauseum. I'm inordinately pleased with my memory forest, which is going to make this task infinitely easier.

Celtic Poetry and the Decline of Oral Traditions

My group's chapter is titled "Boundary". It opens with the poem "The Wooing of Etain" from the Irish myth cycle and documents a goddess who through various misfortunes must live as a human being for a while. Being a goddess she can cross that boundary between the god's realm and that of human beings, but inevitably she must go back. This idea of liminality seems to be a favorite for the Celtic poets and bards since it appears frequently.

The poem Buile Subhine, OR The Frenzy of Sweeney, is an excellent example of this liminal borderland. Written down, which we later find out is sadly ironic, in the 11th with vestiges reaching back in to the 9th. Sweeney is a king situated between the burgeoning Catholicism of his kingdom and the old traditions, between the horns of oral and typographic literature, and most obviously between the extremes of maddness and sanity. Because Sweeney can not reconcile himself to Catholicism and "literature", the hallmarks of civilization of course, he is condemned to live the life of a bird, perching in trees and spilling out mad verse.

Sweeney can't hack the border between classical Celtic orality and the encroaching Literacy, and so he's forced to hover on the periphery until his death and renunciation of the oral values he fought for. Read Seamus Heaney's "Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish" to see the fight between orality and literacy encompassed in the body of a single individual: the Mad Bird King.

Signifier and the Signified

I've read Sassure before for various literary criticism classes and papers, but I still enjoy his thoughts on the nature of the sign as an abstract concept. To this end I chose an Orality and Literacy passage in Chp. 4 on the relationship between words and visual signifiers titled "Words are Not Signs" which gets to the heart of the passage in a stunningly stright forward manner.

My underlined piece begins by observing that even fairly lately, alchemists and other learned peoples would use a symbol, frequently in the zodiac, to denote the contents of a particular bottle. Why? I thinks this ties nicely in to what we have been learning about the place of memory. A zodiac symbol brings up infinite allusions that illustrate a far more descriptive histroy than simply a word. If one were to label a bottle with the word "Mercury" you would now that the flask contained mercury, but the word is empty beyond that designation. If you employ the symbol instead, now the bottle contains Mercury, the essence of the Greek god; created by the planet as it sends out rays that bury themselves deep in the Earth. Allusions of fluidity, movement, travel are instantly bestowed upon the containd element. While these designations somewhat depend on an awareness of the alcehmists' understanding of the properties of Mercury and its development on this planet, much of the allusion remains to this day. (For more on the history and classical allusions of Mercury I suggest everyone read The Baroque Cycle, a series of three books by Neal Stephenson that detail the development of Natural Philosophy, Trade, Politics, and much more through the metaphor of Mercury. If this all sounds boring there is also grand adventure, romance, and pirates. Can't beat pirates. Total pages is something like 2500, but the whole trilogy only took me about two and a half weeks all told. They're that good.)

Visual symbols have largely been replaced with words as designations. This is very probably a more efficiant, clear way to communicate with our fellow literate peoples, but the loss of layered meaning has truncated the meaning of "Mercury".

P.s. I was also really interested to learn about the ivy bush as a desginator of the tavern. I knew about the pawn broker's golden balls and the barber's pole, but the bush was new to me. If I ever have a tavern I'm totally going to plant an ivy out front!