notes from first class

how lovely to see everyone!

oral tradition primary orality
oral/written, concrete/abstract

memory teacher
Ars Memoriae: loci as architecture and the "Memory Palace"

our texts:

1. Frances Yates The Art of Memory
   p.113 Peter of Ravenna, The Phoenix
   tools of memory: loci, image
   "an unfrequented church"
   Quintilian
2. Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers
   prologue and chapter 1 (group work on ch 2-7)
3. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

Mnemosyne and her daughters the Muses

The Tempest, Prospero the storyteller
Walter Crane engraving

Act I Scene II

PROSPERO
No harm.
I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing
Of whence I am ...

MIRANDA
More to know
Did never meddle with my thoughts.

PROSPERO
'Tis time
I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand,
And pluck my magic garment from me. So:
      Lays down his mantle
Lie there, my art. Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.
The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'd
The very virtue of compassion in thee,
I have with such provision in mine art
So safely ordered that there is no soul--
No, not so much perdition as an hair
Betid to any creature in the vessel
Which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. Sit down;
For thou must now know farther.

MIRANDA
You have often
Begun to tell me what I am, but stopp'd
And left me to a bootless inquisition,
Concluding 'Stay: not yet.'

PROSPERO
The hour's now come;
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear;
Obey and be attentive. Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell?
I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not
Out three years old.

MIRANDA
Certainly, sir, I can.

PROSPERO
By what? by any other house or person?
Of any thing the image tell me that
Hath kept with thy remembrance.

MIRANDA
'Tis far off
And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants. Had I not
Four or five women once that tended me?

PROSPERO
Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?...

PROSPERO
... Dost thou attend me?

MIRANDA
Sir, most heedfully.

PROSPERO
... Thou attend'st not.

MIRANDA
O, good sir, I do.

PROSPERO
I pray thee, mark me.
... Dost thou hear?

MIRANDA
Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.

Mazursky, Cassavetes, Rowlands, Sarandon, et al.
Tempest (1982)

Elizabeth Alexander (the poet for Obama's inauguration): "I remember a particular afternoon in the spring of my sophomore year, being blown away by the visceral impact of Seamus Heaney's [Nobel 1995] poem 'Digging'. I felt transported by the sounds of language and compelled by the ways in which looking closely and remembering rendered an almost cinematic kind of transformation."