"Are you talking to yourself?" *Mouths to self* "Weird."

It seems accepted that there is a “dominance of eye over ear in mainstream Western poetics” (Tedlock 195) since the main focus of poetry is on the page and not in the performance. Is this due to society trying to break away from the perception that more primitive cultures focus on oral traditions? There is this focus on the individual within our own capitalistic society, which is indeed reflected by this focus on the written word and the ideas that “The spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups” whereas “Writing and print isolate” (Ong 73). Curling up on the couch by the fire and reading the words is quite different from sitting Indian style around a story teller, perhaps with several others around you, interpreting the orator’s body language and listening.

Often, while riding in the car, I’ll catch my pops mumbling to himself, sometimes even moving his hands a bit while they’re on the steering wheel. When I ask what he’s doing, he says he’s having an intellectual conversation with himself (I’ve been slightly insulted by this response but to my credit, it’s often said while I’m reading). Even though I obviously know and love him, I perceive it as quite odd that he talks to himself but would not see it as odd if he were writing in a journal. Why is that?

Ong states that “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence” (70); I suppose this makes sense to a certain degree, but it also depends on the relation of the sounds. You could say the same of anything living: a dog lives but is nearing death more and more every moment.

Ong also believes that “You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound” but that “There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight” (71). Are we not always immersed in both of these (unless the person is of course deaf and/or blind) already? Previous readings discussed the completely silent room where the person inside of it only hears his/her own body. Therefore, we’re always immersed in sound just as we’re always immersed in sight. However, sight cannot be louder (but could be more visually stimulating or more eye-catching, sight’s equivalent to loud sounds) just as some sounds are more ear-catching.

Ong says that primary oral culture does not focus on preserving skills (43), in which case, it makes me wonder how these people would pass along the skills they had learned without writing or telling. Were these oral tradition people better problem solvers or just better at mimicking what they’d seen once out of necessity?

I would be lost without a dictionary and the CMS (Chicago Manual of Style for the non PWE people) because I love the rules just as I love to look them up (and because my major depends on these rules). But even in primary oral cultures, there must be rules—they’re just not able to be looked up in writing but looked up, so to speak, in the minds of many or agreed upon.