Dilettantery

"The strongest memory is weaker than the lightest ink." -Chinese proverb, (via Louis Lavelle, La Parole et I’ecriture, Paris, 1947) "...the Hebrew term 'dabar' means ‘word’ and ‘event’." -Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982) "...when we speak...we also always express a mood. There are no words uttered without this added spin. The act of saying something is part of the meaning we express, whether we like it or not. We can't separate the *what we say* from the *how we say it*...The same phrase said by ten different people will be ten different experiences - perform ten different events."  -Daniel Coffeen and Matthew Deren, A Space For New Things (2020) Sources and Discussion:  https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/k36jw6/17_ong_and_orality/?

“I shall not recite the hardships of my toil. More than once I cried out to the vault that it was impossible to decipher that text. Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say *the tiger* is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. in time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are the poor and ambitious human words, *all*, *world*, *universe*.” -Jorge Luis Borges, The God’s Script (1949) "This notion ought to trouble you very little, since your philosophy together with ancient authors mentioned by Theophrastus, plainly holds that all sense is touch, a doctrine I most easily admit as true." -Henry More, in a letter to Descartes (December 11, 1648) “God: the mind that generates an utterance prolonged continually.” -Liber XXIV Philosophorum (The Book of the 24 Philosophers) (~12th century, maybe earlier) "By the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound we have built the shape and meaning of western man.” -Marshall Mcluhan, Gutenberg Galaxy (1964) "In Indigenous philosophies, words are not simply representational; they are causal. Language can have material(izing) force."  – Speculative Realism, Visionary Pragmatism, and Poet-Shamanic Aesthetics in Gloria Anzaldúa—and Beyond by AnaLouise Keating Sources and Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ineitj/16_the_greek_alphabet_part_two_mcluhans_thoughts/?

"The nature then of the dragon and of serpents Tauthus himself regarded as divine, and so again after him did the Phoenicians and Egyptians: for this animal was declared by him to be of all reptiles most full of breath, and fiery. In consequence of which it also exerts an unsurpassable swiftness by means of its breath, without feet and hands or any other of the external members by which the other animals make their movements. It also exhibits forms of various shapes, and in its progress makes spiral leaps as swift as it chooses. It is also most long-lived, and its nature is to put off its old skin, and so not only to grow young again, but also to assume a larger growth; and after it has fulfilled its appointed measure of age, it is self-consumed, in like manner as Tauthus himself has set down in his sacred books: for which reason this animal has also been adopted in temples and in mystic rites." -Sanchuniathon/Philo of Byblos Sources and Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/imemgk/15_the_greek_alphabet_part_one_development/?

“When signs are written with care they attest to an interest in proclamation and durability; when they are cursive they show that a society was familiar with writing. Then they are laid out without separations the remind us that our modern page layouts are recent acquisitions. When they are written on scrolls the text unfolds like a film.” -Henri-Jean Martin (1994) “Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space." -Abraham Lincoln  Sources and discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/il17l5/14_other_origins_of_writing_and_other_scripts/?

"Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba pattes some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay." — Sumerian epic poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (~1800 BC) “For writing is a visual enclosure of non-visual spaces and senses. It is, therefore, an abstraction of the visual from the ordinary sense interplay, And whereas speech is an outering (utterance) of all of our senses at once, writing abstracts from speech.” -Marshall Mcluhan, Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) "Whatever the virtues of spoken language, it is through writing that humanity is best able to express an age-old dream: the dream of a release from nature, from the material tissue, from one's own constraining existence. “ -Claude Hagège (1988) Sources and Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ig74du/13_the_origin_of_writing_and_james_joyce/?

The final episode introducing Marshall Mcluhan's thought.  “My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them ‘theories’ is to miss my satirical intent altogether […] You are in great need of some intense training in perception in the arts.” "Using a format borrowed from Pound, he combined seemingly disparate elements into ‘mosaics.’ When you interface the right images, each illuminates the other, like a blade on a grindstone. Sparks fly." -Donald Theall (2001) Sources and Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/iaoefg/12_marshall_mcluhan_intro_biography_part_three/?

A continued introduction. I start looking at how Mcluhan thinks and writes. sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/i8bmkl/episode_11_marshall_mcluhan_intro_biography_part/

Part one of a series centred on Marshall Mcluhan. In this first episode, I go over some biographical details and Mcluhan's thesis.  “He had a mind that could only think in metaphors.” -Norman Mailer, on Marshall Mcluhan “The great alchemists…were grammarians. From the time of the Neo-Platonists and Augustine to Bonaventure and to Francis Bacon, the world was viewed as a book, that lost language of which was analogous to that of human speech.” -Marshall Mcluhan Sources and discussion at https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/i7o0m0/episode_10_marshall_mcluhan_intro_biography_part/?