My paper: semi edited.
Oral Traditions Term paper
Dr. Sexson
John Nay
What shall become of time,
lapping back and forth?
To begin, this essay is neither conclusive, nor has a real beginning in a linear academic sense; but is a true gestation of what I have learned, or perhaps remembered, in the course of a semester, and the breadth of my entire waking life. This is why epistemological understanding and education for me is about involving oneself in the embodiment of the material physically. Perhaps this is why I wrote a poem for my oral performance, and still perhaps why I use the nine muses as a mnemonic tool to remember things throughout my life.
And…In order for me to accomplish this feat—“a true gestation of what I have learned”, if at all possible,—I will explicate my oral performance in this essay; in a manner that demonstrates poetry’s power to veer through time—in and out the of human consciousness—in the oral world, the literate world, and the shaping of the prevailing mythic world that continues to construct a collective cultural consciousness. And In short, demonstrate life as an object, captured perfectly in remembrance of song sung, or rather songs to sing…in the fury of poetry through the ages.
Myth is perhaps the underlying subject matter of this essay. For it is not something that has ceased to exist—rather it is adaptive to a changing world—and the power it evokes (even in contemporary life) is not something to be taken lightly. For myth is an entity that is neither visible, nor tangible, but merely unconsciously lived in a removed sense. If one were to analyze cultural values in any part of the world, it would become apparent that they are mythic fulfillments, and not underlying truths, other than the truth that a particular culture deems them underlying truths. In a profoundly enlightening novel on this subject matter titled Ishmael, the protagonist (who is a telepathic guerilla) in a Socratic dialogue asks his pupil, “if he thought the Greeks were livid in a world constructed out of myth”. When the student answers no, the discussion continues in a new plane of understanding. Like I have said, Myth in its contemporary form is not tangible, nor was it tangible to any persons living through out it.
Sean Kane in his book, Wisdom Of The Mythtellers, starts a discussion that reflects some of these points I have made. In his study he distinguishes between three distinct eras that he will expand upon, “they are the Paleolithic, the Mesolithic, and the Neolithic—that is, Early Middle and Late Stone Age. It is from these different kinds of earth relatedness that we will take our stories (p.16)”. Perhaps, this quote does not immediately seem self evident on its relevance to the subject of poetry, or mythic fulfillment—but it is. The mythtellers of these eras (as a contemporary would perceive them) were poets in a preliterate sense, and this “earth relatedness” is what I want to address to expand my subject matter. A bond, and a relationship to the earth is something that is unquestionably true in any human endeavor—yet, isolation and deprivation from the world as it naturally exists is becoming a dominant worldview. And in the minds of scholars like Walter J Ong—the advent of writing progressed this isolation of the human life world into abstract forms such as the novel, and modern western world perspective.
Kevin Luby, in his paper The Memory, Imagination, and Soul of Mythtelling gives insight into the subject matter that has exponentially expanded my perspective on the subject. In his essay he writes:
“The myths of oral storytellers create the dialogue with the earth that taps into its available knowledge. As Sean Kane states in his book, human tradition dictates myth thus allowing them to be apart of the conversation. The earth learns of humans just as humans learn of the earth, through the mythic conversation.”

This is an incredible comment if one is really to reflect upon it. If this is in fact true, than humanity with the advent, and prevalence of agriculture, and increased individualism during the Neolithic era, consciously pitted itself against the earth by creating a sense of personal domain and property—in a world that was once abundant, and harmonious in its resources to all earth’s creatures. This is perhaps why Sean Kane explains that when studying past myth, we are jaded, for we have no real context in fully understanding ancient perspective. Sean Kane makes further assessment on this subject when addressing a myth such as Demeter and Persephone, which has been dismembered by modern interpretation. In the Wisdom Of The Mythtellers he states, “The example of the textbook Demeter demonstrates a myth held in suspended animation in two individual contexts: an ancient context involving a transfer of power from plants to kings, and a modern context involving a transfer of power from storyteller to author(P.231)”.
The context which I attempted to provide in my poem is I hope somewhat reflective of this statement, on a smaller scale of course. For I know that these former statements in my paper were largely political, and this was not really my aim for my poem. Yet it doesn’t matter, for no matter how much things are avoided, poems are mythic invocations of time present, and time past. And the purpose of verse such as this, “We are certainly not who we were/ When we left cracking snow this morning,/ And we are never who we are/when we arrived at crimson dusk;/What will we remember at the beginning, middle, and ending/if anything at all…”,is to invoke a context that is relevant to the class in its momentary reference to snow, its larger reference to memory as primary subject matter, but is also an attempt to leave this poem ambiguous enough to draw a larger body of input from any audience. Another angle I approached to express a sediment of context was to draw soley on personal expression, “Were my soul still swoons in green patterns, and falling raindrops,/were my father hitched the highway/with a promising young thumb”. In this line of verse, I have added myself as subject matter; for everything is relevant to the context of this poem that is attempting blend orality and literacy in a context that is remembrance of this class, in song sung of an ever-changing myth.
The context of the poem, and the verses I just spoke of was primarily in the literate tradition, and as I said in somewhat different words, my goal for this poem was a marriage, and an alignment between orality and literacy. So, what I choose to do to represent a sense of oral tradition in this class was to reinvent popular reggae songs with everyone’s class epithet. Walter J. Ong, in his book Orality and Literacy, has systematically demonstrated the power of epithets in oral verse. In the chapter, Some Psychodynamics Of Orality, he demonstrates how epithets are tools to increase memory in an oral culture. Literary cultures, as we know, find this redundant, and prefer the arsenal of a dictionary rather than these clichés (P.38). But in terms of creating oral epics—which I contend many songs are, especially African Diaspora music,—the epithet and situational scenarios play a particularly important role. Ong states that:
“Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the human lifeworld…[for example]…the epithet amymon applied by homer to Aegisthus: the epithet means not ‘blameless’ a tidy abstraction with which literates have translated the term, but ‘beautiful-in-the-way-a-warrior-ready-to-fight-is-beautiful (49)’”.

This situational stream of thought that is prevalent in oral cultures is not only representative of every changing context; it is also representative of the interiority of sound.
Ong makes it particularly clear that sound is itself “exists only when it is going out of existence (70)”. This is why, “In a primarily oral culture, where the world has its existence only in sound…the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word (72)”. So by creating songs that mimicked these theory’s that Ong has presented, I hopefully have created a poem that unifies the oral world, and the literate world.
Mythic context (as I have defined as ever changing) is extremely relevant to this notion of situational representation. My poem in its totality has closure, and an explicit ending, but this is just because much of the elements in this poem are from the literate tradition. The songs that contain the epithets themselves are as Ong quoting Horace states, “[an] epic poet [that] ‘hastens into the action and precipitates the hearer into the middle of things (139)’”. This is quite an adequate explanation of why when someone looks at the lyrics of songs, versus when they are performed, the performed song seems to make more sense, even though they do not contain a lengthy back story. It is also an explanation of how Oral Poems and reggae songs such as this, invoke empathy in the listener. For example, the song Johnny Too Bad by The Slickers (the first song that is sung in my poem) seemingly has benign and irreverent jargon for lyrics to a reader. Yet when it is performed orally in verse, the sound jumps off the page, and invokes emotions that mean numerous amounts of things in Jamaican mythic context. The author of the book Cut ‘N’ Mix, a chronological study of the progression of culture in Caribbean music makes this point about Jamaican music:
“African, Afro-American and Caribbean music is based on quite different principles from European classical tradition. The collective voice is given precedence over the individual voice of the artist or the composer. The rhythm and the percussion play a much more central role. In the end, there is a link in these non-European music’s with public life, with speech with the textures and the grain of the living human voice (p.11)”

The author of this book also gives more information into how this music is steeped in the oral tradition. Paraphrasing him he makes the point that this term “versioning” is one of the most important terms that can be assigned to reggae music and its subsequent paradigm shifts. What it means is constantly rearranging songs in new formats to represent new contextual moments. For example: if a politician was shot, an older reggae song might be versioned to add another element to the song to keep up with the contemporaneity. In terms of relevance in a broad perspective, African Caribbean music has had some of the biggest impact in returning western culture to orality.
If I had had more time I would have made a point in memorizing everyone’s names in a memory theater, and invoking these epic songs in, as Walter J Ong has called it, “the singer’s memories of songs sung (143)”. The purpose of this feat would have been to see if there were any incongruities between what I wrote, and what I remembered, and to see how adaptive song is to present conditions in different moments.
Bringing this paper to my final point, I want to address tonality, and how tone is a method of situating poetry, and even prose in a marriage between orality and literacy. Zach Morris has written a paper that substantially deals with this topic. In his explanation of how tone can become settled in the abstracted universe of the print culture he states, “By imagining a particular mood, and by writing in such a way as to compliment that mood, the author can imagine the tone in which the reader would probably use to read the letter”. And this is, I suppose, is what I was attempting to do when I made the change in my poem from sung verse to that that which was tonally intact in of itself. In lines such as this, “Click: He switched the station after he had enough—His withered fingers told stories that were content with his age, And his eyes were quite with the years…”, I am playing the role of a narrator that is not physically engaging (such as in the oral world of verse) but rounded as Ong states is essential to the print tradition (148). The “click” is the onomatopoeic signifier that bridges orality and literacy in this poem. With subtle changes in my invocation, and conscientious moments of tone difference, I hopefully made this clear in my mode of conveying my poetics.
I developed this idea of a radio as a means of oral expression, and oral diversion from the novel Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey, for it is a work of fiction that is extremely tonally aware. Music, dialect, and a conflict between high literacy and low literacy are extremely prevalent themes in this book, and the conflict that arises in the typical Freytag’s pyramid is not only a dramatic linear plot of literary events, but a clash of the oral tradition and literary tradition. The novel which is actually named after a country-western-song, constantly breaks into verse from truck radio’s, portable radios, and even begins chapters with popular folksy verse. When I read it the first time, I constantly caught myself singing along in a mystic forgotten recollection of the power of poetry. This novel, which was a huge inspiration to me for creating this poem, and understanding literature in general as I do, is a perfect example (tonally speaking) that it is possible to have this marriage between orality and literacy in written form. It is a novel that hopefully with a more in depth understanding, will receive the esteem it deserves.

To conclude in a matter of a lack of a real conclusion, I would like to comment on James Joyce’s masterpiece, Finnegans Wake as the beginning, middle, and ending of everything that I have to say in this essay. In short, it is the return mythically, musically, and tonally of orality through the media of literacy. It is poetry in its purist, and most abstracted form, it is everything and nothing at the same time. It is in a sense more readable, or audible than Ulysses, for there is something in it for everyone to enjoy—it will always have new context.
What I initially stated in this paper, was that song is remembrance of song sung, and that poetry has the power to transcend all human emotion in any era, and practically any mode of expression, and that poetry is not only the breadth and voice of myth, but the mender and creator of it. Is it not possible then, as Dr Sexon has stated in his article, that what Joyce has created is, “not vague recollection but the fashion of a body, wholly body, replete with regenerative functions…the finding of all the missing letters (litter) and the reshaping them into a text with texture, taste and tactility (3).” Perhaps this absurd, and more complicated than anything needs to be, perhaps I have no Idea of what I am talking about…perhaps I will walk out of this room without the slightest idea of what this essay was really about.