In One Eye, Out The Other!
I have said it before in this blog, but it bears repeating, and that's that sound, according to Ong, "exists only when it is going out of existence." Here is the rest of the quotation from Orality and Literacy : "[Sound} is not simply perishable, but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. When I pronounce the word 'permanence', by the time I get to the '-pence', [sic] the 'perma'- is gone, and has to be gone.... All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way." The notion of secondary orality means much more than the strand of thought with which I cling to it. But it makes sense to me that there is something essentially oral, fleeting, evanescent, about the text and pic-based media in which we now move. (I thank my MACT professor, Gordon Gow, and my boss, Peggy Garritty, for pointing me and keeping me in this interesting direction...