On Being "Chirographically Thinking and Speaking Human Beings:" A Response to Walter J. Ong

Writing is not an innately human activity.
A spoken truth is fleating, temporary.
Lanugage technology pushes us farther away from human nature.
So great!
True & Fascinating!
Yes!
Mechanical contrivances allow for human expression.
Writing divides, identifies & isolates.
No?
Language trumps music!  More deeply internalized form of human expression.

These are just a few of the lively comments that are scrawled on the pages of my copy of Walter J. Ong's paper, "Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought." I could not stop with the marginalia in this one.  His work uncovers a wealth of jewel-like insights into the the role language (written and oral) plays in the cognitive, psychological and social development of humans.  When he writes, "If [modern literate humans] are asked to think of the word 'nevertheless' for two minutes, 120 seconds, without ever allowing any letters at all to enter their imaginations, they cannot comply. A person from a completely oral background of course has no such problem," Ong skillfully reveals to his readers what it would be like without their foundation in graphic language.  His imagery quickly conveys the sense of a mental white board, an interior space where all the letters and words dance to the surface when summoned-up with a verbal or conceptual cue. Without the development or mastery of the written word, our minds would function in a very different way. I cannot help but wonder what that white screen would contain in an oral society. Pictures? Colors?  How would we choose our words without the concept of how they are visually represented?  Would emphasis be placed more on sound or precise meaning?  Or, would we utilize different forms of artful expression altogether, demoting verbalization to an inferior mode of communication? Through Ong's simple example it becomes strikingly clear that we modern humans are constantly engaging visually with the alphabetic representation of our language and that the oral & visual cannot exist seperately in our modern literate minds.  This point of interconnectedness is just one of the many fascinating kernals of thought Ong presents in this work; and upon further reading, marking-up the pages, I became keenly aware that his astoundingly well written ideas are not only foundational to linguistic theory but extremely relevant to the conversations we are having in class on literacy and language acquisition.

Early Chinese Papermaking - Wood Block Print

First Day of Creation from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle. It is one of the best documented early printed books, an incunabulum and one of the first to successfully integrate illustrations and text.

Boar Scribe

Whimsical Artistry of a Medieval Scribe

These secret hobo signs communicate the dangers and delights of the road ahead.

 

Printed words. Why are they important? Why make any distinction at all between print and written-script? Sure, you have to know how you are going to produce a piece of writing, which method you will use to set mark to page. But certainly that should be the end of it, right? Print it with letters, any discernible font will do, on paper with whatever means necessary I don't care if you stamp, type, emboss or print, just get those words on the page!

This might have been my view a few years ago, before I took a class in book-making. I just had no idea. However I quickly learned how significant the artistry of mark-making is once I heard the rhythmic sounds of a hand operated printing press: crink, womp, and shooh–the roller coming down, ink pressed to letters, letters pressed to page and then out. No matter if you are a writer, publisher or simply a human with a heartbeat, you'll feel the weight of the printed word's significance once you hear that sound.

The moment in A Short History of the Printed Word that brought me back to those moments in the print-room was when Bringhurst closed Chapter I by outlining the debate between scholars regarding the significance of print mechanics. Although, in most things I tend to side with the Romantics in their ideology in this one I side with William Blake when he said "mechanical excellence is the only vehicle of genius." He seems to say, know your tool, know it well and you can be masterful with it. This idea continues to resonate even in todays electro-technically dependent culture. Know your tool, be it computer, pen or printing press and you have the means to produce compelling streams of thought through thoughtfully arranged words.