SPLITS : Orality & Literacy
WILLIAM BLAKE
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3, (E 34)
"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and
Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to
Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good &
Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active
springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."
From Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, I’ve assembled a long list of contraries, terms that indicate opposition and interaction, terms that force division into experience in order to gain some clarity about it.
ORALITY LITERACY
speech writing
sound sight
motion rest
action reflection
event object
alive dead (immortal)
name as power name as label
recall look up
synthetic analytic
repetition novelty
participation distance
togetherness separation
riddle logic
unify divide
harmony clarity
wholism schizophrenia
cliche "make it new"
conservative liberal
presence absence
space time
circle line
feminine masculine
Catholic Protestant
Jung Freud
communism democracy
spirit matter
kin contract
guru professor
concrete abstract
sacred profane
myth science
body mind
public private
process product
Orality & Literacy/ Splits, more
George Sand : The days are made to repose us from our nights; that is to say, the reveries of the lucid day are made to rest us from our dreams of night.
Gaston Bachelard : An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
In his The Poetics of Reverie, these splits :
feminine male
reverie dream
anima animus
child adult
image concept
moon sun
water fire
inside "outside man"
Michel Serres : The Five Senses
The figure of Hermes which as Serres remarks in The Five Senses, he chose as the 'totem, emblem, or theorem' for his early work, oscillates between these two accents of noise At the beginning of The Five Senses, Hermes appears as the defeater of Argus, as the ubiquity of sound overcomes and surpasses the geometry of vision.--Introduction, Steven Connor
Bachelard : In numerous works C. G. Jung has shown the existence of a profound duality in the human Psyche. He has situated this duality under the double sign of an animus and an anima....Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.