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

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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.

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Gaston Bachelard : An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

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In his The Poetics of Reverie, these splits :

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feminine   male

reverie     dream

anima      animus

child        adult

image      concept

moon       sun

water       fire

inside      "outside man"

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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

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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.

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