http://www.mythic-cartography.org/2006/11/14/the-wild-library/ Revitalizing Riddles, Mythic Story, Family, Village and Land. Sun, 1 Aug 2010 06:55:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.2 http://www.mythic-cartography.org/2006/11/14/the-wild-library/#comment-5357 The College of Mythic Cartography » Blog Archive » Merlin and His Book of the Land Mon, 26 Mar 2007 04:44:53 +0000 http://www.mythic-cartography.org/2006/11/14/the-wild-library/#comment-5357 [...] In reading the book, Merlin: Shaman, Prophet, Magician, by John Matthews, I ran across a great passage underscoring something that I touched on before, with the help of an excerpt by David Abram: the connection between insight, knowledge, and the land. The quote from the book on Merlin runs thus: Messages from the Land Physical contact with the earth is another important part of the transmission of the skills of both the seer and the prophet. The land held information like a great book, which could be accessed by those with the skill to see or hear it. The most subtle methods of prophetic tradition in Britain and Ireland seem always to have been available to those who live within the spiritual continuum of the land, and this, we have seen, is very much a central aspect of Merlin’s life in the wilderness. [...] […] In reading the book, Merlin: Shaman, Prophet, Magician, by John Matthews, I ran across a great passage underscoring something that I touched on before, with the help of an excerpt by David Abram: the connection between insight, knowledge, and the land. The quote from the book on Merlin runs thus: Messages from the Land Physical contact with the earth is another important part of the transmission of the skills of both the seer and the prophet. The land held information like a great book, which could be accessed by those with the skill to see or hear it. The most subtle methods of prophetic tradition in Britain and Ireland seem always to have been available to those who live within the spiritual continuum of the land, and this, we have seen, is very much a central aspect of Merlin’s life in the wilderness. […]

]]> http://www.mythic-cartography.org/2006/11/14/the-wild-library/#comment-455 The Fifth World Community » Blog Archive » Setting & Story Fri, 05 Jan 2007 14:43:43 +0000 http://www.mythic-cartography.org/2006/11/14/the-wild-library/#comment-455 [...] The College of Mythic Cartography ran an article on this aspect of Abram’s work called “The Wild Library.” In the book, Abram discusses the incredible marriage of place and story in oral cultures, and how animists read the landscape the same way you’re reading this article. He writes, “One of the strong claims of this book is that the synaesthetic association of visible topology with auditory recall—the intertwining of earthly place with linguistic memory—is common to almost all indigenous, oral cultures.” Especially impressive is his accounting of the Dreamtime in Australia, and the song lines that foragers recite, telling a continuous story of creation all across the continent. He discusses similar feats among Native American tribes, as well, and even points out that it isn’t even alien to alphabetical civilization: Indeed, even within European culture there is a celebrated example of this propensity, albeit in a throughly altered form … [in] the mnemonic technique utilized by the classical orators of Greece and Rome to remember their long speeches (a technique regularly practiced by rhetoricians up until the spread of typographic texts during the late Renaissance). The orator would imagine an elaborate palace, filled with diverse halls and rooms and intricate structural details. He would then envision himself walking through this palace, and would deposit at various places within the rooms a sequence of imagined objects associated with the different parts of his planned speech. Thereafter, to recall the entire speech in its correct sequence and detail, the orator had only to envision himself once again walking the same route through the halls and rooms of the memory palace: each locus encountered on his walk would remind him of the specific phrase to be spoken or the particular topic to be addressed at that point during the discourse. Rather than striving to memorize the composed speech on its own, the orator found it much easier, and certainly much safer, to correlate the diverse parts of the speech to diverse places within an imaginary structure, within an envisioned topology through which he could imaginatively stroll. Yet while the classical orators had to construct and move through such topological matrices in their private imagination, the native peoples of Australia found themselves corporeally immersed in just such a linguistic-topological field, walking through a material landscape whose every feature was already resonant with speech and song! [...] […] The College of Mythic Cartography ran an article on this aspect of Abram’s work called “The Wild Library.” In the book, Abram discusses the incredible marriage of place and story in oral cultures, and how animists read the landscape the same way you’re reading this article. He writes, “One of the strong claims of this book is that the synaesthetic association of visible topology with auditory recall—the intertwining of earthly place with linguistic memory—is common to almost all indigenous, oral cultures.” Especially impressive is his accounting of the Dreamtime in Australia, and the song lines that foragers recite, telling a continuous story of creation all across the continent. He discusses similar feats among Native American tribes, as well, and even points out that it isn’t even alien to alphabetical civilization: Indeed, even within European culture there is a celebrated example of this propensity, albeit in a throughly altered form … [in] the mnemonic technique utilized by the classical orators of Greece and Rome to remember their long speeches (a technique regularly practiced by rhetoricians up until the spread of typographic texts during the late Renaissance). The orator would imagine an elaborate palace, filled with diverse halls and rooms and intricate structural details. He would then envision himself walking through this palace, and would deposit at various places within the rooms a sequence of imagined objects associated with the different parts of his planned speech. Thereafter, to recall the entire speech in its correct sequence and detail, the orator had only to envision himself once again walking the same route through the halls and rooms of the memory palace: each locus encountered on his walk would remind him of the specific phrase to be spoken or the particular topic to be addressed at that point during the discourse. Rather than striving to memorize the composed speech on its own, the orator found it much easier, and certainly much safer, to correlate the diverse parts of the speech to diverse places within an imaginary structure, within an envisioned topology through which he could imaginatively stroll. Yet while the classical orators had to construct and move through such topological matrices in their private imagination, the native peoples of Australia found themselves corporeally immersed in just such a linguistic-topological field, walking through a material landscape whose every feature was already resonant with speech and song! […]

]]>