Words Are Events
August 12 was the date of death of Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr., and the date I entered some theological remarks in a new Harvard weblog. It turns out that August 12 was also the feast day of a new saint… Walter Jackson Ong, of St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri, a Jesuit institution.
Today, August 25, is the feast day of St. Louis himself, for whom the aforementioned city and university are named.
The New York Times states that Ong was "considered an outstanding postmodern theorist, whose ideas spawned college courses…."
There is, of course, no such thing as a postmodern Jesuit, although James Joyce came close.
From The Walter J. Ong Project:
"Ong's work is often presented alongside the postmodern and deconstruction theories of Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, and others. His own work in orality and literacy shows deconstruction to be unnecessary: if you consider language to be fundamentally spoken, as language originally is, it does not consist of signs, but of events. Sound, including the spoken word, is an event. It takes time. The concept of 'sign,' by contrast, derives primarily not from the world of events, but from the world of vision. A sign can be physically carried around, an event cannot: it simply happens. Words are events."
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From a commonplace book
"We keep coming back and coming back
The poem of pure reality, untouched
At the exactest point at which
The eye made clear of uncertainty,
Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
The solid, but the movable,
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) |
The web page where I found the Stevens quote also has the following:
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Case 9 of Hekiganroku:
A monk asked Joshu,
Joshu said, Setcho's Verse:
Its intention concealed,
Setcho (980-1052), |
See also my previous entry for today,
"Gates to the City."