the berkeley rep magazine - Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Muses
it is a central mark of our humanity that we work so hard to
remember what has happened to us as individuals and as a species. In ancient times, storytellers
encoded information in oral tales to share with future generations, and philosophers used
their keen powers of observation to craft ingenious mnemonic systems. More recently, scientists
have tirelessly studied behavior, psychology, and the physical landscapes of our brains to better
understand how we remember and why. As we’ve evolved from singing around the campfire
to cloud storage, the ideas we wish to remember and the technology used to record them have
grown evermore complex. While possible to document events in a detached and clinical fashion,
the meaning only emerges for us when we can tease out a narrative from tangles of data. The
desire to tell a story about what has happened to us remains the same. We want our wisdom to
endure and to improve the lives of our children’s children, and above all, we want them to know
and understand us, so we tell a story.
Linguist Walter J. Ong has done extensive research into oral cultures all over the world. He
divides societies into two main categories: societies that have had no exposure to written language,
and groups that have incorporated writing into their social fabric. In the wake of globalization,
very few communities have had no contact with the printed word, but some cultures have a
higher “oral residue” than others. The ancient Greeks in the days of Socrates and Herodotus lived
in a society with a significant oral residue. Though a Greek alphabet had existed for some time
and the Greeks had contact with numerous other literary cultures, written documents had not
yet been fully embraced either as an art form or as the most effective means of recordkeeping.
Plato records a fascinating story from Socrates about the Egyptian god Theuth’s (Thoth) gift of
letters to the king Thamus:
‘This invention, 0 king,’
said Theuth, ‘will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their
memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.’
But Thamus replied, ‘Most ingenious Theuth…. this invention will produce forgetfulness
in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not
practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external
characters which are not part of themselves will discourage the use
of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir
not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the
appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.’
In other words, writing is a prop and a poor substitute for actually learning something.
Socrates goes on to assert that it is an impersonal and incomplete way of connecting or acquiring
2012–13 · ISSUE 2 · the berkeley rep magazine · 17