Sublime

Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist—all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

History and myth

The hall was the primary milieu of poetry and of its masters, the skalds. In a sophisticated oral society such as that of Vendel, and later Viking, Scandinavia, one of the poets’ main tasks was to find memorable language in which to distill what was necessary to know, enabling people to retain what they needed of their collective past.

idealized Indo-European social world of the linguists. We might not be able to retrieve the names or the personal accomplishments of the Yamnaya chiefs who migrated into the Danube valley around 3000 BCE, but, with the help of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language and mythology, we can say something about their values, religious beliefs,

The oral transmission of the past means that the past is hound to the present for its survival. The

Digital media reverse literacy and retrieve “natural” reactions to the world—impulsive and nearly physiological—but in digital forms. Digital orality reverses reflections into reflexes, pushing us back to pre-literate conditions.