On Writing and Orality

The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly—yes, and this is also very good, and I like it a lot, I also very much agree with this, that this what is one man's treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person.

Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse, 1922.

If orality is itself a means through thoughts and feelings can be communicated from oneself to others, literacy would be a heavy technological extension of this means. It gives us the possibility to create an extension of the reality, a representation, a separate world of the reality. And I could interpret it in different levels:

1. Literacy as representation of human thoughts in relation with the universe (reality).
2. Literacy as a tool for a certain context-free communication.

I consider that the relation among meanings-thoughts-words-writings can be seen as different stages of one single sequence or can be seen as different relations of disparate processes. In a deeper reflection on these processes one can experiment an affliction, a suffocation conditioned by the heaviness of all the ideas that literacy has helped to create referring to mind shaping and mind behavior. Although writing is an advanced technology -maybe the most- in which people can transmit their culture, their feelings, their knowledge, it also brings a separation, a distortion, a blurred image of the real meaning. And that is excellent because there is no equivalence between the representation and that what is represented.

These different relations differ from peoples to peoples, depending on their perceptions of the world. Thus writing could be and has been useful to maintain memories and history as in a library. This can be considered as an extension of humankind memory but, some communities don't have writing culture and their knowledge has been preserved through orality, maybe because there are many roads toward the comprehension of existence. However writing can shape in an enormous way the rapprochement between the subject and the object, as an instrument of seeing in peoples with a written culture