Olson, to end: What's real?

Olson's discussion of medieval sensibilities is enlightening. That reading was oral (!) -- surprise! -- reading aloud is a great way of revising one's composition. Re-vis.....re-vision....see again. Medieval reading was a way of hearing again. The jewish and Arabic concern with strict "letter" of the law is a context out of which grew medieval Christianity's view of text as a cultural artifact that the viewer would them breathe spirit into. Intersting, in light of this, that the Jewish tradition permitted interpretive license (a tradition of scholarly argument, I beleive) as contrasted with with Christianity's growing concern with 'correct interpretation". I remember being in an Old Testament class as an undergrad and discussing the wandering of the Jews. I was keenly interested in knowing the geographical reality of the area -- in the hopes that I would then better understand the lived reality of the wanderers. The professor, who was also a Rabbi, scolded me for not seeing the 'spirit" in the work but only focusing on the textual. I feel that my position was more like that of Rashi (150) in that for me the wonder of it all becomes more real, not less, as the people and the places become real as well. An interesting parallel discussion was that of the Italian versus Dutch master painters. The Italians were viewing the painting as a reminder of stories they already knew -- or objects to be venerated -- and certainly interpreted. The Dutch's decidedly descriptive and Protestant POV -- every person and everything in the world had its own value (202 referring to Alpers). I was amazed at the mental map of the Polynesians -- an impressive example of the "complexity of the operations that can be carried out in the mind without the use of ...." wriitng and abstract representation. Ong's quote (216) bring up for me that because of our maps and such, we abstract the experience of, say, seafaring and thus, it becomes a "big adventure"; whereas in "the ancient oral world" it was all about what was in front of someone at any given time -- what was real, required real responses in real time.