Because I’m currently editing Ong’s unpublished lecture “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism,” I think I’ve paid more attention to the following paragraph than I have in earlier readings:

Literate persons imagine words more or less as things because they think of them i[n] textual form. Suppose I ask you to think of the word nevertheless for two minutes, 120 seconds, without allowing any visual image of the spelled-out words to enter you imagination? You cannot do it. You are out of primary orality spectacularly and for good. You can learn about primary orality but you cannot enter into it. Paradoxically, you can understand primary oral culture better than those who live in it —if not feel it as intimately. All knowledge of anything demands proximity and distance: advantages of writing (more distancing than orality, which feeds on proximity).

Actually, I don’t visualize words. Neither do my father or my maternal grandfather. In fact, I didn’t know that most people do visualize words until my first year in college. This doesn’t mean, however, that I’m noetically closer to a primary oral culture than those who do visualize words. Rather, it means that I probably have a form of visual processing disability or some such thing. In other words, because the standard pedagogical assumptions and practices regarding spelling didn’t hold for me, I had to develop my own literacy practices. For one, I often found dictionaries difficult if not useless because I could not find the words I needed to spell (my situation was probably worse than many in my same situation because my reading comprehension and vocabulary were above grade level). Not able to rely upon dictionaries, I found other ways to look up words. (I discuss some of these literacy practices in “Mnemonic Practices 3.”)

As I was saying, my inability to visualize words is of a different kind than people in primary oral cultures, which are cultures that have no knowledge of writing whatsoever. They are unable to visualize words, at least in the way that Ong means here (i.e., visualizing the individual letters) because they have no letters to visualize. I make this point not to take issue with Ong’s larger claim that we think of words as things while primary oral cultures think of words as events (see “World as View and World as Event.” American Anthropologist 71.4 (1969): 634-47). I bring all this up largely because I find the whole issue of visualizing words fascinating, in part because I can’t do it and in part because it helps explain my own struggles with spelling. (Studies such as M.R. Radebaugh’s “Children’s Perceptions of Their Spelling Strategies” (The Reading Teacher 38 (1985): 532-536) have found that good spellers visualize the words they are spelling.) I also bring it up because I think, although I don’t want to say so for sure, that Ong’s statement is an example of how the conflation of orality-literacy contrasts and literacy studies can lead us astray. As I’ve said before, the two are related but distinct fields of study.

I guess I should say something more about “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism” itself. It’s an unpublished lecture typescript that is representative of Ong’s thinking and writing during the mid-1990s. Because it was written to be a lecture rather than a publication, it’s part reading script and part talking points, which means it has passages such as “Similarities and differences between primary orality and secondary literacy. Primary orality: word not visualizable (explain), lives only in world of sound, world of voice” as well as more developed passages such as the one quoted above. The lecture, worked up for a D. Min. in Preaching Seminar in the Aquinas Institute of Theology here in St. Louis, was first given on October 28, 1994 and then again for the same course on October 6, 1995. I’m editing the typescript (largely integrating Ong’s handwritten notes into the text) for the Walter J. Ong Collection web site. When the site launches later this month, both my edited transcription and a scan of the typescript will be available.

The initial web site won’t be large, but I’m trying to ensure that it’s got a good mix of content including a couple of audio recordings of talks and interviews, unpublished work like “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism,” photos of Ong, some sketches by, some of his published and unpublished poetry, and, I hope, an exhibit about his lecture tour of Africa in 1974, undertaken as a Lincoln Lecturer for the United States Board of Foreign Scholarships.