Memory, p.14
Memory, page 14
This was the starting point for a brilliant paper on oral history, old age and community memory: ‘Wash Day and Bath Night: Uncovering Women’s Reminiscences’.fn3 What did it demonstrate? Certainly that Marisse was a very good researcher, and knew how to wait, how to listen, and how to gain trust. But also that Memory and Forgetting are subject to the law of Association.
[6]
The concept of the association of ideas is at least as old as Aristotle writing in the fourth century BC. The argument was taken up by Pascal and Hobbes, and later elaborated by David Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature (1738). Hume suggested that ideas were naturally linked by three qualities: ‘resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect’.fn4 But it took an eighteenth-century doctor to transform these metaphysics into a scientific theory of memory.
One of the great, forgotten books of English Romanticism is David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations, first published in 1749. Hartley was a successful physician, who turned his hand to philosophy and psychology. Born in Yorkshire, he practised largely in London and Bath, where he developed a theory of consciousness based on his own medical observations of his patients. Hartley’s great originality was to consider memory primarily as a physiological process. It was something that occurred not only in the ‘mind’, but physically in the structure of the brain. He combined the empirical philosophy of Locke with his own views of the human nervous system. He argued that all memories were formed by ‘clusters’ or sequences of associated impressions and ideas. These were physiologically encoded in the brain in an enormous network of medullary ‘vibrations’, or smaller ‘vibratiuncles’, similar to electrical impulses moving through the brain tissue or ‘medullary substance’.
Although Hartley had not carried out dissections of the cerebral cortex, and had no effective map of the human brain, his theories strikingly anticipate much speculative modern neuroscience. For example Francis Crick’s study, The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), with its characteristically provocative subtitle ‘The Scientific Search for the Soul’, proposes ‘40-Herz oscillations’ within the brain and ‘reverberations’ within the cortex, as the possible basis of human consciousness. ‘Consciousness depends crucially on thalmic connections within the cortex. It exists only if certain cortical areas have reverberatory circuits … that project strongly enough to produce significant reverberations.’fn5
In their most basic form Hartley’s associative clusters were linked to simple impressions of pleasure or pain, but eventually organised themselves hierarchically. They evolved into all the higher forms of remembered knowledge, learning and reason. They evolved into notions of imagination, ambition, conscience and love. They even evolved into a belief in God, what Hartley called ‘theopathy’.
Hartley was a philanthropist, a vegetarian, a Christian and a believer in a mystical kind of Paradise. Yet in effect, he was putting forward a theory of the entirely physical or ‘material’ evolution of the human brain. He saw no sign of the traditional division between mind and body. He detected no separate interjection of a ‘spirit’, a divine ‘spark’ or a soul. Memory was a form of electrical or chemical motion. As he put it in his famous Proposition 90: ‘All our voluntary powers are of the nature of Memory’.fn6
Hartley also had an unusual theory of dreams. Far from being coded messages from the unconscious, they were simply part of the brain’s system of waste disposal. When we dreamed, we abandoned the useless memories and associations of the day. Dreaming was a functional form of forgetting, that prevented the machinery of the brain from becoming overloaded. Without forgetfulness, we would become mad. ‘The wildness of our dreams seems to be of singular use to us, by interrupting and breaking the course of our associations. For if we were always awake, some accidental associations would be so cemented by continuance, as that nothing could afterwards disjoin them; which would be madness.’fn7
These ideas strongly attracted the eighteenth-century scientist and free-thinker, Joseph Priestley. Priestley was fascinated by various forms of chemical and electrical energy, and suspected that the human brain contained both. (He had a taste for daring innovations, and was the first to isolate, though not to identify, oxygen gas consumed in combustion.) In 1774 Priestley edited a new edition of the Observations with his own preface. ‘Such a theory of the human mind … contains a new and most extensive science,’ he wrote. ‘It will be like entering upon a new world, affording inexhaustible matter for curious and useful speculation.’fn8
But others were profoundly shocked. Thomas Reid, a professor of moral philosophy from Edinburgh, observed that ‘the tendency of Hartley’s system is to make all the operations of the mind mere mechanism, dependent on the laws of matter and motion’. The horrific idea of human memory as a ‘mere mechanism’ inspired Reid with a superb passage of polemic science fiction. ‘If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of feeling; of a whispering gallery that had the power of hearing; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched; such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages …’fn9
It does not weaken Reid’s metaphysical outrage to observe that three hundred years later most of these ‘absurd’ and incredible machines do exist. Certainly one could argue that the laparoscope (introducing carbon fibre optics within the body), the mobile phone, the desktop computer and the MRI scanner demonstrate respectively many of the impossible features Reid describes.
[7]
More surprisingly, Hartley’s Observations deeply impressed a Romantic poet. In his extraordinary effusion of 1796 entitled ‘Religious Musings’ (a sort of intellectual tour d’horizon written at the age of twenty-four), Coleridge grouped David Hartley with Newton and Priestley as one of the three visionary English scientists who had truly glimpsed a ‘renovated Earth’. He described Hartley as the ‘wisest’ among scientific thinkers, who had fearlessly explored the human mind, and become (in a prophetic image)
… The first who marked the ideal tribes
Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain.
Many of Coleridge’s finest early poems, such as ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), with its complex patterns of memory association, are explorations of Hartley’s theories. Like a Memory Box, this poem contains a series of physical objects and sensations – an owl’s cry, a flickering fire, a baby’s cradle, the sound of church bells – which reverberate into an ever-expanding orchestration of memories. These also produce, like complex harmonies, several layers of past and future identity. The adult Coleridge becomes a child again; while the child remembers he has become a father; and the father blesses the child. It is no coincidence that the actual baby in this poem is Coleridge’s eldest son, Hartley, born near Bristol in 1796 and named in honour of the philosopher-doctor.
Coleridge’s later Notebooks have many passages exploring the phenomenon of memory association, such as those connected with his beloved Asra, Sara Hutchinson. In March 1810 he wrote down an enormous catalogue of all the objects which by ‘the Law of Association’ reminded him of her – from a piece of music to a waterfall, from a bedroom door ajar to the delicious white sauce on a joint of meat. He described them as forming a powerful cluster of ideas, almost unbearably strong and vivid, ‘that subtle Vulcanian Spider-web Net of Steel – strong as Steel yet subtle as the Ether – in which my soul flutters enclosed with the Idea of your’s.’fn10
Here Hartley’s ‘vibrations’ have been subtly transformed back into a ‘flutter’ of the soul; a word that also occurs at a key place in ‘Frost at Midnight’. In this beautiful and observant passage, Coleridge uses the faint flicker of convected air above his fire (the mirage-like ‘film’, not the visible flame) to produce a remarkable image of human consciousness itself. It is essentially unstable, dynamic and playfully inventive.
… the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not,
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
Coleridge would go on to dedicate three entire chapters of his Biographia Literaria (1817) to the history of Associationism ‘traced from Aristotle to Hartley’. In one place he remarked that Hartley’s theory of memory could be compared to ‘a broad stream, winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents, varying and running into each other according as the gusts chance to blow from the opening of the mountains’.fn11
[8]
In one form or another the theory of Associationism remained hugely influential throughout the Romantic period. The radical idea of memory as a physiological process was seen to provide a possible link between human consciousness and the rest of the living world, however remote. Coleridge had written of ‘dim sympathies’ with ‘companionable forms’. More than seventy years after Hartley’s Observations, the great chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, was exploring Associationism in connection with freshwater fishes in his book Salmonia, or Days of Fly-Fishing, published in 1828.
He was investigating the mysterious memories of fish, which he regarded as quite as interesting a phenomenon as those of human beings. For example, once a trout was caught and thrown back into the river, could it remember being hooked? Could it remember the pain of being hooked? Could it feel – or remember – pain at all? And if so, was trout-fishing inherently cruel? – an astonishingly modern question. ‘But do you think nothing of the torture of the hook, and the fear of capture, and the misery of struggling against the powerful rod?’fn12
Davy debates these issues in a series of dialogues, which gain an added poignancy from the fact that he himself was ill, in pain and near death at the time he wrote them. ‘My only chance of recovery is in entire repose,’ he wrote from the shores of Lake Constance in July 1827, ‘and I have even given up angling, and amuse myself by dreaming and writing a very little, and studying the natural history of fishes … I now use green spectacles, and have given up my glass of wine per day.’fn13
He concludes that although a trout may not feel pain in a human sense, it does remember being hooked, and afterwards may subsequently ‘refuse an artificial fly day after day, for weeks together’. Davy thought the reason for this was that the trout associated the pain with the place. ‘The memory seems local and associated with surrounding objects; and if a pricked trout is chased into another pool, he will, I believe, soon again take the artificial fly. Or if the objects around him are changed, as in Autumn, by the decay of weeds, or by their being cut, the same thing happens.’fn14
[9]
One afternoon about five years ago I was walking around a favourite flower bed in Norfolk, which Rose and I had dug and planted from scratch. Every plant and shrub was an old friend – iceberg roses, Hidcote lavenders, blue hydrangeas, magnolia, purple berberis, red-tipped photinia, Japanese anemones, scarlet crocosmia, white potentilla. Then I came to a pleasant, green tufted shrub which had once been the size of a modest pincushion and was now more like that of a plump chaise-longue. I had often fed it, clipped it, hoed uxoriously under its skirts. I had, frankly, often wished to sprawl full length on its springy, inviting mattress of minute green foliage and tiny white flowerets.
But on this particular afternoon I gazed down at its familiar, cheery, hospitable shape and realised that I had totally forgotten its name. For several uncomfortable minutes I stared down at it, reaching into the pocket of my memory and finding it alarmingly empty, just as if I had suddenly lost a set of car keys. Only when I turned to walk back up the lawn, and was momentarily distracted by the flight of a pigeon above the beech trees, did the name ‘hebe’ spring effortlessly to mind.
Of course this is a common phenomenon among the middle-aged. (Is it called ‘nominative aphasia’? I can’t remember.) It applies particularly to the names of specific things – people, places, books, or – in my case – plants. It can be combated, especially by childlike mnemonic devices. ‘Hebe-jeeby’ has rarely failed me since. Nevertheless it tends to spread steadily and insidiously once it has begun. No one has quite explained its causes. I know a computer expert who calls it the ‘disk full’ effect; while others speak of senior moments, or hardening cerebral arteries, weakened synaptic links, alcohol, tea-drinking, metaphysical distraction, existential anxiety, or just the middle-aged mind generally ‘on other things’ – though not necessarily higher ones.
This kind of Forgetting certainly belongs to the goddess who has no name. Yet it is not so much a failure to remember: more a failure to recollect. Moreover the act of recollection worked in a curious way. When I actively tried to recollect, it was as if I was constantly on the brink of remembrance, or as if I was stuttering with a word, or slipping back from the last few inches of a rope-climb. But the moment I stopped trying, the moment I looked up and admired the pigeon in his evening swoop over the beech trees, the word ‘hebe’ arrived without effort, without strain, like a free gift.
Coleridge was one of the first people to describe this phenomenon of ‘active and passive recollection’ in his Biographia. It appears in Chapter 6, where he compares the mental law of Association with that of the physical law of gravitation: ‘it is to Thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to locomotion’. Sometimes we actively strive for memory, sometimes we passively yield to forgetfulness. When someone is ‘trying to recollect a name’, he uses ‘alternate pulses of active and passive motion’. The surprising analogy Coleridge gives for this mental process is that of a tiny water-beetle swimming up a stream. He adds that a very similar active-passive is at work in the composing of poetry. The passage, with its impression of Coleridge himself bending over the surface of the water (or the mind), minutely observant, half poet and half scientist, is itself a kind of mnemonic image.
Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name … Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current and now yielding to it in order to gather further strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work …fn15
[10]
The power of what has been forgotten can sometimes be as great as that which has been remembered. In Edward Thomas’s poem, ‘Old Man’, the unnamed bush that stands outside his cottage door has a tiny leaf with a dark, bitter, haunting smell. It evokes something he can never quite place or explain. Each time he rubs it between his fingers, the scent sweeps him back to the borders of a primitive memory, which is never quite rediscovered.
As for myself
Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.
I, too, often shrivel the grey shards,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering.
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning than this bitter one.
I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember …
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.
Thomas’s poem also reminds one of the peculiar power of smell to summon up – to call back – specific memories (especially of places). I have an aftershave which instantly recalls a certain room in a motel in Pacific Grove, near Monterey, in California.
Proust observed in A la recherche du temps perdu that the smell and taste of things were ‘more faithful’ than visual images. They remained suspended in the mind for a long time, ‘like souls ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment to come amid the ruins of all the rest; they bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection’.
That was written in 1913, as Proust reflected in Paris on the extraordinary power of the madeleine dipped in the tea, to call back the memories of his country childhood in Combray. It has become the classic literary reference to the power of smell and taste to summon memories. But five years earlier, in a dark lane near the River Thames, another equally powerful summons – with the force of ‘an electric shock’ – had already been recorded.
We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal’s intercommuncation with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word ‘smell’ for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal at night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of those mysterious fairy calls from out of the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, while as yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recover the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him.
