Memory, p.16
Memory, page 16
The idea of the ‘art of memory’ recurs in all sorts of forms and contexts. The possession of a good memory has always been regarded as a desirable attribute. Almost every biography of a great man lays emphasis on his unusual powers of memory. It is no wonder, therefore, that the cultivation and improvement of the memory has been a preoccupation throughout history. How early this preoccupation started is not known, almost certainly long before there is any recorded evidence of it. The first man who is known to have discovered a method of impressing facts on the memory is a poet, Simonides of Ceos (c.556–468 BC). An entry in the Parian Chronicle (c.264 BC) describes him as ‘the inventor of the system of memory aids’; but it is highly unlikely that he was in fact the first to discover his system. It was here that we particularly regretted our inability to look at, for example, early Chinese or Sanskrit literature for similar records. The accidental circumstances in which Simonides developed the methods which were to make him famous and become so influential in the classical and mediaeval periods are told by Cicero in his treatise, De Oratore, and the context in which he tells the story indicates why the discovery was to be so assiduously cultivated by Simonides’ successors. Orators, lawyers, politicians, anyone who was expected to be able to speak at length on subjects of considerable complexity and sophistication without the assistance of notes or any other visual aids, desperately needed some sort of system which would enable them to carry the points of their argument clearly in their heads. Simonides’ idea of inventing a series of easily-remembered places or loci and then placing the points to be remembered in them (so that a speaker, by walking round a house or a room in his head, could retrieve the points of his argument in order from the lobby, the hall, the coat-rack, etc.) provided it. The anonymous Roman, of the same period as Cicero, who addressed a textbook on rhetoric to an equally unknown Herennius, elaborated the system still further, and his work provided the foundation on which mediaeval (and indeed later) writers were to build. Their further development of it, mostly in monasteries where philosophical and patristic tomes were being produced without the benefit of copyright libraries or the internet, appears to carry the system into the realms of fantasy. The treatise on the artificial memory of Thomas Bradwardine, the fourteenth-century theologian and mathematician known as the Profound Doctor, may raise a smile today; the point is that the system worked and, indeed, for many people is still working.
The best indication that Simonides may only be the first recorded practitioner of the artificial memory and not its true begetter is the consideration of how many people since the Middle Ages have worked out the system for themselves without the benefit of their classical or mediaeval predecessors. Frances Yates, in The Art of Memory, tells the story of a professor whose favourite parlour game was to ask each of his students to name an object, and later astonish them by repeating the list in the right order, simply by placing the objects, as they were named, on the windowsill, on the desk, in the waste-paper basket. He had never heard of the classical mnemonic, she says, but had discovered the technique quite independently, as did A.R. Luria’s famous patient, S., as have done many others down to the present day. Yates goes on to describe how, during the Renaissance, the original simple system was further developed and refined in the hands of scholars like Giulio Camillo, Giordano Bruno and Robert Fludd into a series of magical and occult memory theatres of extraordinary complexity. The painter and sculptor, Anselm Kiefer, has carried the system one step further in the late twentieth century, in using it to construct a kind of symbolic memory theatre of German icons and images from German history, and especially from the Second World War.
There are, of course, a large number of pieces which have no other justification for being there than the fact that they caught our imagination and we could not bear to exclude them. Most of our choices, in the last analysis, were personal choices. Our best hope was to suggest some of the aspects and angles from which the subject could be approached. But there was the discipline of space. We have been obliged to sacrifice many pieces that we would have liked to include and we have been obliged to cut rigorously even those which we have included. The editorial knife is red with the blood of Plato, Augustine, Freud, Proust and others. On some occasions we have been obliged to make a different kind of choice. It is right that writers and publishers should receive some kind of return for use of the work which they have brought into print, but editors of anthologies work to tight budgets. This is a suitable place to record our deep gratitude to many publishers and copyright holders who have generously reduced or waived their normal charges to enable us to include extracts to which we attached importance. But not all have been so understanding. The chapter on public memory would have looked very different if we had not had at the last moment to withdraw from it an extract from E.H. Gombrich’s life of Aby Warburg on Warburg’s ideas about inherited memory. This we regretted; but the charge demanded for it was exorbitant.
We spent much time deciding how the material should be arranged. Not the least of the challenges was the fact that almost everything could be placed in more than one category. St Augustine would fit as well into ‘Memory and Imagination’ as into ‘The Idea of Memory’; Freud’s search for his mother in the wardrobe would be as suitable for ‘Memory and Science’ as for ‘Childhood Memories’. Edwin Muir, who started in ‘Childhood Memories’, ended up much more appropriately in ‘Memory and Imagination’ but either would have done. The different chapters do not represent hard-and-fast categories; the material of one flows naturally into another.
The fundamental importance of memory is admirably described by Antonio Damasio in his Looking for Spinoza: ‘What we do not know cannot hurt us. If we had the gift of consciousness but were largely deprived of memory, there would be no remarkable anguish either. What we do know, in the present, but are unable to place in the context of our personal history could only hurt us in the present. It is the two gifts combined, consciousness and memory, along with their abundance, that result in the human drama and confer upon that drama a tragic status, then and now. Fortunately, the same two gifts also are at the source of unbounded enjoyment, sheer human glory.’
Annotations. Footnotes from the original extracts are indicated by numbers: editorial footnotes by symbols.
Childhood Memories
From WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest I. ii
Prospero: Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell?
I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not
Out three years.
Miranda: Certainly, sir, I can.
Prospero: By what? by any other house or person?
Of any thing the image tell me that
Hath kept with thy remembrance.
Miranda: ’Tis far off,
And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants. Had I not
Four or five women once that tended me?
Prospero: Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it
That this lives in thy mind? What see’st thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?
If thou rememb’rest aught ere thou camest here,
How thou camest here thou mayst.
Miranda: But that I do not.
From THOMAS DE QUINCEY, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822)
The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them; for, if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But, placed as they were before me in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine that, having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the assistance which reached her at the last critical moment, she saw in a moment her whole life, clothed in its forgotten incidents, arrayed before her as in a mirror, not successively, but simultaneously; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part. This, from some opium experiences, I can believe; I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which probably is true – viz. that the dread book of account which the Scriptures speak of is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind. Accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil. But alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed whenever the obscuring daylight itself shall have withdrawn.
THOMAS HOOD, ‘I remember, I remember’ (1826)
I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!
I remember, I remember
The roses, red and white,
The violets, and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday, –
The tree is living yet!
I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow!
I remember, I remember
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy.
JOHN CLARE, ‘Remembrances’ (1832)
Summer pleasures they are gone like to visions every one
And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on
I tried to call them back but unbidden they are gone
Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away
Dear heart and can it be that such raptures meet decay
I thought them all eternal when by Langley Bush I lay
I thought them joys eternal when I used to shout and play
On its bank at ‘clink and bandy’ ‘chock’ and ‘taw’ and ducking stone
Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own
Like a ruin of the past all alone
When I used to lie and sing by old eastwells boiling spring
When I used to tie the willow boughs together for a ‘swing’
And fish with crooked pins and thread and never catch a thing
With heart just like a feather – now as heavy as a stone
When beneath old lea close oak I the bottom branches broke
To make our harvest cart like so many working folk
And then to cut a straw at the brook to have a soak
O I never dreamed of parting or that trouble had a sting
Or that pleasures like a flock of birds would ever take to wing
Leaving nothing but a little naked spring
When jumping time away on old cross berry way
And eating awes like sugar plumbs ere they had lost the may
And skipping like a leveret before the peep of day
On the rolly polly up and downs of pleasant swordy well
When in round oaks narrow lane as the south got black again
We sought the hollow ash that was shelter from the rain
With our pockets full of peas we had stolen from the grain
How delicious was the dinner time on such a showry day
O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away
The ancient pulpit trees and the play
When for school oer ‘little field’ with its brook and wooden brig
Where I swaggered like a man though I was not half so big
While I held my little plough though twas but a willow twig
And drove my team along made of nothing but a name
‘Gee hep’ and ‘hoit’ and ‘woi’ – O I never call to mind
These pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind
While I see the little mouldywharps hang sweeing to the wind
On the only aged willow that in all the field remains
And nature hides her face where theyre sweeing in their chains
And in a silent murmuring complains
Here was commons for the hills where they seek for freedom still
Though every commons gone and though traps are set to kill
The little homeless miners – O it turns my bosom chill
When I think of old ‘sneap green’ puddocks nook and hilly snow
Where bramble bushes grew and the daisy gemmed in dew
And the hills of silken grass like to cushions to the view
When we threw the pissmire crumbs when we’s nothing else to do
All leveled like a desert by the never weary plough
All vanished like the sun where that cloud is passing now
All settled here for ever on its brow
I never thought that joys would run away from boys
Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys
But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys
To petrify first feelings like the fable into stone
Till I found the pleasure past and a winter come at last
Then the fields were sudden bare and the sky got overcast
And boyhoods pleasing haunts like a blossom in the blast
Was shrivelled to a withered weed and trampled down and done
Till vanished was the morning spring and set that summer sun
And winter fought her battle strife and won
By Langley bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill
On cowper green I stray tis a desert strange and chill
And spreading lea close oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self interest fell a prey
And cross berry way and old round oaks narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again
Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors – though the brook is running still
It runs a naked brook cold and chill
O had I known as then joy had left the paths of men
I had watched her night and day besure and never slept agen
And when she turned to go O I’d caught her mantle then
And wooed her like a lover by my lonely side to stay
Aye knelt and worshipped on as love in beautys bower
And clung upon her smiles as a bee upon her flower
And gave her heart my poesys all cropt in a sunny hour
As keepsakes and pledges to fade away
But love never heeded to treasure up the may
So it went the comon road with decay
SAMUEL BUTLER, Note Books, ‘Henry Hoare’s Torn Finger-Nail’ (1878)
When Hoare was a young man of about five-and-twenty, he one day tore the quick of his finger-nail – I mean, he separated the fleshy part of the finger from the nail – and this reminded him that many years previously while quite a child he had done the same thing. Thereon he fell to thinking of that time, which was impressed upon his memory partly because there was a great disturbance in the house about a missing five-pound note, and partly because it was while he had the scarlet fever.
Having nothing to do he followed the train of thought aroused by his torn finger, and asked himself how he tore it. After a while it came back to him that he had been lying ill in bed as a child of about seven years old at the house of an aunt who lived in Hertfordshire. His arms often hung out of the bed and as his hands wandered over the wooden frame of the bed he felt that there was a place where a nut had come out so that he could stuff his fingers in; one day, in trying to stuff a piece of paper into this hole, he stuffed it so far and so tightly that he tore the quick of his nail. The whole thing came back so vividly, though he had not thought of it for twenty years, that he could see the room in his aunt’s house, and remembered how his aunt used to sit by his bedside writing at a little table from which he had got the piece of paper which he had stuffed into the hole.
So far so good; but then there flashed upon him an idea that was not so pleasant. I mean it came upon him with irresistible force that the piece of paper he had stuffed into the hole in the bedstead was the missing five-pound note about which there had been so much disturbance. At that time he was so young that a five-pound note was to him only a piece of paper; when he heard that five pounds were missing he had thought it was five sovereigns; or perhaps he was too ill to know anything, or to be questioned. I forget what I was told about this – at any rate he had no idea of the value of the piece of paper he was stuffing into the hole but now that the matter had recurred to him at all he felt so sure it was the note that he immediately went down to Hertfordshire where his aunt was still living, and asked to the surprise of every one to be allowed to wash his hands in the room he had occupied as a child. He was told there were friends staying with them who had the room at present, but, on his saying he had a reason, and particularly begging to be allowed to remain alone a little while in this room, he was taken upstairs and left there.
