Memory, p.26
Memory, page 26
During the years eighty-five and eighty-six we spent the summer in Montevideo. In eighty-seven I returned to Fray Bentos. I asked, as was natural, about all my acquaintances and, finally, about the ‘chronometrical’ Funes. I was told he had been thrown by a half-tamed horse on the San Francisco ranch and was left hopelessly paralysed. I remember the sensation of uneasy magic the news produced in me: the only time I had seen him, we were returning from San Francisco on horseback and he was running along a high place; this fact, told me by my cousin Bernardo, had much of the quality of a dream made up of previous elements. I was told he never moved from his cot, with his eyes fixed on the fig tree in the back or on a spider web. In the afternoons, he would let himself be brought out to the window. He carried his pride to the point of acting as if the blow that had felled him were beneficial … Twice I saw him behind the iron grating of the window, which harshly emphasised his condition as a perpetual prisoner: once, motionless, with his eyes closed; another time, again motionless, absorbed in the contemplation of a fragrant sprig of santonica.
Not without a certain vaingloriousness, I had begun at that time my methodical study of Latin. My valise contained the De viris illustribus of Lhomond, Quicherat’s Thesaurus, the commentaries of Julius Caesar and an odd volume of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, which then exceeded (and still exceeds) my moderate virtues as a Latinist. Everything becomes public in a small town; Ireneo, in his house on the outskirts, did not take long to learn of the arrival of these anomalous books. He sent me a flowery and ceremonious letter in which he recalled our encounter, unfortunately brief, ‘on the seventh day of February of the year 1884’, praised the glorious services my uncle Gregorio Haedo, deceased that same year, ‘had rendered to our two nations in the valiant battle of Ituzaingó’ and requested the loan of any one of my volumes, accompanied by a dictionary ‘for the proper intelligence of the original text, for I am as yet ignorant of Latin’. He promised to return them to me in good condition, almost immediately. His handwriting was perfect, very sharply outlined; his orthography, of the type favoured by Andrés Bello: i for y, j for g. At first I naturally feared a joke. My cousins assured me that was not the case, that these were peculiarities of Ireneo. I did not know whether to attribute to insolence, ignorance or stupidity the idea that the arduous Latin tongue should require no other instrument than a dictionary: to disillusion him fully, I sent him the Gradus ad Parnassum of Quicherat and the work by Pliny.
On the fourteenth of February, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires saying I should return immediately, because my father was ‘not at all well’. May God forgive me; the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to communicate to all Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the message and the peremptory adverb, the temptation to dramatise my suffering, affecting a virile stoicism, perhaps distracted me from all possibility of real sorrow. When I packed my valise, I noticed the Gradus and the first volume of the Naturalis historia were missing. The Saturn was sailing the next day, in the morning; that night, after supper, I headed towards Funes’s house. I was astonished to find the evening no less oppressive than the day had been.
At the respectable little house, Funes’s mother opened the door for me.
She told me Ireneo was in the back room and I should not be surprised to find him in the dark, because he knew how to pass the idle hours without lighting the candle. I crossed the tile patio, the little passageway; I reached the second patio. There was a grape arbour; the darkness seemed complete to me. I suddenly heard Ireneo’s high-pitched, mocking voice. His voice was speaking in Latin; his voice (which came from the darkness) was articulating with morose delight a speech or prayer or incantation. The Roman syllables resounded in the earthen patio: my fear took them to be indecipherable, interminable; afterwards, in the enormous dialogue of that night, I learned they formed the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Naturalis historia. The subject of that chapter is memory; the last words were ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum.
Without the slightest change of voice, Ireneo told me to come in. He was on his cot, smoking. It seems to me I did not see his face until dawn: I believe I recall the intermittent glow of his cigarette. The room smelled vaguely of dampness. I sat down; I repeated the story about the telegram and my father’s illness.
I now arrive at the most difficult point in my story. This story (it is well the reader knows it by now) has no other plot than that dialogue which took place half a century ago. I shall not try to reproduce the words, which are now irrecoverable. I prefer to summarize with veracity the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak: I know I am sacrificing the efficacy of my narrative; my readers should imagine for themselves the hesitant periods which overwhelmed me that night.
Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and in Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory recorded in the Naturalis historia: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered the law in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventor of the science of mnemonics; Metrodorus, who practised the art of faithfully repeating what he had heard only once. In obvious good faith, Ireneo was amazed that such cases be considered amazing. He told me that before that rainy afternoon when the blue-grey horse threw him, he had been what all humans are: blind, deaf, addle-brained, absent-minded. (I tried to remind him of his exact perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything. When he fell, he became unconscious; when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories. Somewhat later he learned that he was paralysed. The fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (he felt) that his immobility was a minimum price to pay. Now his perception and his memory were infallible.
We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Río Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: ‘I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world.’ And again: ‘My dreams are like you people’s waking hours.’ And again, towards dawn: ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.’ A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, lozenge – all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. I don’t know how many stars he could see in the sky.
These things he told me; neither then nor later have I ever placed them in doubt. In those days there were no cinemas or phonographs; nevertheless, it is odd and even incredible that no one ever performed an experiment with Funes. The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
Out of the darkness, Funes’s voice went on talking to me.
He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Pérez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated … I tried to explain to him that his rhapsody of incoherent terms was precisely the opposite of a system of numbers. I told him that saying 365 meant saying three hundreds, six tens, five ones, an analysis which is not found in the ‘numbers’ The Negro Timoteo or meat blanket. Funes did not understand me or refused to understand me.
Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible language in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch, would have its own name; Funes once projected an analogous language, but discarded it because it seemed too general to him, too ambiguous. In fact, Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He decided to reduce each of his past days to some seventy thousand memories, which would then be defined by means of ciphers. He was dissuaded from this by two considerations: his awareness that the task was interminable, his awareness that it was useless. He thought that by the hour of his death he would not even have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood.
The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, a useless mental catalogue of all the images of his memory) are senseless, but they betray a certain stammering grandeur. They permit us to glimpse or infer the nature of Funes’s vertiginous world. He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift relates that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, of fatigue. He could note the progress of death, of dampness. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world. Babylon, London and New York have overwhelmed with their ferocious splendour the imaginations of men; no one, in their populous towers or their urgent avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the hapless Ireneo, in his poor South American suburb. It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every moulding in the sharply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.) Towards the east, along a stretch not yet divided into blocks, there were new houses, unknown to Funes. He imagined them to be black, compact, made of homogeneous darkness; in that direction he would turn his face in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, rocked and annihilated by the current.
With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalise, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.
The wary light of dawn entered the earthen patio.
Then I saw the face belonging to the voice that had spoken all night long. Ireneo was nineteen years old; he had been born in 1868; he seemed to me as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the pyramids. I thought that each of my words (that each of my movements) would persist in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying useless gestures.
Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of congestion of the lungs.
FRANCES A. YATES’S discussion in The Art of Memory (1966) of the Theatre Memory System of Robert Fludd (1574–1637)
The chapter on ‘the science of spiritual memorising which is vulgarly called Ars Memoriae’fn2 is introduced by a picture illustrating this science. We see a man with a large ‘eye of imagination’ in the fore part of his head; and beside him five memory loci containing memory images. Five is Fludd’s favourite number for a group of memory places, as will appear later, and the diagram also illustrates his principle of having one main image in a memory room. The main image is an obelisk; the others are the Tower of Babel, Tobias and the Angel, a ship, and the Last Judgement with the damned entering the mouth of Hell – an interesting relic in this very late Renaissance system of the medieval virtue of remembering Hell by the artificial memory. These five images are nowhere explained or referred to in the following text. I do not know whether they are intended to be read allegorically – the obelisk as an Egyptian symbol referring to the ‘inner writing’ of the art which will overcome the confusions of Babel and conduct its user under angelic guidance to religious safety. This may be over-fanciful, and in the absence of any explanation by Fludd it is better to leave them unexplained.
After some of the usual definitions of artificial memory, Fludd devoted a chapter to explaining the distinction which he makes between two different types of art, which he calls respectively the ‘round art [ars rotunda]’, and the ‘square art [ars quadrata]’.
For the complete perfection of the art of memory the fantasy is operated in two ways. The first way is through ideas, which are forms separated from corporeal things, such as spirits, shadows [umbrae], souls and so on, also angels, which we chiefly use in our ars rotunda. We do not use this word ‘ideas’ in the same way that Plato does, who is accustomed to use it of the mind of God, but for anything which is not composed of the four elements, that is to say for things spiritual and simple conceived in the imagination; for example angels, demons, the effigies of stars, the images of gods and goddesses to whom celestial powers are attributed and which partake more of a spiritual than of a corporeal nature; similarly virtues and vices conceived in the imagination and made into shadows, which were also to be held as demons.
The ‘round art’, then, uses magicised or talismanic images, effigies of the stars; ‘statues’ of gods and goddesses animated with celestial influences; images of virtues and vices, as in the old medieval art, but now thought of as containing ‘demonic’ or magical power. Fludd is working at a classification of images into potent and less potent such as was [Giordano] Bruno’s constant preoccupation.
The ‘square art’ uses images of corporeal things, of men, of animals, of inanimate objects. When its images are of men or of animals, these are active, engaged in action of some kind. The ‘square art’ sounds like the ordinary art of memory, using the active images of Ad Herennium and perhaps ‘square’ because using buildings or rooms as places. These two arts, the round and the square, are the only two possible arts of memory, states Fludd.
Memory can only be artificially improved, either by medicaments, or by the operation of the fantasy towards ideas in the round art, or through images of corporeal things in the square art.
The practice of the round art, though it is quite different from the art with the ‘ring of Solomon’ of which Fludd heard rumours at Toulouse (and which must have been blackly magical), demands nevertheless, he says, the assistance of demons (in the sense of daemonic powers not of demons in Hell) or the metaphysical influence of the Holy Spirit. And it is necessary that ‘the fantasy should concur in the metaphysical act’.fn3
Many people, continues Fludd, prefer the square art because it is easier, but the round art is infinitely the superior of the two. For the round art is ‘natural’ using ‘natural’ places and is naturally adapted to the microcosm. Whereas the square art is ‘artificial’ using artificially made up places and images.
Fludd then devotes a whole, fairly long chapter, to a polemic against the use of ‘fictitious places’ in the square art. To understand this we must remind ourselves of the age-long distinction, stemming from Ad Herennium and the other classical sources, between ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’ memory places. ‘Real’ places are real buildings of any kind used for forming places in the normal way in the mnemotechnic. ‘Fictitious’ places are imaginary buildings or imaginary places of any kind which the author of Ad Herennium said might be invented if not enough real places were available. The distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’ places went on for ever in the memory treatises with much elaborate glossing on these themes. Fludd is very much against the use of ‘fictitious’ buildings in the square art. These confuse memory and add to its task. One must always use real places in real buildings. ‘Some who are versed in this art wish to place their square art in palaces fabricated or erected by invention of the imagination; that this opinion is inconvenient we will now briefly explain.’ So opens the chapter against the use of fictitious places in the square art. It is an important chapter for, if true to these strongly held views against fictitious places, the buildings which Fludd will use in his memory system will be ‘real’ buildings.
Having laid down his distinction between the ars rotunda and the ars quadrata and the different kinds of images to be used in each, and having made clear his view that the ars quadrata must always use real buildings, Fludd now arrives at the exposition of his memory system. This is a combination of the round and the square. Based on the round heavens, the zodiac and the spheres of the planets, it uses, in combination with these, buildings which are to be placed in the heavens, buildings containing places with memory images on them which will be, as it were, astrally activated by being organically related to the stars. We have met this kind of thing before. In fact the idea is exactly the same as that in Bruno’s Images, where he used sets of atria or rooms, cubicles, and ‘fields’, crammed with images, and activated by being organically affiliated to his ‘round’ art, the images in which were gods and goddesses to whom celestial influences were attributed. Bruno had also laid down the distinction between what Fludd calls the ‘round’ and the ‘square’ arts in his Seals published in England thirty-six years before Fludd’s work.
