This book has started getting really interesting – and so it’s quite hard to keep these notes short. Will do my best.
Metaphors of Memory – Overview
– The general themes of the chapter are: collective and individual memories, how technologies have helped/hindered our memories, and how those technologies give us metaphors with which to try to understand memories.
The Ancient Arts of Memory
– pre-writing, in oral cultures, forgotten meant forgotten forever. As a result, “special people, the elderly, the bards, became the keepers of the common clture, capable of retelling the epic tales which enshrined each society’s origins”
[e.g. Homer’s Iliad was first written down several hundred years after it started being performed]
– Plato and friends were pretty suspicious of the merits of a written culture. Writing was felt to weaken the mind, and turn mental processes into manufactured “things”
– Mnemotechnics, or “memory training” was the discipline that helped people remember things without writing. (Still exists today in those newspaper ads with a “Do you find yourself forgetting things?” byline and a picture of a confused ‘fifties man)”
– According to Cicero, a Greek poet called Simonides discovered the rules of memory circa 470 BC.
“Once Simonides was dining at Krannon in Thessaly at the house of the rice and noble Skopas. He had composed a song in honor of this man and in it he put a lot of typical ornamental material concerning Kastor and Polydeukes. Whereat Skopas ungenerously declared that he would pay Simonides only half the fee they had agreed on for the song: the other half he should get from the gods whom he had praised to that extent. Just then Simonides received a message that two young men were asking for him at the front door on a matter of urgent business. He got up and went out but found no one there. Meanwhile the roof of the room in which Skopas was dining collapsed, kil! ling him and his friends. Now when the kinsfolk of these people wished to bury them, they found it impossible to recognize the remains. But Simonides, it is said, by remembering the exact place where each man had sat at the table, was able to identify them all for burial. From this he discovered that it is order that mainly contributes to memory its light…I am grateful to Simonides of Keos who thus invented (so they say) the art of memory.” [Cicero, De oratore 2.86]
That last bit is the key – placing or ordering things in a memory ‘palace’ allows for better recall.
– Memory palaces, and the mnemotechnician’s approach remained popular til the middle ages. Thomas Aquinas recommended it, the arts of memory became fashionable, the image of a palace was replaced by the image of a theatre, and things started getting all a bit heretical from there.
– Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk, became one of the most famous practitioners of the memory arts. Later burned at the stake for heresy and occultism, Bruno left the Dominican order and wandered throughout Europe, telling the secrets of memory to all he could find. In addition to his consultations to itinerant occultists and magicians, Bruno published from 1581 to 1591 a series of books including The Shadows of Ideas.
Links:
Simonides of Ceos – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simonides_of_Ceos
Giordano Bruno – http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
Good book on memory and Bruno – The Art of Memory by Francis Yates