The Book of Memory Read online

  and representations of such tablets have been found in eighth-century BC

  reliefs from Western Asia.24 They served for memoranda of all sorts –

  ephemeral and occasional writing, like school notes and exercises, sketches

  of compositions, bills and accounts.

  The root Plato uses for ‘‘seal’’ is s¯eme-, which means ‘‘sign’’ or ‘‘a mark by

  which something is known’’; it has several other more restricted meanings

  related to the basic one, like a ‘‘signal’’ as in battle, or a ‘‘badge.’’25 It is

  significant, it seems to me, how emphatic Plato is about the ‘‘sign’’-nature

  of his metaphor, for he repeats the idea three times in three words: the

  phrase translated ‘‘as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring’’ is in

  Greek ‘‘ho¯sper daktylion s¯emeia ens¯emainomenous.’’ So the ‘‘seal in wax’’ is

  basically a model of inscription or incising, as writing is incised upon a clay

  or wax or stone surface. Moreover, the forms incised symbolize informa-

  tion and thus are representations that serve a cognitive purpose, as do the

  representations of words, whether by phoneme or syllable or unit of sense,

  used in writing systems. In other words, to borrow some terms from the

  cognitive psychologists, the ‘‘representation’’ in memory is ‘‘verbal’’ rather

  than ‘‘pictorial’’ in nature.

  The underlying implication of the metaphor of the seal in wax receives

  one of its fullest expressions in Cicero’s De oratore, one of the major

  vehicles through which the image came to later writers like Quintilian,

  St. Augustine, Martianus Capella, and others. Later still, writers of the

  scholastic Middle Ages found it anew in the Rhetorica ad Herennium,

  ascribed by them to Cicero, and in the Latin translations and commen-

  taries on Aristotle’s De memoria that became available during the thirteenth

  century.

  In Book II of De oratore, Antonius discusses with his friends the value of

  memory training. He recounts how Simonides first discovered the princi-

  ples of the mnemonic technique of placing images (imagines) in an orderly

  set of architectural backgrounds (loci) in his memory because one day he

  had just left a banquet hall when the roof collapsed on it, killing all who

  were still there. He was able to reconstruct the guest list by recalling the

  location of each person’s seat (sedes) at the table. Antonius goes on to say

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  The Book of Memory

  that sight is the keenest of all our senses (sensus vivendi).26 Therefore,

  perception received orally or by the other senses, or objects conceived

  through thought alone, ‘‘can be most easily retained in the mind if they

  are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes.’’ Of course,

  many things and events are of such a nature that we either have not seen or

  cannot see what we wish to remember. In these cases, we should make them

  visible by marking them with a sort of image or figure (quasi et imago et

  figura).

  These mental images, the ancients say, are sort of figures and similitudes.

  The qualification is crucially important, for reasons well defined in modern

  philosophical discussions of the nature of mental images. Following sug-

  gestions of Wittgenstein, J. T. E. Richardson defines the representational

  aspect of mental images functionally rather than mimetically. What defines

  a mental image is not its pictorial qualities but whether its user understands

  it to represent a certain thing. As J. A. Fodor has written of this same

  subject, if asked to make a picture of a tiger I can paint a realistic portrait or

  I can draw a stick figure, but in both cases I understand the result to

  represent a tiger. ‘‘My images . . . connect with my intentions . . . I take

  them as tiger-pictures for the purposes of whatever task I have in mind.’’27

  The mental image which an individual makes need have little to do with

  objective reality. Donald Norman reports on experiments with mental

  imaging which he has conducted, and notes that most people, when

  asked what city in North America is most directly across the Atlantic

  Ocean from Madrid, Spain, construct a mental map on which most of

  them say they ‘‘see’’ that Madrid is somewhere south of Washington, DC –

  Richmond, Virginia, or perhaps Cape Hatteras. In like manner, most place

  London on a line with Boston, and Paris with New York. A glance at a map

  shows that this mental image is clearly wrong as an accurate representation

  of the latitudinal relationship of these cities.28 For my part, I cling to my

  ‘‘wrong’’ images no matter how often I am corrected, because the image

  functions cognitively for me not as a terrestrial map but as a cultural one.

  I know that Madrid is ‘‘south’’ in Europe, and so I place it ‘‘south’’ in the

  United States. Paris, London, and New York (lined up in a row in my

  mental image) are aligned because they are all three cultural capitals. Given

  its cognitive function for me, my cultural map is perfectly ‘‘correct,’’ and

  I am right not to change it.

  A functional definition understands the words ‘‘representation’’ and

  ‘‘image’’ in ways that I think are essentially compatible with ancient under-

  standing embodied in words like s¯eme- and its derivatives, and in the

  subsequent, continuous development of the metaphor of mental image

  Models for the memory

  27

  as writing. The likeness between the two terms of the metaphor is one of

  cognition (as a word ‘‘represents’’ a concept) rather than the replication of

  form. The structures which memory stores are not actual little pictures, but

  are quasi-pictures, ‘‘representations’’ in the sense that the information

  stored causes a change in the brain that encodes (the modern word) or

  molds (the ancient one) it in a certain way and in a particular ‘‘place’’ in the

  brain. This ‘‘sort-of’’ image is then used as the basis for thought by a process

  (intellection) which understands it to be a configuration standing in a

  certain relationship to something else – a ‘‘representation’’ in the cogni-

  tively functional sense, as writing represents language.

  Such a distinction between objective and functional representation

  probably lies behind Aristotle’s analysis, in 450b 11–20 of De memoria, of

  how a memory-image, which is ‘‘like an imprint or drawing in us,’’ can also

  cause us to remember ‘‘what is not present.’’ He likens the memory-

  drawing to a painted panel: ‘‘the figure drawn on a panel is both a figure

  and a copy . . . And one can contemplate it both as a figure [zo¯on] and as a

  copy [eiko¯n].’’ As a figure or picture it is ‘‘an object of contemplation

  [th¯eor¯ema] or an image [phantasma]. But, in so far as it is of another

  thing, it is a sort of copy [oion eikon] and a reminder [mn¯emoneuma].’’29

  If, for example, there should pop into my mind a delightful composition of

  the letters and numbers ‘‘Psalms 23:1,’’ I may regard it simply as a picture

  that I can think about for its own sake. But if this ‘‘picture’’ also reminds m
e

  of the words, ‘‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,’’ then it is a signal

  or cue for remembering, and it ‘‘stands for’’ those words as a ‘‘sort-of copy’’

  of them.

  The distinction between ‘‘figure’’ and ‘‘copy’’ continued to be emphasized

  in both Arabic and scholastic comment upon Aristotle’s text. Avicenna and

  Averroe¨s address it as the distinction between regarding an image as a

  picture or as a portrait. What is involved in remembering is the association

  and recollection of previously impressed material when the original is no

  longer present to us. If the object should become actually present to our

  senses again and we can compare our mental image to it for accuracy, we are

  engaged in a process of recognizing rather than of remembering or recollect-

  ing. We might, in such a situation, be momentarily embarrassed that our

  mental stick-figure bore so little resemblance to the actual lineaments of the

  tiger we see before us. At such a moment, we are regarding our mental image

  as a ‘‘picture,’ to be judged as good or bad according to whether it presents a

  recognizable likeness of the original we see. As portrait, however, the mental

  image calls to mind someone who, by definition, is not present; its function

  in such circumstances is to remind or recollect to us its original. As picture,

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  The Book of Memory

  the formal characteristics of the image itself are all-important; as portrait, its

  recollective or heuristic function is paramount to everything else.30

  The distinction which philosophers of language are now making

  between ‘‘formal’’ and ‘‘functional’’ views of linguistic representation is

  useful also as a modern restatement of the ancient distinction between

  ‘‘philosophical’’ and ‘‘rhetorical’’ concerns. 31 The extreme idealist or for-

  malist thinks of language in terms of how completely it represents the tiger,

  and since it can never fully get that right, would rather lapse into silence

  than speak. The rhetorician or pragmatist, having to speak, accepts that

  words are all more or less in the nature of crude stick-figures, but can be

  used meaningfully so long as speaker and audience share a common

  cultural and civic bond, whether that of civitas Romana or civitas Dei, a

  bond forged by the memories of people and their texts. Where classical and

  medieval rhetorical pragmatism diverges from modern, I think, is in

  assigning a crucial role to a notion of common memory, accessed by an

  individual through education, which acts to ‘‘complete’’ uninformed indi-

  vidual experience. This notion is basic to Aristotle’s view of politics as the

  life of the individual completed in society. Such assumptions put the civic

  bond on a historically continuous basis, and make the notion of shared

  meaning less arbitrary and merely occasional than most modern ‘‘func-

  tional’’ theories of language tend to do.

  If we, in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, unpack the metaphor incorporated in

  the scholastic dictum ‘‘veritas est adaequatio verbi et rei,’’32 we find that it

  embodies what is basically a rhetorical view of the representational relation-

  ship between word and thing (and we must always remember that the Latin

  word res is not confined to objects of our senses but includes notions,

  opinions, and feelings) – that is, a view based on the principle of deco-

  rum. 33 Adaequatio is a word of relationship, ‘‘adjustment,’’ ‘‘fitting’’ a word

  to what one wants to say. The prefix is crucial to its meaning, not a dead

  metaphor. Aequatio and its adjective, aequalis, convey the notion of iter-

  ation, ‘‘equal,’’ identity of a formal, quantifiable sort. But in this dictum,

  truth contained in words is always ad-aequatio, getting towards identity but

  never achieving it. Although adaequatio is sometimes applied even by

  medieval logicians to the sorts of mathematical identities one derives

  from truth-tables, that is a specialized use of the word which ignores its

  root metaphor. Aequatio conceptually admits only of true or false; adae-

  quatio, being a matter of relationship and not identity, admits of many

  grades and degrees of approximation. Aequalitas is an absolute and neces-

  sary state of affairs; adaequatio, being a matter of more-or-less, requires

  human judgment. Adaequatio is a likeness between two non-identities,

  Models for the memory

  29

  and it thus has more in common with a metaphor or a heuristic use of

  modelling than with an equal sign. 34

  Partialness is also a characteristic of memory. This is true not only

  because memory and recollection proceed by means of imagines rerum

  rather than the things-themselves, but because a part of the original

  experience is inevitably lost or ‘‘forgotten’’ when the memory impresses

  the imago of a res. This position is common to both Aristotelians and

  Platonists, those who believe the mind stores and makes use only of

  phantasmata derived from the sensory mediation of ‘‘objects,’’ and those

  who believe the memory also has been truly stamped by divine Ideas, which

  humans have ‘‘forgotten’’ because of original sin or simply in the act of

  birth. Albertus Magnus writes that since recollection is of past experience,

  there is a ‘‘break’’ between the original action of memory that impresses the

  sensory image and its recollection. This break means that the original

  experience itself is lost, wholly or in part. Recollection thus becomes a

  reconstructive act, analogous to reading letters that ‘‘stand for’’ sounds

  (voces) that ‘‘represent’’ things in a more-or-less adequate, fitting way.35

  This is also to say that human understanding occurs in an occasional

  setting; it is not universally and eternally fixed. By their very nature signs

  are sensible, practical, worldly, belong to the traditional realm of rhetoric

  and must be understood within its procedures, most particularly the

  process of decorum, of fitting a word to a thing in terms that an audience

  will understand. 36

  Without getting too far into the intricacies of medieval signification

  theory, upon which much excellent work has been done, 37 I would stress

  that the assumption behind all the theory is that signs can be meaningfully

  judged and interpreted. Because it recalls signs, reminiscence is an act of

  interpretation, inference, investigation, and reconstruction, an act like

  reading. But in pre-modern thought, signs only have meaning as they

  refer to something else. A pre-modern memory phantasm is not a picture

  of what it represents, but neither is it ‘‘language,’’ as modern philosophers

  use this term, for it has no inherent ‘‘grammar,’’ no necessary structure of its

  own. 38 The task of the recollector who is composing (and, as we will see,

  recollection is commonly described as an act of composition, a gathering-

  up into a place) is to select the most fitting and adequate words to adapt

  what is in his memory-store to the present occasion. Language is shaped to

  thought, or, as Chaucer wrote, ‘‘The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede’’
/>
  (The Canterbury Tales, I. 742) – cousin, not parent.

  This view of the matter, so characteristically different from our own,

  is well demonstrated in Augustine’s notion of the ‘‘inner word’’ or

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  The Book of Memory

  understanding, ‘‘the word which shines within’’ illuminated by grace, and

  which then must find expression in words ‘‘spoken without’’ in human

  tongues conditioned by particular times and places. Because of its very

  nature, the relationship between the inner truth and its human expression

  in language will be inexact, unequal; like the pagan orator, the Christian

  will also have to seek a decorum, a mean or ‘‘adequacy’’ or plane of

  congruence between these two inequivalencies. 39

  Most pre-modern writers thought of knowledge as a collection of truths

  awaiting expression in human languages, and fitted, as appropriate, to

  various occasions. These truths are general but can never, with the excep-

  tion of a limited set of mathematical axioms, be universally or singly

  expressed.40 Ethical truths especially are expressed not singly but ‘‘copi-

  ously.’’ When one examines a typical entry in a medieval florilegium

  one finds not generalized definitions, together with illustrative citations,

  as in a modern dictionary. One finds under a heading such as justicia

  dozens of dicta and often facta or exemplary stories as well, each of which

  is a definition, or, more precisely, a way-of-having-said (dictum) ‘‘justice.’’

  Copiousness, like decorum, is an essential part of a rhetorical understand-

  ing of the nature of human speech; indeed, copiousness and decorum are in

  a relationship analogous to symbiosis. The memory of an orator is like a

  storehouse of inventoried topics that ideally would contain all previous

  ways-of-saying ethical truths like ‘‘justice,’’ ‘‘fortitude,’’ ‘‘temperance,’’

  from which he draws in order to fit words to yet another occasion,

  requiring another way-of-saying. But this storehouse should be thought

  of as a set of bins that are empty when we are born and get filled up with a

  lot of ‘‘coins’’ or ‘‘flowers’’ or ‘‘nectar,’’ whose aggregate is a meaningful if

  only partial ‘‘speaking’’ of ‘‘justice,’’ or whatever. And each ‘‘speaking’’ of