The Book of Memory Read online

  ‘‘justice’’ adds to the common store.

  Thus ‘‘justice’’ has no single or simple meaning, but it is not thereby

  without meaning. It is a principle, a ‘‘starting-point,’’ or a res (which in this

  context might best be translated ‘‘idea’’) one holds within oneself either

  through accrued experience, both individual and common, or through

  some combination of that and indwelling divine grace (to adopt

  Augustine’s notion). This inner res needs to be spoken ‘‘without’’ in

  human language adjusted to occasions throughout time. Such occasional

  speaking will not coincide with or be fully extensive with (for a spatial

  notion is part of the root meaning of Latin aequus) the universal aggregate

  of ‘‘justice’’ that God alone knows, and in that sense it will be partial,

  lacking, and imperfect rather than complete. But, if its expression is

  ‘‘adequate,’’ justice can be usefully, and in that sense truthfully, applied

  Models for the memory

  31

  within a particular human situation. Words used by a wise speaker are the

  means of this application, words drawn from the copious inventory of dicta

  et facta memorabilia in the educated person’s memorial loci.

  The problem of how words ‘‘represent’’ res is related to but not identical

  with the question of what form the mental imagines or phantasmata take in

  the brain. In my next chapter I will discuss at greater length the physio-

  logical process by which such images were thought to be produced; this will

  get us closer still to understanding what they are, though not completely to

  an answer (indeed, the ancients themselves never completely defined their

  nature).41 It is apparent from the metaphors they chose to model the

  processes of memory and perception that the imagines were thought in

  some way to occupy space. They are ‘‘incised’’ or ‘‘stamped’’ into matter,

  they are ‘‘stored’’ and can be recalled or reconstructed by means of memo-

  rial storage. And because each memorial phantasm is in some way physi-

  cally present in the brain, it can be given a particular ‘‘address’’ during the

  process of memory storage, associations that will ‘‘send’’ recollection to it.

  Whatever else the memory-image may be, it is clearly in part material; as

  we shall see, the physical variations of individual brains were thought to be

  crucial to their ‘‘talent’’ for storing and recalling phantasmata.

  This assumption concerning the material, and therefore spatial, nature

  of memory-images also helps to account for why the ancients persistently

  thought of memoria as a kind of eye-dependent reading, a visual process.

  There simply is no classical or Hebrew or medieval tradition regarding an

  ‘‘ear of the mind’’ equivalent to that of the ‘‘eye of the mind.’’ The exception

  is the famous invocation to the monks which opens Benedict’s Rule:

  ‘‘Ausculta, o fili, praecepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui,’’ ‘‘Listen,

  my son, to your master’s precepts and incline the ear of your heart.’’42 The

  image is not a general trope, however, but a specific literary recollection of

  Ps. 44:11, ‘‘Audi, filia, et vide, et inclina aurem tuam,’’ ‘‘Listen, daughter,

  and behold, and incline your ear.’’ The same verse was invoked by Jerome

  at the beginning of a famous letter on virginity (Epist. 22), and so Benedict

  was likely thinking of that association as well. The phrase ‘‘aurem cordis’’

  seems to be his own; perhaps Benedict employed it because the Rule was to

  be read aloud to the monks during collatio, the occasion which combines

  eating, listening, and meditation. Elsewhere in the Rule, Benedict does not

  hesitate to use a meditational aid that is visual and spatial in character, the

  mnemonic trope of Jacob’s ladder, to help recall the stages of humility.

  Memory advice stresses the empirical observation that remembering

  what is aurally received is more difficult for most people than remembering

  what is visual, and the consequent need to secure the one by association

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  The Book of Memory

  with the other. Aural reception, as has often been remarked, is temporal

  not spatial, and yet, Aristotle says, even our ability to judge time-lapses

  depends on a mechanism of visual comparison like that by which we judge

  spatial magnitude. We must construct in our minds, he says, a kind of

  schematic diagram, by means of which we can judge relative durations just

  as we similarly use memory-images to judge relative size.43

  Antonius says in Cicero’s De oratore that we ‘‘employ the localities and

  images respectively as a wax tablet and the letters written on it.’’44 Although

  his subject is an architectural ars memorativa, he yet understood the

  process not as one of viewing a picture or sculpture, but of reading letters.

  Even the most apparently pictorial of mnemonic systems are based on

  principles governing the nature of writing. Most require that the ‘‘picture’’

  relate to the word or concept it marks for recollection via a pun or

  homophony. The earliest Greek memory text we possess, a pre-Socratic

  fragment called Dialexeis, relies upon a sort of visualized homophony in

  its advice about memorizing both words and things.45 Thus to recall the

  name ‘‘Pyrilampes,’’ we should ‘‘place it on’’ (i.e. connect it with) pyr ‘‘fire’’

  and lampein ‘‘to shine.’’ To remember things, we recall a significant figure

  to represent the particular theme; thus, to remember courage we fix it

  with a representation of Aries or Achilles. The connection between what is

  to be remembered and the device used to remember it is fundamentally

  through reading, through sign and not through mimicry. When the

  ancients use the word ‘‘visual’’ to refer to the nature of the phantasm, it is

  the act of reading words that they have in mind. The point is well made by

  John of Salisbury: ‘‘Letters however, that is their shapes [figurae], are in the

  first place signs of words [vocum, literally ‘‘sounds organized into words’’];

  then of things, which they bring to the mind through the windows of the

  eyes, and frequently they speak silently the sayings of those no longer

  present.’’46

  Cicero uses the wax tablet image itself a bit later in Antonius’s speech.

  Metrodorus of Scepsis, a man famous for his memory, said that he wrote

  down things to be remembered in particular places in his mind, as if he

  were writing letters on wax tablets. 47 The contemporaneous Rhetorica ad

  Herennium, which gives us the most detailed description of the ancient

  architectural mnemonic, also contains the fullest elaboration of the meta-

  phor that likens writing on the memory to writing on wax or papyrus:

  those who have learned mnemonics can set in backgrounds what they have heard,

  and from these backgrounds deliver it by memory. For the backgrounds are very

  much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and

  disposition of images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading. 48

  Models for the memory

  33

  Th
e metaphor changes slightly over the centuries to reflect the most

  common form of writing materials, but its tenacity in Western thought

  is remarkable. Martianus Capella, writing in the early fifth century when

  the codex had supplanted the papyrus roll as the vehicle of choice for

  books, advises that ‘‘what is [sent] to memory is written into areas, as if in

  wax and on the written page.’’49 Dante writes of ‘‘the book of my memory.’’

  Nor is the image exclusively Greco-Roman, nor only in rhetorical teaching,

  for there is a variant of it in Proverbs 3:3 (though Proverbs does show

  considerable Greek influence): ‘‘Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind

  them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart.’’50 The

  Hebrew words contain the metaphor, but of course it was the Latin that

  was known to the Middle Ages: describere, ‘‘write upon’’ or ‘‘incise,’’ and

  tabulae, ‘‘wax tablets’’ of the sort used until paper tablets fully supplanted

  them in Europe sometime in the fifteenth century. The appearance of the

  metaphor in Biblical as well as classical tradition (so it would have seemed

  to medieval scholars) would have considerably enhanced its prestige as a

  governing archetype.

  In addition to demonstrating that pre-modern scholars thought of

  remembering as a process of mentally visualizing signs both for sense

  objects and objects of thought, this metaphor also shows that the ancients

  and their medieval heirs thought that each ‘‘bit’’ of knowledge was remem-

  bered in a particular place in the memory, which it occupied as a letter

  occupies space on a writing surface. The words topos, sedes, and locus, used

  in writings on logic and rhetoric as well as on mnemonics, refer funda-

  mentally to locations in the brain, which are made accessible by means of

  an ordering system that functions somewhat like the routing systems used

  by programs to retrieve, merge, and distinguish the information in a

  computer’s ‘‘memory,’’ and also postal addresses or library shelf-marks. 51

  It is Cicero again who makes clear both the physiological nature and

  cognitive function of these words. In Topica, a work he composed from

  memory while on a voyage without his library, he writes:52

  it is easy to find things that are hidden if the hiding place is pointed out and

  marked; similarly if we wish to track down some argument we ought to know the

  places or topics: for that is the name given by Aristotle to the ‘‘regions,’ as it were,

  from which arguments are drawn. Accordingly, we may define a topic as the

  region of an argument, and an argument as a course of reasoning which firmly

  establishes a matter about which there is some doubt. 53

  Aristotle did indeed think of his topoi as structured regions of the

  mind where arguments, either general or subject-particular, were stored.

  He advises students in his Topica (163b, a passage evidently known to

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  The Book of Memory

  Cicero) to memorize these by number, for then they will be able to take a

  quick and sure mental look at them (the verb he uses is blepein) when

  composing their own discourse. Particularly in De memoria, Aristotle

  emphasizes the importance of order for storing the phantasmata in the

  memory, and recommends an alphabet-based mnemotechnique (evidently

  both number and alphabet were known to him as providing useful bases for

  mnemonic heuristics). In a crux that has proved very difficult for a number

  of commentators (partly because of a faulty text), but that has been

  considerably clarified by Richard Sorabji,54 Aristotle describes the advant-

  age of using the order of the alphabet to organize material in the memory.

  If one assigns a separate letter of the alphabet to distinct pieces of informa-

  tion, then one can move from one bit to the next using the rigid order of

  the letters to organize otherwise unrelated material. In recollecting, one can

  start with Alpha, if one wishes. But if one wants to remember something

  further on, one could begin instead at Theta. Or one could begin with Zeta

  and move easily to its ‘‘neighbors,’’ Eta or Epsilon. 55 It is the interior

  orderliness of the places that makes it possible to read what is written in

  the shapes stored in memory.

  Thus far, I have discussed this ancient metaphor of the waxed tablets as

  though its explanation of memory processes were modeled upon a pre-

  viously familiar process of writing on a physical surface. In fact, however,

  both ancient and medieval authors reverse the direction of this metaphor.

  Ancient Greek had no verb meaning ‘‘to read’’ as such: the verb they used,

  anagigno¯sko¯, means ‘‘to know again,’’ ‘‘to recollect.’’ It refers to a memory

  procedure. Similarly, the Latin verb used for ‘‘to read’’ is lego, which means

  literally ‘‘to collect’’ or ‘‘to cull, pluck,’’ referring also to a memory proce-

  dure (the re-collection or gathering up of material).56

  Like reading, writing depends on and helps memory. The shapes of

  letters are memorial cues, direct stimuli to the memory. What is heard as

  well as what is seen is transformed into a mental signal that is ‘‘read’’ by the

  ‘‘eye of the mind.’’ Thus Aeschylus speaks in Prometheus of ‘‘the unforget-

  ting tablets of thy mind,’’ and I have already mentioned the advice in

  Proverbs to ‘‘write upon the table of thy heart.’’ It has been remarkable to

  me, and I will have occasion frequently to recall the phenomenon during

  this study, that none of the texts I have encountered makes the slightest

  distinction in kind between writing on the memory and writing on some

  other surface. Writing itself, the storing of information in symbolic ‘‘rep-

  resentations,’’ is understood to be critical for knowing, but not its support

  (whether internal or external) or the implements with which it is per-

  formed. All these early writers are agreed that writing on the memory is the

  Models for the memory

  35

  only writing truly valuable for one’s education, literary style, reasoning

  ability, moral judgment, and (later) salvation, for in memorizing one writes

  upon a surface one has always with one. And the corollary assumption is

  that what one writes on the memory can be at least as orderly and accessible

  to thought as what is written upon a surface such as wax or parchment.

  At the end of his Phaedrus, Plato gives one of the best statements of this

  assumption in antiquity. Written words, says Socrates, serve only to

  ‘‘remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned with.’’57

  The trouble with a written composition is that it becomes detached from

  its author, and goes off on its own, so to speak, falling into ignorant as well

  as learned hands. The educational value of writing thus depends upon the

  knowledge and quality of the person who reads it, for reading can only

  remind readers of what is already imprinted upon their memories, of what

  they alone ‘‘bring to the text,’’ as we now say. To Socrates, ‘‘living dis-

  course’’ is best; the wise man will write only ‘‘by way of pastime, collecting a
r />   store of refreshment both for his memory . . . and for all such as tread in his

  footsteps.’’58 Two living minds can engage one another, whereas in the

  solitary reading of a written text the mind encounters, he implies, only

  itself. But Socrates allows value to writing as a way of storing experience for

  oneself and posterity (in a phrase which, incidentally, suggests strongly that

  he is thinking of something along the lines of a florilegium).59

  It is in this context that Plato introduces the myth of Theuth (Thoth)

  and Thammuz (called Ammon in some versions). Theuth is the Egyptian

  god who invented calculation, number, geometry, dice – and script. He

  came to the king, Thammuz, to introduce his various arts, most of which

  were well received, but when he extolled writing, Thammuz expressed

  skepticism. Theuth claimed that writing was a ‘‘recipe for memory and

  wisdom.’’ Thammuz replied that it hadn’t anything to do with memory at

  all, but merely with reminding, and was thus clearly wisdom’s semblance

  rather than the real thing. The danger in it was that men might begin to rely

  upon writing instead of truly learning things by imprinting them in

  memory first. 60 Socrates is concerned in the whole Phaedrus with distin-

  guishing between true and apparent happiness, beauty, love, and – in the

  end of the dialogue – rhetoric. Full of finely crafted discourse itself, the

  dialogue is concerned to reveal the falseness of any teaching which suggests

  that rhetoric should be only a matter of knowing tropes, figures, and

  ornaments instead of having a firm conviction of truth and knowledge of

  philosophy as well. In context, Plato is specifically responding to the use of

  textbooks with a ‘‘cookbook’’ approach as a substitute for live teaching. So,

  Thammuz objects to Theuth’s ‘‘recipe’’ for memory by saying that it is a

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  The Book of Memory

  mere gimmick which substitutes an appearance for the substance.

  Textbooks substitute writing ‘‘produced by external characters which are

  not part of [oneself]’’ for writing on the memory. 61

  The ancient observation that what we do in writing is itself a kind of

  memory, suggests an interesting correction to the popular idea that writ-

  ing, defined as the use of an alphabet, and consequently literacy are