The Book of Memory Page 8
‘‘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
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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
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