Unforgettable Memories

For some reason, my most memorable memories are those in which I am getting in trouble. Perhaps the moments I remember most vividly are those in which I was having the most fun J  Seeing as I now live in the very neighborhood I grew up in a mere 15-18 years ago (family graduate housing), I find myself having waves of deja vu quite frequently. I remember these moments with such detail that I can recall the tone changes in my mother’s exhausted voice as she reprehended me on this particular occasion. She had found me trying to start my own ant farm under the sheets of the bottom level of my bunk bed. I was in the living room, unaware of my mother’s whereabouts when I heard her shriek—followed by a loud and irritated “TIIIIIIIIAAA!” She rounded the corner and marched up the hallway entering into the living room. “Follow me young lady,” she managed to spit out as she whirled around, dragging me with her.

We entered my room, which at the time seemed a large enough playground (now I use this room as my office and it does not have nearly the footage I seem to remember). There was a big-bird toy on the ground that, when turned around, could house a book on tape if you removed the flap covering his rear end. Next to my bed stood a white painted desk my father had built for me and next to that my toy chest that had my birthday and name engraved into the wood (a birthday present from my grandfather).

My mother pulled down the sheets to my ruffled bed to expose my newest project: project ant farm. Intermixed with the dried dirt, worm and dandelion there were several ants scattering across my yellow sunflower printed sheets.

The funny thing about this memory is not what I remember, but rather what I don’t. For the life of me I cannot think of how my mother punished me or who had to clean up the mess, but I do remember the details leading up to the farm unveiling. Funny how our brain can selectively recall photos, videos, and short clips from the long documentary stored up there. How does it choose?

Travelers

Chinua Achebe’s profound revulsion to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness gave birth to his short critique titled An Image of Africa; in which Achebe examines the hidden breakdown acclaimed author(s), including Conrad, mistake as prestige works of literature despite the underlying tones of apparent racism. In his short critique Achebe is quoted saying: 

Indeed, travelers can be blind. 

This got me wondering, are we (as travelers of our own memories) blind to the capacity and complexity of our experiences? When we fail to think memorable thoughts are we subjecting our memories to blind coherence? As abstract memory champions of our own musyrooms we must strive to take off the blindfold that passively dismiss knowledge and reclaim our eyeglasses. Maintaining our vision, our memorable thoughts, will acknowledge the first action of reclamation--In every sense returning to an original state of nature: the complete retention of memory.    

Bruno's Mnemonic Wheel

In the first fixed ring the practitioner will assign a mythological or heroic figure to each letter. Bruno provides some examples : A Lycaon; B Deucalion; C Apollo; D Argos ... The letters of the second ring correspond to an action or a scene associated with each figure. The examples provided are: AA Lycaon at a banquet; BB Deucalion and pebbles; CC Apollo and Python; DD Argos and some cattle.Thus rotating the first inner ring operates permutations between the figures and their action. Further permutation occurs when the third wheel is set in motion. It contains attributes or enseignes which can be easily passed from one figure to another. Bruno provides only four examples and leaves the rest to the imagination of his reader. These are : AAA, Lycaon at a banquet with a chain; BBB, Deucalion and pebbles with a headband; CCC, Apollo and Python with a baldric; DDD, Argos and some cattle with a hood. This way the systems makes it possible to create combinations of letters representing words, acronyms or syllables to be remembered by means of animated images mixing the attributes and accustomed actions of familiar mythological figures.

 

BAA: B Deucalion A at a banquet A with a chain
MAD: M Perseus A at a banquet D with a hood
CAD: C Apollo A at a banquet D with a hood
COD: C Apollo O and Proserpina D with a hood  

How did the system work? By magic of course, by being based on the central power station of the … images of the stars, closer to reality than the images of things of the sublunar world, transmitter of the astral forces, the `shadows’ intermediary between the ideal world above the stars and the objects and events in the lower world.’ (The Art of Memory, p. 223)

This kind of memory palace reminds me of the mystery stories I used to read as a young child, the stories in which you could choose to read alternative endings. Memory systems as complex as Bruno's gives the author or memory constructor power over mere chance. I can construct my own Musyroom but after I present the construction to the class does it loose a sense of liberty?

Swerve

I recently picked my Uncle up from the airport. On the ride back to Bozeman he began asking me about my classes, what was interesting, what I was learning ext.. I began to tell him about Joshua Foer and Frances Yates nonfiction book The Art of Memory. My Uncle was fascinated so I continued to tell him about the method of loci, also called the memory palace. I explained how the mnemonic device introduced in ancient Roman rhetorical treatises that rely on memorized spatial relationships to establish order and recollect memorial content. My Uncle shared with me a book he recently read titled THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN by Stephen Greenblatt.

Here is the Google book description: In this book the author transports readers to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion. In this work he has crafted both a work of history and a story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius, a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book, the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age, fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

This book brings in the same themes such as Botticelli and Giordano Bruno- the translation of the ancient book in Swerve reminds me of the translation of a tradition we have focused soly on: the translation of the oral tradition into written tradition. In Chapter XIV, The Art of Memory and Cruno's Italian Dialogues, Yates defines Bruno's idea of the art of memory as inseparable from thought and religion. He continues by saying "the magical view of nature is the philosphy which makes possible the magical power of the imagination to make contact with it, and the art of memory as transormed by Bruno was the instrument for making this contact through the imagination (308)."

This exert from Yates caused me to reflect on the “magical” sense of our musyrooms. The more “magical” our imaginations become the more advanced and prestige our memories become. Memories as an object reflect a time or place stagnant in space. We can manipulate our mind to construct memories that defy nature or the scientific sense of gravity and somehow we can retain this “memory,” this object. Language too can be seen as an object in the sense that when spoken, can be deemed as controversial, communicative and many times outright wrong. Not unlike Bruno’s ideas on heliocentricity, his expedition through the streets and waterways of London often seen in the same light. Was his journey just a memory system in which Bruno remembers vivid imagry as means of a loci.  



Yates Chapter 6

“When discussing the rule that memory loci are to be formed in quiet places he says that the best type of building to use is an unfrequented church. He describes how he goes round the church he has chosen three or four times, committing the places in it to memory. He chooses his first place near the door; the next, five or six feet further in; and so on. As a young man he started with one hundred thousand memorized places, but he has added many more since then. “

Pg. 134 (Yates)

As I began reading, I couldn't help but acknowledge the truth behind solitary study tactics. I sometimes kid myself and try to multi task, whether that be television or radio, yet in the end I have to turn off all distractions in order to solely focus on the task at hand. Even as I was studying for the 51 memorized "things" with music playing softly from my computer, I soon found myself distracted and unable to find memorable loci with the dull roar of Matt and Kim in the background.

However, I wasn’t to focus on the latter half of the Yates' quote. As a young man Peter of Ravenna had memorized how many places? ONE HUNDERED THOUSAND?! How realistic is this?

Yates goes on to say:

“[Peter] can repeat from memory the whole of the canon law, text and gloss (he was a jurist trained at Padua); two hundred speeches or sayings of Cicero; three hundred sayings of the philosophers; twenty thousand legal points.”

I am so impressed. I am struggling with my 500 page LSAT study book/guide and here Mr. Peter of Ravenna is recreating architectural brilliance through mnemonic loci. Last summer I traveled to Europe and made my rounds to several historical landmarks. If you asked me to recall these places (sistine chapel, colosseum ext.) in detail-- I wouldn't be able to without the help of snapped photographs.

However, I was just telling Megan Mother of the Muses, (I think) my memory is improving! I find it takes less time for me to assign loci to events, names or school material. Pretty cool stuff. . .