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.