February 10, 2023
As I have admitted in previous newsletters, I have a bad memory, which limits me in any number of ways, both practically and intellectually. I am not speaking in this newsletter of personal memory, whose roots, through our desires and fears, lie deep in the unconscious, but rather of exactly of the opposite: memory of information, of the surface data of experience. There is a saying, “God is in the details,” and if that is true it would definitely explain my lack of divine visitation. The saying is sometimes attributed to Flaubert, but another candidate, interestingly, is the art historian Aby Warburg, founder of the famed Warburg Institute, of which more later. However, there is also a proverbial saying, “The devil is in the details,” so perhaps I should be careful what I wish for. Nonetheless, I have often longed for the kind of naturally good memory that so many of my friends possess. My former wife Stacey can sometimes remember the names of students that I taught years ago when I have forgotten them myself, even though she has never met them. A previous relationship, Margo, also a teacher, memorized the names of her students in a single night, where it takes me two to three weeks, and even then I am usually still hovering over one or two. My friend Dennis can tell you the name of the bass player on a psychedelic rock album from 1967 by a band that only made one album.
My failure to remember things that I need to remember afflicts me not just with frustration but with an uneasy sense of guilt over a moral failing, the feeling that I just do not pay attention, that I evade reality and wander off into escapist fantasies.
I am forced to admit there is some truth to this. In the lingo of Jungian psychological typology, my “inferior function,” the one that is undeveloped and in fact repressed, is sensation, that which registers the data of sensation. Jung sometimes called it the reality function in the sense that it registers what Wallace Stevens calls “things as they are.”
It is true that memory is to some extent responsive to both fear and delight. When I asked Margo how she could memorize students’ names so quickly, she replied that in her previous life, when she moved in wealthy and prestigious circles, it was an anxious social necessity that she remember people’s names when introduced to them at a cocktail party, and the skill transferred over to her later academic career. Whereas in social situations, when introduced, my mind immediately goes blank and sometimes I do not even hear the name, which means I may have to fake it later. On the other hand, Dennis is a walking encyclopedia of information about obscure psychedelic bands out of sheer enthusiasm for the subject, an example of what Maslow calls “love knowledge.” The more deeply we care, the more intensely we see and the more vividly we remember.
There is a certain prestige that sometimes accompanies the ability to carry all kinds of random information in our heads. With a head crammed like a kitchen drawer full of odds and ends, people win at Trivial Pursuit and make money on Jeopardy.
There are some unusually-wired people who can memorize and spit back lists of random numbers and the like, but only fairly naïve people mistake such ability for real erudition. There are more serious uses for factual memory in certain professions: I am always amazed at how much knowledge doctors have at their fingertips. However, the human race has increasingly turned over the task of remembering large amounts of data over to technology. The first form of information technology was writing. In a famous moment in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates quips that the first thing this newfangled invention called writing will do is cause us all to lose our memories. Frances Yates, in her marvelous book The Art of Memory (1966), which has largely prompted this newsletter, points to the next step, the invention of printing:
In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, a scholar, deep in meditation in his study high up in the cathedral, gazes at the first printed book which has come to disturb his collection of manuscripts. Then, opening the window, he gazes at the vast cathedral, silhouetted against the starry sky, crouching like an enormous sphinx in the middle of the town. “Ceci tuera cela,” he says. The printed book will destroy the building….The printed book will make such huge built up memories, crowded with images, unnecessary. (131)
In our time, someone might well point to a computer while looking at a library and say, “This will destroy that.” It could be one of my students, of the kind that says, when I demand that they memorize, “If I want to know something, I’ll look it up on my phone.” Don’t get me wrong, I am deeply grateful for the enormous database to which my little laptop is the portal. The volumes of Northrop Frye’s notebooks that I edited each had something like a thousand endnotes. If I had had to go to a library and rummage blindly in printed volumes for hundreds and hundreds of bits of out-of-the-way information, I would probably be editing them still.
The problem with memorizing random information is precisely its randomness. As I tell my students when I force them to memorize anyway, it is much easier to memorize when you can fit the information into some organizing pattern. The most rudimentary, and least useful, organizing scheme is alphabetical, the organization of the encyclopedia. The idea of the encyclopedia arose out of the development of modern scientific and technologically-based society, with its need to keep track of great swathes of data. Hence the first famous one was the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot in the 18th century, its articles composed by the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Its grandiose aim was to gather together all the knowledge of the world. Two centuries later, when I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, multi-volume encyclopedias became symbols to the middle class of an aspiration to higher knowledge. People really did go to door to door selling them. Although my parents later bought me the Encyclopedia Americana, I began with the Golden Book Encyclopedia for younger readers. Strange little kid that I was, I began reading my way through them from start to finish. I now recognize that this was a bookworm’s way of trying to cope with a family life that was out of control, in an era in which it was not yet fashionable to develop an eating disorder or self-mutilate. I have an indelible personal memory that symbolizes this, of desperately trying to keep my attention on what I was reading in Volume 9, Labor Day to Matches, with its orange cover (each volume was a different color) while my grandmother and other relatives talked intensely with my mother the night in 1960 that they came to take her to Massillon State Hospital to be treated for paranoid schizophrenia. I have kept that one volume all these years, which is why I can be so precise, despite my bad memory.
In the Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov invented a science fictional counterpart of the Encyclopédie, the Encyclopaedia Galactica. The fact that the project of compiling it was a mere ruse, intended as a mere cover for the work of the Foundation in revitalizing the Galactic Empire, may indicate some doubt in Asimov’s mind about the usefulness of such a project, despite the fact that Asimov himself was a polymath who wrote 500 books. If his intentions were not satiric, others’ were. Samuel Delany’s Empire Star (1966) features a group of obsessives working on a similar project, clearly a parody of Asimov’s, whose finish they do not foresee for 600 years. Empire Star is a book about the nature of true knowledge, which is “multiplex,” that is, knowledge of relationships and interconnections rather than isolated facts. Collecting isolated facts as an encyclopedia does is merely “simplex.” (Those with good memories may recall that I wrote about this in an early newsletter). A better known parody is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the series of that name by Douglas Adams. The Guide, though wildly inaccurate and occasionally outright perverse, is said to be better than the Encyclopaedia Galactica in two ways: it is cheaper, and has the invaluable advice “Don’t Panic” on its cover. In fact, encyclopedias have enjoyed a new lease on life in the computer age. The limitation of encyclopedias is that the potentially multiplex interrelationships of their alphabetically arranged articles is only clumsily overcome in a print format by a list of “See also” terms at the end of each entry. When computers turned these into hypertext links, the result was Wikipedia, which, like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, is sometimes wildly inaccurate, but is even cheaper and capable of being put to multiplex uses depending on how it is employed. I for one am grateful to have it, at least as a starting point.
The problem of what is called the knowledge explosion is not how to preserve knowledge but how to make use of it without being overwhelmed by its extensiveness. Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon (1942) is set in a utopia in which the most highly respected social position is that of “encyclopedic synthesist,” the opposite of a specialist. A synthesist, aided by a photographic memory, is able to process vast amounts of information, seeing connections across disciplines, synthesizing human knowledge by seeing it as an interconnected whole. The biologist E.O. Wilson had a very similar idea in Consilience (1998), envisioning the unification not only of the sciences but of science and the humanities. There is an obvious kinship to Northrop Frye’s theory of an “order of words”: not just literature but anything constructed out of language belongs to that order. Needless to say, such theories have generated ideological opposition. To toughminded scientific empiricists, one step away from specialization towards being a “generalist” and you are a mere popularizer, no longer a real scientist. And to many leftist literary and cultural theorists, any kind of cultural unity is sinister, a coercive imposition of the will to power. At any rate, the problem of modern culture is that it remembers too much, and is lost in a labyrinth of information, no longer able to see the forest for the trees.
But most societies, for most of human history, were oral, and for them the problem was different, one of preserving and passing on cultural memory when nothing could be written down. That was the original task of the poet, to remember: there is a reason that Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory,” was the mother of the Muses. Most treatments of the art of memory stress the visual, but I think that may be a one-sidedness produced by a writing culture, for writing spatializes language, turns it into something visible. The stress on “imagery” in modern poetry perhaps results from this. However, language is originally oral and invisible, and in an oral culture memory has to be preserved and recalled through auditory devices, various forms of patterned repetition. Meter is one such device, along with alliteration and assonance. What we call mnemonics are often little poems devised to aid the memory: “Thirty days hath September” and the like. In Homer, the action is intermittently paused by the introduction of an “epic catalogue,” such as the catalogue of ships in Book 2 of the Iliad, which goes on for pages listing how many ships such a leader brought, and how many men were on each ship. In A Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock speaks of the “Homeric encyclopedia”: such lists mattered to the original audience, who traced their ancestry back to the Trojan War generation. But Homer’s catalogues are more or less subordinated to the narrative. In Hesiod, contemporary with Homer but far more primitive in technique, the narrative is subordinated to the catalogues. Hesiod’s Theogony is in fact far more of an encyclopedia than the Iliad or the Odyssey:
Tethys bore whirling Rivers to her mate Ocean: the Nile, Alpheios, and the deep Eddying Eridanus, Strymon; then, Meander, Ister’s lovely-flowing stream, And Phasis, Rhesus, and the silver pools of Achelous and Nessus, Rhodius, Then Haliacmon, Heptaporus, and Granicus, Aesepus, bright Simois, Peneus, Hermus, gentle Caicus Sangarius the great, Parthenius, Ladon, Euenus, and Aldescus; last, She bore Scamander, shining holy stream.
The rest of the page on which this catalogue occurs is taken up with a subsequent catalogue of the names of the fifty Oceanids, also daughters of Oceanus and Tethys, to which the poet adds,
but there are Many others beside them, Oceanids, Three thousand nymphs with shapely ankles, who Are scattered everywhere, over the earth And on deep water, glorious goddesses. There are as many roaring rivers too…. It is hard for mortal man to name their names, But they are known to those who live nearby. (lines 335-92)
We are grateful for being spared the names of the three thousand, however shapely their ankles. At the same time, we wonder what we are reading: is this some kind of mad pedantry? Apparently not: catalogues of water-names were and are a thing. Milton catalogues the names of rivers in his pastoral elegy Lycidas because Edward King, the real subject of the elegy, drowned in the Irish Sea. James Joyce worked the names of a few hundred rivers into the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of Finnegans Wake because the title character is metaphorically the River Liffey that flows through Dublin.
Was this actually useful information to Hesiod’s audience? It depends on what you mean by useful. When I teach Milton, I make my class read a passage from A Suit of Nettles (1958), a wonderful book-length poetic sequence by Canadian poet James Reaney. It is a pastoral sequence, whose characters are talking geese in an Ontario barnyard, one of whom, Valancy, recounts the, ahem, “philosophy of teaching” of his old professor, Strictus, who made his students commit things to memory:
When I was a gosling he taught us to know the most wonderful list of things. You could play games with it; whenever you were bored or miserable what he had taught you was like a marvellous deck of cards in your head that you could shuffle through and turn over into various combinations with endless delight.
When asked for an example of this “reviving curriculum,” Valancy produces this:
Who are the children of the glacier and the earth? Esker and hogsback, drumlin and kame. What are the four elements and the seven colours, The ten forms of fire and the twelve tribes of Israel? The eight winds and the hundred kinds of clouds, All of Jesse’s stem and the various ranks of angels? The Nine Worthies and the Labours of Hercules, The sisters of Emily Brontë and the names of Milton’s wives? The Kings of England and Scotland with their Queens, The names of all those hanged on the trees of law Since this province first cut up trees into gallows. What are the stones that support New Jerusalem’s wall? Jasper and sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, Sard, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, Chrysoprasus, hyacinthine and amethyst.
To which his anti-intellectual respondent replies, “My goodness, how useless so far as the actual living of life is concerned,” adding, “Pah! If they like nothing, then teach them that. The self must be free,” which is more or less equivalent to “If I want to know something, I’ll look it up on my phone.” I will grant such a skeptic that there is no doubt a limit of common sense. In 6th grade, I was faced, in a required course on Ohio History, with the task of memorizing all of Ohio’s 88 counties and writing them in on a map. Why some teacher thought this was a useful assignment is something of a mystery. However, I did it, making only one error because I had mistaken the name of the county seat for the name of the county. I did so by inventing for myself the technique of mnemonics. Ohio’s counties fall into more or less vertical rows, north to south. I memorized the counties in rows by making up a little narrative out of the names in each row. I told you I was a weird little kid. But it worked.
Modern poets who aspire to the epic poet’s task of recording an “encyclopedia” of knowledge essential for those of a given culture come up against the problem of the fragmentation, not just of knowledge but of the cultural values latent in that knowledge. The most ambitious encyclopedic poet of the Modernist era was Ezra Pound, whose Cantos are modeled on Dante’s in the Divine Comedy. But Pound’s epic is as fragmented as Dante’s is magnificently architectonic. It is not just that the Cantos are full of arcane information, but that information is presented as a bricolage of seemingly disparate fragments, so that the reader is faced with the task of seeing their connections. Pound in fact inspired a whole school of creative fragmentation, one of whose members, the Welsh poet David Jones, epitomized his epic, The Anathemata, by saying, “I have made a heap of all that I could find.” Pound’s deeper problem lay in deciding what information was worthy of being memorialized, for, unlike scientific information, cultural information is not neutral but is the vehicle of some ideology. The Cantos are valuable in widening the ethnocentricity of modern poetry, suggesting that, for example, Chinese history might be relevant to an epic vision. Regrettably, however, they also preserve the quack economic theories to which Pound subscribed, along with his reactionary, fascist political values, sadly amalgamated with some truly great poetry.
Between the technological era we are now in and the oral phase in which culture begins intervened a period in which the art of memory shifted its emphasis from melos to opsis, to use the terms from Aristotle’s Poetics borrowed by Frye for his own purposes, from auditory techniques of recall to visual and spatial ones. This is the area covered by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory. Yates was an Honorary Fellow of the Warburg Institute of the University of London, which became famous for its philosophical and interdisciplinary approach to art history. Eminent names associated with the Warburg Institute include Ernest Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, Fritz Saxl, Henri Frankfort, Samuel Courtauld, Ernest Gombrich, an epic catalogue of figures devoted to the study of the imagination as the home of human life. The Art of Memory traces the development of a technique originally devised by Classical rhetoricians as a way for orators to remember long and complex speeches. Greatly simplified, the method had two components, places and images. The rhetorician would first commit to memory some place—a temple or a theatre, for example—with many chambers, compartments, or alcoves. Then he would memorize a succession of images, preferably ones with vivid emotional associations, that corresponded to the parts of his speech. Then he would mentally place the images in the chambers of the physical location. As the speaker moved through his speech, he would be moving from chamber to chamber in his mind, and the image he found in each place would remind him of that component of his speech. With delightful candor, Yates admits that the method sounds as cumbersome and impractical to her as it probably does to most people:
From these concluding words of Cicero on the art of memory we learn that the objection to the classical art which was always raised throughout its subsequent history—and is still raised by everyone who is told of it—was voiced in antiquity. There were inert or lazy or unskilled people in Cicero’s time who took the common sense view, to which, personally, I heartily subscribe—as explained earlier I am a historian only of the art, not a practitioner of it—that all these places and images would only bury under a heap of rubble whatever little one does remember naturally. Cicero is a believer and a defender. He evidently had by nature a fantastically acute visual memory. (35)
In the field of education, there has been a lot of talk about “visual learners” who are disadvantaged by the verbally-based methods of higher education such as the lecture. I have tended to dismiss most of this as an excuse of those who did not want to go to the hard work of listening and focusing, but perhaps there is something to it. Certainly ideas are abstractions from sensory impressions, especially images, and conceptualizing is learned behavior. Children’s books teach through visual imagery, and poetry is “primitive” in the sense of returning to that primal grounding. Nonetheless, I share Yates’s bafflement: the memory theatre seems only to multiply what has to be remembered. Now, in addition to my speech, I have a set of rooms and a set of images to memorize, and in a particular order. The alternative to memory theatre would seem to be the visual method of the outline, whose easily discernable parts correspond to the logical divisions of the subject matter, complete with the subordination of smaller points under major topics. I cast my class notes in outline form so that I can look down and read them at a glance.
By itself, memory theatre would be only an eccentric footnote in the history of culture. But in the Renaissance it became more than that by being taken up and put to new uses. Briefly, it was transformed from a rather gimmicky rhetorical device into a form of imaginative meditation on symbols, a meditation that promised not only a new kind of wisdom, a gnosis or spiritual revelation, but a new kind of power. In short, it became a form of magic, drawing upon the power latent in archetypal symbols. The Art of Memory is the sequel to Yates’s breakthrough book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964).
Giordano Bruno is usually remembered as the man who suffered the fate that Galileo avoided: he was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for refusing to renounce his advocacy of the Copernican system. But it is misleading to regard him solely as a martyr for the cause of science. Bruno was one of the most virtuosic practitioners of the art of memory. For much of his life he wandered across Europe, one step ahead of the Inquisition, giving demonstrations of his extraordinary powers of recall while also arrogantly debating other scholars about the new astronomy. Bruno wrote a half-dozen books on the art of memory, including one dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, whom he met during his stay in England. But Bruno was one of a number of people who transformed the art by infusing it with the mythological imagery of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and the Cabala. Now, contemplating the images was no mere aide de memoire but a means of putting oneself in touch with the ordering and controlling powers of the universe:
It proposed to show how Man, the great Miracle, who could harness the powers of the cosmos with Magia and Cabala as described in Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, might develop magical powers as an orator by speaking from a memory organically affiliated to the proportions of the world harmony. (171)
The practitioner was no longer a mere rhetorician: he was a Magus, a figure who is at once scholar and magician:
Renaissance Hermetic man believes that he has divine powers; he can form a magic memory through which he grasps the world, reflecting the divine macrocosm in the microcosm of his divine mens. The magic of celestial proportion flows from his world memory into the magical words of his oratory and poetry, into the perfect proportion of his art and architecture. Something has happened within his psyche, releasing new powers… (273-74)
To remember now means to establish contact with the powers that order and control reality. The powers are both transcendent and immanent, both “supercelestial” and within the psyche. Frye and Jung call them archetypes, and the syncretistic combination of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and Cabbalism, along with a few other “methods,” including astrology and alchemy, that make up the foundational theory behind Renaissance magical practice are a primary precursor of the Romantic theory of the imagination. The art was a gnosis that promised wisdom, power, and a certain kind of love. It is embodied in Prospero, the white magician in Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, who speaks of his magic as “my art,” implying an identity of magician and artist. Prospero is the precursor of all the Magus figures who use their power and wisdom for good, from Gandalf to Dumbledore to Obi Wan Kenobi. But power corrupts, and the danger of what Jung calls inflation is embodied in Faust, precursor of all who have gone over to the dark side of the Force, from Sauron and Saruman to Voldemort to Darth Vader. It is for this reason that so much modern criticism has been resolutely anti-Romantic.
We are not done with this subject yet. Next week, I want to examine Northrop Frye’s own contribution to the art of memory, the form that he called the anatomy, with its visual metaphor. But I also want to examine the greater system that stands behind not only Anatomy of Criticism but all Frye’s published work, a system that exists only in Frye’s notebooks. All his life, Frye envisioned a magnum opus of eight books that he called the ogdoad, a name for a pantheon of eight gods, each volume designated in the notebooks by a symbolic letter or character. They are his own art of memory, an eightfold or double fourfold way of seeing, of creating and recreating. He never wrote those volumes, yet they are the shaping spirit informing everything he did write. I hope my readers may call upon their art of memory as we take a brief intermission, then return to the memory theatre for the second half of the play.
References
Hesiod. Theogony. In Hesiod and Theognis, translated by Dorothea Wender. Penguin, 1973.
Reaney, James. A Suit of Nettles. Press Porcépic, 1975. Originally published 1958.
Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Penguin, 1966.