The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  gets into the brain is a single process resulting in the production of a

  phantasm that can be seen and scanned by ‘‘the eye of the mind.’’ This sort

  of language is constant and pervasive in writings on the subject from

  earliest times. Albertus Magnus, for instance, writes that Isaiah’s visionary

  experience ‘‘was not secured enough from hearing, but by seeing it was

  firmed up.’’ And he quotes Horace to the effect that ‘‘things intrusted to the

  ear / Impress our minds less vividly than what is exposed / To our trust-

  worthy eyes.’’10

  A major source of confusion for proponents of the opinion that a

  ‘‘literate consciousness’’ replaced an earlier oral one lies in their frequent

  failure to distinguish this very matter, the generic cause from the physio-

  logical cause (if I may, on the verge of an Aristotelian analysis, freely adapt

  some Aristotelian categories). In discussing the acts of memory, we can

  be concerned with three quite separate matters: first, what is the actual

  20

  The Book of Memory

  origin of information entering the brain; second, how is that information

  encoded, and is it in a way that physically affects our brain tissue; and third,

  how is its recollection best stimulated and secured, or what kind of

  heuristic devices are necessary for us to find it again once it has been

  stored? According to the Greek tradition, all perceptions, however pre-

  sented to the mind, are encoded as phantasmata, ‘‘representations’’ or a

  ‘‘kind of eiko¯n.’’11 Because they are themselves ‘‘sort-of pictures,’’ these

  representations were thought to be best retained for recollection by mark-

  ing them in an order that was readable, a process the ancients thought to be

  most like the act of seeing.

  Evidently, at least in the context of this metaphor, reading was consid-

  ered to be essentially a visual act, despite the fact that most ordinary social

  reading, at least, was done aloud by someone to a group of listeners,

  throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, and well into modernity.

  Nonetheless, as they understood the process, whatever enters the mind

  changes into a ‘‘see-able’’ form for storing in memory. Jerome describes it

  well and typically in his commentary on Ezekiel 40:4 (‘‘And the man said

  unto me, Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and

  set thine heart upon all that I shall shew thee; for to the intent that I might

  shew them unto thee art thou brought hither’’). ‘‘Nothing,’’ Jerome writes,

  ‘‘that you have seen or heard is useful, however, unless you deposit what

  you should see and hear in the treasury of your memory. When indeed he

  says, all that I shall shew thee, he makes his listener attentive, and also makes

  matters prepared for the eyes of his heart, so that he may hold in memory

  those things shown to him, for to the intent that I might shew them unto thee

  art thou brought hither.’’12

  Material presented acoustically is turned into visual form so frequently

  and persistently, even when the subject is sound itself, that the phenom-

  enon amounts to a recognizable trope. Guido d’Arezzo, the eleventh-

  century Benedictine music master whose annotation schemes profoundly

  influenced the writing of music, likens the values of the gamut to the letters

  of the alphabet – one writes with each: ‘‘Just as in all writing there are four-

  and- twenty letters, so in all melody we have seven notes.’’13 A note is a cue

  recalling a vox or sound, as is a written letter. In his Teseida, Boccaccio

  describes how Palemone’s prayer to Venus takes on human shape as his

  words rise up. This ‘‘shape’’ walks around the gardens and temple of Venus,

  and petitions the goddess, while the speaker himself remains corporeally

  below (Bk. 7, 50–69). And in Chaucer’s The House of Fame, gossip-spread

  tales pass through the House of Rumor until, acquiring a feathered body,

  they creep through a window and fly away (HF III, 2081–2087).

  Models for the memory

  21

  One should distinguish very carefully between ‘‘pictorial’’ and ‘‘visual.’ 14

  Memories could be marked by pictorial means; the ancient system

  described in Rhetorica ad Herennium was precisely that. But pictures are

  not the only sorts of objects we can see. We also see written words and

  numbers, punctuation marks, and blotches of color; if we read music, we

  hear it seen in notes on the staff; if we play the piano ‘‘by ear,’ we also see the

  music in the position of our fingers on the keys. Moreover, we can

  manipulate such information in ways that make it possible to bring it

  together or separate it in a variety of ways, to collate, classify, compose,

  and sort it in order to create new ideas or deconstruct old ones. In likening

  the notes of music to the letters of the alphabet, Guido d’Arezzo used a

  common trope of music theory. It always expresses admiration for how an

  abundance of material can be generated from a very few items. In other

  words, the trope articulates processes of recollection whose goals are to

  invent and compose in the present – not to reproduce a record of past

  events. This is a crucial distinction.

  One accomplishment which seems always to have been greatly admired

  by both ancient and medieval writers was the ability to recite a text back-

  wards as well as forwards, or to skip around in it in a systematic way,

  without becoming lost or confused. The ability to do this marked the

  difference between merely being able to imitate something (to reproduce it

  by rote) and really knowing it, being able to recall it in various ways. Such

  reports are common enough throughout the period of my study. For

  example, Augustine describes a school friend named Simplicius:

  an excellent man of remarkable memory, who, when he might be asked by us for

  all the next-to-last verses in each book of Virgil, responded in order quickly and

  from memory. If we then asked him to recite the verse before each of those, he did.

  And we believed that he could recite Virgil backwards. If we desired a common-

  place concerning any topic, we asked him to make one and he did. If we wanted

  even prose passages from whatever of Cicero’s orations he had committed

  to memory, that also he could do; he followed in order however many divisions

  (versus) we wanted, backwards and forwards. When we wondered (about his

  abilities), he testified that he had not known God could do this before this

  proof from his experience. 15

  Notice that what is unusual to Augustine is not that Simplicius knew all

  of Virgil and much of Cicero, nor that he could manipulate these texts, but

  the degree to which he could do so – pulling single verses of Virgil out of

  context, composing commonplaces on any topic, running extensively

  backwards as well as forwards through various lengthy texts. The proof

  of a good memory lies not in the simple retention and regurgitation even of

  22

  The Book of Memory

  large amounts of material. Rather, it is the ability to move it about

  instantly, directly, and securely that is admired.<
br />
  To produce this facility, memory must be trained as though it were a

  kind of calculative ability, manipulating letters, bits of texts, and common-

  places in addition to numbers. Such manipulation can only be accom-

  plished if the materials can in some sense be internally read. Try the

  following two exercises. First, recite from memory the first verse of

  Psalm 23 (‘‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want’’) in normal order,

  and then backwards word by word. Next, whistle a short phrase from

  ‘‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’’ in normal order, and then backwards note by

  note. It is possible to scan both the words and the musical phrase back-

  wards, but the music must be rendered in a form that makes the relations of

  pitch able to be read in a way similar mentally to reading the words

  backwards. For instance, if one assigns the pitches of the first phrase to

  the three joints of one finger, one will find that one is as easily able to

  perform the musical exercise as the recitational one. This is the principle of

  the so-called ‘‘Guidonian hand,’’ associated with Guido d’Arezzo (though

  probably older), in which the tones of the gamut are assigned to various

  locations on the left hand. Drawings of it appear in many musical texts

  through the late Renaissance.16 Visual coding, like writing, allows the

  memory to be organized securely for accurate recollection of a sort

  that permits not just reduplication of the original material, but sorting,

  analysis, and mixing as well – genuine learning, in short, rather than simple

  repetition. 17

  It might be useful to pause a moment here in order to clarify certain

  terms I have occasion to use throughout this work. First, I wish to clarify

  the distinction between memory understood as the ability to reproduce

  something exactly (‘‘rote’’) and memory as recollection or reminiscence.

  Second, and related to the pre-modern understanding of reminiscence,

  I want to clarify the distinction I make between the adjectives ‘‘heuristic’’

  and ‘‘hermeneutical.’’

  Modern experimental psychology, focusing on the behavior and

  capacity of short-term or ‘‘working memory,’’ has encouraged an under-

  standing of memory that identifies it solely with the ability to reproduce

  exactly the items in a series, carefully excluding from its concerns the ability

  to reconstruct such information, whether logically or by a mnemonic

  scheme.18 This is not at all what pre-modern writers meant by ‘‘memory.’’

  The distinction is clear in Albertus Magnus’s commentary on Aristotle’s De

  memoria et reminiscentia. Albertus says that the iteration, or rote repetition,

  of knowledge is not at all a task of memorial recollection or memoria. He

  Models for the memory

  23

  defines reminiscence or recollection as the rational discovery (investigatio)

  of what has been set aside (obliti) through and by means of the memory.

  This process differs in nature from ‘‘rote repetition’’ (iterata scientia).

  Recollection occurs consciously through association: one finds or hunts

  out the stored memory-impressions by using other things associated with it

  either through a logical connection or through habit (consuetudo), the sort

  of associations taught by the various artes memorativa. Rote repetition,

  since it is not ‘‘found out’’ by any heuristic scheme, is not considered

  recollection or true memory (memoria).19

  Chaucer’s Summoner is a familiar example of mechanical, rote reiter-

  ation (The Canterbury Tales, I, 637–643); he can repeat a few Latin phrases

  heard in court, but Chaucer comments that a jay can cry ‘‘Wat’’ as well as

  the pope can – the Summoner’s memory is of that sort. Notice that the

  Summoner is compared to a bird; animals were considered to have no true

  memory. It is also worth noticing that Chaucer does not use the word

  ‘‘rote’’ in connection with the Summoner’s mimicry, in contrast to what he

  says about the trained legal memory of the Sergeant of Law (I, 323–327),

  who has every statute ‘‘pleyn by rote’’ in his memory, that is ‘‘habitually and

  systematically.’’ This has made him formidable in ‘‘termes,’’ or negotia-

  tions, because his mind ‘‘hadde’’ all cases and precedents from the time of

  King William ready for his immediate use. 20

  The ‘‘art of memory’’ is actually the ‘ art of recollection,’ for this is the task

  which these schemes are designed to accomplish. They answer to principles

  that define and describe how reminiscence occurs, what it is, and what it is

  supposed to do. And among those tasks, iteration per se was not considered

  sufficient. The crucial task of recollection is investigatio, ‘‘tracking-down,’’ a

  word related to vestigia, ‘ tracks’ or ‘ footprints.’ All mnemonic organiza-

  tional schemes are heuristic in nature. They are retrieval schemes, for the

  purpose of inventio or ‘ finding.’ The word ‘ heuristic’’ derives from a Greek

  verb meaning ‘‘to find,’ and I use it to mean any scheme or construct that is

  ‘ valuable for stimulating or conducting empirical research but unproved or

  incapable of proof’ itself (in the definition of Webster’s Third International

  Dictionary).

  Distinct from ‘‘heuristic’’ are the words ‘‘hermeneutic’’ and ‘‘icono-

  graphic.’’ These latter two, as I use them, both refer to interpretation rather

  than retrieval. Hermeneutic refers to the methods and content of textual

  interpretation, especially of the Bible, and iconographic to the ‘‘illustration

  of a subject by pictures’’ (to quote Webster’s Third again). The heuristic

  schemes might well take advantage of certain hermeneutic and/or icono-

  graphic conventions in constructing mnemonically valuable markers, but

  24

  The Book of Memory

  such meanings are not intrinsically necessary to mnemonic schemes. In

  fact, such received meanings can be more of a hindrance than not, and

  every writer on the subject urges students to form their own habitual

  schemes rather than relying on those of others. For the mnemonic scheme’s

  basic function is only heuristic, to retrieve not to interpret. 21 Recollection

  can occur either naturally (‘‘ex parte rei,’’ as Albertus says, though we would

  probably use a word like ‘‘formally’’) or artificially (‘‘ex parte consuetudi-

  nis,’’ or as we more likely would say ‘‘associatively’’). The latter sort is

  generally more useful because it can organize a mass of otherwise unrelated

  material, like texts or sermons. The former is restricted to material that is in

  itself formally congruent, like a logical proof. But both sorts of schemes are

  heuristic, inventive, and investigatory in the classical sense.

  Thinking of memory as wax or a waxed surface on which ‘‘images of a

  sort’’ are inscribed involves us in two distinct, if related, questions: what is

  the physical nature of such ‘‘images’’ and in what sense do they ‘‘represent’’

  that which they ‘‘copy?’’ In the discussion which follows, I am going to

  reverse the order of these quest
ions and focus first on the representational

  character of the memory-likenesses and then on their physical nature.

  Directing my analysis is the ancient observation that I have just discussed,

  that memory is a process most like reading written characters.

  The earliest explicit use of the seal-in-wax model for cognition is in

  Plato’s Theaetetus, although the image is not original to Plato, who says

  that he was developing a metaphor already implicit in Homer. In fact,

  Socrates is at some pains to say that his way of describing the memory as

  being like seals (s¯emeia) made by a signet ring is not new, but really very

  old. This is important because it is a model based upon how the eye sees in

  reading, not how the ear hears. In recollection, one looks at the contents of

  memory, rather than hearing or speaking them; the mediator is visual.

  Socrates says:

  Imagine . . . that our minds contain a block of wax, which in this or that individual

  may be larger or smaller, and composed of wax that is comparatively pure or

  muddy, and harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes of just the right

  consistency . . . Let us call it the gift of the Muses’ mother, Memory, and say that

  whenever we wish to remember something we see or hear or conceive in our own

  minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them on it as

  we might stamp the impression of a seal ring. Whatever is so imprinted we

  remember and know so long as the image remains; whatever is rubbed out or

  has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know.22

  Plato’s choice of phrase, ‘‘keŕinon ekmag¯eion’’ (block of wax), is signifi-

  cant, for the noun ekmag¯eion has a long career in philosophical writing.

  Models for the memory

  25

  Aristotle used it to mean ‘‘matter as a recipient of impressions’’ (for example,

  in Metaphysics, 988aI); it is used as a verb by Plato (in Theaetetus) and other

  philosophers to mean ‘‘mold’’ or ‘ impress.’ It can also mean ‘‘model,’’ and is

  so used by Plato in Laws, 800b.23 The tablet on which the wax is spread,

  thickly or thinly or just right, is the pair (though sets of as many as ten have

  been found) of wooden slabs fastened together, familiar to every ancient

  student; it was one of the oldest surfaces for writing known to the Greeks,