The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  word omnia. It got entangled in noise and I recorded omnium . . . and the

  more people talk, the harder it gets, until I reach a point where I can’t make

  anything out’’ (39).

  S. had trained his memory ‘‘for words’’ rather than ‘‘for things,’’ in the

  ancient sense. His grasp of entire passages of a text, his ability to form

  coherent images associated with the meaning of a long passage, was far

  from good. If a story were read to him, especially at a rapid pace

  (S. required a pause of 3–4 seconds between items in order to form and

  place his images), he would complain that, since each word called up an

  image for him, they began to collide with one another in a hopeless muddle

  (65). He was best at recalling items in a series, or brief connected passages

  which he could remember as though they were parts of a scene. His

  capacity for recalling thousands of such series, however, was virtually

  limitless in space and, over time; indeed, S.’s chief problem, especially

  after he became a professional performer, was how to forget, a problem

  which presented itself to him as how to erase images he had formed. He

  96

  The Book of Memory

  tried mentally burning an image sequence he no longer needed, and he

  tried writing it down (unwittingly putting to the test Thammuz’s fears

  about the danger of substituting writing for memory). Thammuz needn’t

  have worried. Neither technique had the least effect on S.’s memory.

  Finally S. realized that he could simply will a specific series of images not

  to appear, and they would not come up (66–71). This clear indication of his

  conscious control was a great relief to him.

  One test Luria set for S. was to remember the first four lines of the

  Inferno. S. knew no Italian, and so made images of Dante’s words from

  Russian homophones. This was the method he described using to memo-

  rize the first line, ‘‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’’:

  Nel – I was paying my membership dues when there, in the corridor, I caught sight

  of the ballerina, Nel’skaya.

  mezzo – I myself am a violinist; what I do is to set up an image of a man who is

  playing the violin [Russ.: vmeste], together with Nel’skaya.

  del – There’s a pack of Deli Cigarettes near them.

  cammin – I set up an image of a fireplace [Russ.: kamin] near them.

  di – Then I see a hand pointing to a door [Russ.: dver].

  nostra – I see a nose [Russ.: nos]; a man has tripped and, in falling gotten his nose

  pinched in the doorway [tra].

  vita – He lifts his leg over the threshold, for a child is lying there, that is, a sign of

  life – vitalism. (45–46)

  His system for the other three lines was similar, though he devised a

  different scene of related images for each line. Sixteen years later, without

  warning, Luria asked him to repeat these lines for him and he did so,

  flawlessly and effortlessly.

  Shereshevski’s technique for recalling after so long an interval is also

  discussed by Luria. It made no difference to S. whether a series were

  presented orally or in writing. He had practiced his imagining technique

  to the point where he could find images quickly even for words he had

  never heard before; for common words, he tended to use the same images

  over again. Once remembered, he had no difficulty in recalling, whether

  the interval had been a day, a month, or many years. But he needed first to

  place himself mentally back in the situation in which he had first commit-

  ted the series to memory. As Luria describes it:

  S. would sit with his eyes closed, pause, then comment: ‘‘Yes, yes . . . This was a

  series you gave me once when we were in your apartment . . . You were sitting at

  the table and I in the rocking chair . . . You were wearing a gray suit and you

  looked at me like this . . . Now, then, I can see you saying . . .’ And with that he

  would reel off the series precisely as I had given it to him at the earlier session. If

  Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory

  97

  one takes into account that S. had by then become a well-known mnemonist, who

  had to remember hundreds and thousands of series, the feat seems even more

  remarkable. (12)

  One final characteristic of S.’s method is worth remarking. Luria stresses

  that the highly intricate technique he had developed was at its basis entirely

  natural to him, essentially a matter of spontaneous recollection by his

  memory aided by consciously applied method. The ‘‘techniques he used

  were merely superimposed on an existing structure and did not ‘simulate’ it

  with devices other than those which were natural to it’’ (63). The author of

  Ad Herennium, introducing his strikingly similar mnemonic, comments

  that ‘‘the natural memory, if a person is endowed with an exceptional one,

  is often like this artificial memory [similis sit huic artificiosae], and this

  artificial memory [haec artificiosa], in its turn, retains and develops the

  natural advantages by a method of discipline’’ (III. 16.29). The use of the

  demonstrative pronoun in the Latin text seems to me significant. This

  method, the author is saying, builds upon the memory’s natural disposi-

  tions. So too S.’s memory system – to say nothing of that of the Japanese

  mnemonist who used a similar one – was natural, developed by practice but

  entirely self-generated and self-taught.

  There are a number of ways in which Luria’s study of S. can provide useful

  insight into the basic neuropsychology of the descriptions we have of the

  architectural and other mnemonic schemes. First, Luria was especially

  impressed by S.’s synaesthesia, or apparently simultaneous and unsorted

  sensory perceptions, especially of ear, eye, and nose (though all five senses

  were involved). He ‘ saw’ sounds as visual shapes, and his memory-images

  often produced sensations of vibration or smell for him, as well as sight. This

  natural tendency was greatly increased by his mnemonics, for everything

  coming in to his mind was turned into an image. The essentially visual

  nature of these images was psychologically crucial. Sounds were only con-

  fusing to S. unless they were translated into particular clear visual images. It

  was the images which provided the stability over time to S.’s recollective

  power. Medieval memory advice stresses synaesthesia in making a memory-

  image. Memory-images must speak, they must not be silent. 131 They sing,

  they play music, they lament, they groan in pain. They also often give off

  odor, whether sweet or rotten. And they can also have taste or tactile

  qualities. I will have more to say about this later, but it is worth commenting

  on here, since synaesthesia was considered to be so vital to S.’s success.

  In the second place, S.’s process of recollection was a process of percep-

  tion; he mentally walked through his memory places and looked at what

  was there. This accounts for the essentially perceptual nature of ancient

  98

  The Book of Memory

  advice on the preparation of loci, that they be properly lighted, moderate in

  size and extension, different enou
gh from one another in shape that they

  can’t be confused, not crowded, that the images in them be of moderate

  size and neither too large nor too small, and that they be made clearly

  distinct from their background.

  Third, S.’s problem with overloading, experienced when words were

  read to him too rapidly, or when he tried to grasp a lengthy passage as a

  whole, suggests why all the ancient Roman writers, from the Ad Herennium

  author through Quintilian, had their doubts about the ordinary utility of

  ‘‘memory for words’’ when tied to images like these. Fourth, and as a

  counterbalance to the previous point, S.’s ability to recall thousands of

  short series of words, even though he had trouble grasping long connected

  passages, sheds light on the ancient advice to memorize lengthy passages

  piecemeal, in short sections which can later be united. As Hugh of

  St. Victor writes, the memory rejoices in shortness (‘‘memoria brevitate

  gaudet’’); the experience of S. should caution us, however, against assuming

  that in saying this Hugh meant that only brief extracts of longer works

  could be retained in the memory. Any long work can be considered as a

  number of short series joined together – indeed, this is exactly Quintilian’s

  advice. And as separate series, a virtually limitless number can be retained

  in a good, trained memory.

  Fifth, and in some ways the most important for our purposes, S. was

  completely uneducated in mnemonics. The system of backgrounds and

  images he devised was self-taught, refined by trial and error. He never

  seems to have discovered the principle of ‘‘memory for things’’ that every

  ancient writer on the subject is at pains to emphasize as the key to the

  successful composition and delivery of an oration. This, surely, was because

  his prodigious feats of memory were treated as freakish, and he himself as a

  vaudeville act, his art perceived to be a mere curiosity without social

  usefulness and ethical value. Moreover, he was rewarded only for his

  iterative accuracy – creative composition was not his aim. The situation

  in the ancient and medieval worlds, needless to say, was far different. By

  providing such tantalizing parallels, S. can teach us how the memory

  system described in these treatises is true to human psychology, but there

  is much about the actual use of memory in education and composition

  during the Middle Ages that S.’s experience cannot tell us.

  C H A P T E R 3

  Elementary memory design

  T H E N U M E R I C A L G R I D

  The architectural mnemonic was not the only, or even the most popular,

  system known in the Middle Ages for training the memory. In her 1936

  study of the subject, Helga Hajdu mentions various alternative systems,

  including an elaborate digital method of computation and communication

  that also served mnemonic purposes, discussed in the treatise De loquela

  digitorum ascribed to Bede; various mnemonic verses that serve both

  scholars and laity, such as the university students’ mnemonic for remem-

  bering the various types of syllogism (‘‘Barbara Celarunt Darii,’’ etc.) and

  the execrable rhyming hexameters used by lawyers as a mental index to the

  various collections of laws; and various counting devices, like the rosary

  and the abacus, which involve manipulating physical objects in a rigid

  order as an aide-me´moire in calculation. 1 There are rhyming catalogues of

  medieval libraries which were intended to be memorized by the monks, 2

  and there are Alexandre de Villedieu’s 4,000 rhymed hexameters setting

  forth the rules of Latin grammar, the Doctrinale. One of the earliest and

  longest-lived poems in English is the mnemonic for the months of the year:

  ‘‘Thirty days hath September, April, June and November.’’

  Interesting as these particular items are, however, they are too limited in

  purpose or too bound to a particular situation, such as the monastery or the

  law court, to be of much interest in considering how memories were

  trained by a wide variety of people to make a securely searchable inventory

  of a variety of texts and other material (what Albertus Magnus lumps

  together as negotia, a word usually understood as ‘‘business,’’ but in the

  context of memory-training it translates better as ‘‘matters,’’ ‘‘content,’’ or

  even ‘‘stuff’’). Other systems of memory training clearly surpassed that

  described in the Ad Herennium, in both their longevity and their broad

  applicability to all spheres of learning. And, unlike the Herennian mne-

  monic, they were widely disseminated in the Middle Ages (not just the

  99

  100

  The Book of Memory

  humanist circles in papal Avignon and in Tuscany), and find their way into

  practical writings on the subject of memory well before the fourteenth

  century. 3 In this chapter, I will be concerned with two simple schemes used

  in memory training. They employ the most common of locational heu-

  ristics, the order of numbers, and that of the alphabet. In order to

  demonstrate their ubiquity, I must appeal to the reader’s patient willing-

  ness to pick the way through the eclectic evidence that I have gathered up in

  this chapter.

  Learning by heart: Hugh of St. Victor on memorizing the Psalms

  How to use a number scheme is described by Hugh of St. Victor in a text

  virtually overlooked by modern scholars, the Preface to his Chronicle, also

  called ‘‘De tribus maximis circumstantiis gestorum,’’ translated in

  Appendix A. Hugh’s description is one of the fullest, and clearest, of any

  mnemonic system. The method utilizes psychological principles similar to

  the method using images in background places, but in this case the system

  of loci is numerical, and the images are short pieces of text written into the

  numbered backgrounds, as though within the cells of a grid. The images of

  written text are impressed also as they appear in the particular codex from

  which they were first memorized, including their location on the page

  (recto, verso, top, middle, bottom), the shapes and colors of the letters

  themselves, and the appearance of each page including marginalia and

  illuminations, to make a clear visual experience. Finally, Hugh advises that

  the physical conditions under which one had memorized the original

  material should also become part of one’s total recollection of it – in

  modern psychological terms, to make of it an ‘‘episodic’’ not just a ‘‘seman-

  tic’’ memory.

  This Preface was composed about 1130, and is addressed to novices

  (pueri) studying Scripture in the cathedral school of St. Victor. It precedes

  a Chronicle of Biblical history, set out as columns – seventy folio pages in

  the fullest versions – of names, dates, and places, which the students were to

  memorize as an elementary part of their education in sacra pagina, or the

  study of the Bible. The Preface was unpublished until 1943, when it was

  edited by William M. Green (there appear to have been no previous

  printings at all).4 The manuscripts suggest that the preface, while having

  some local success, never
achieved the wide dissemination of Didascalicon,

  the work which earned Hugh a reputation for being an important propo-

  nent of ars memorativa in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance.5 There

  are several manuscripts of the Preface alone; Green comments that, while

  Elementary memory design

  101

  portions of the Chronicle tables were ‘‘often omitted with much resultant

  confusion and variety in the manuscripts, the text of the prologue . . . is

  usually well preserved.’’6 There are 34 surviving manuscripts of the Preface

  (compared to 125 of Didascalicon), nearly all written in the twelfth and

  thirteenth centuries, though there are 2 from the fourteenth, and 1 from the

  fifteenth century. Of those whose provenance is known, most are claus-

  tral.7 The largest number of manuscripts is French, as we would expect,

  including several from St. Victor. So, the evidence suggests that this

  particular treatise was not regarded as major or original enough to deserve

  wide dissemination, despite its author’s eminence, and that it sank into

  oblivion by the early fourteenth century, because it had been superseded by

  or incorporated into other pedagogical tools. Its very ordinariness, how-

  ever, makes it important to my study.

  Hugh’s method displays the principles basic to classical mnemonics, as

  we find them described by Aristotle, Tullius, Cicero, and so many others.

  One must have a scheme of places in a rigid, easily retained order, with a

  definite beginning. Into this order one places the components of what one

  wishes to memorize and recall. As a moneychanger (nummularius)

  separates and classifies his coins by type in his money-bag (sacculum,

  marsupium), so the content of wisdom’s store-house (thesaurus, archa),

  which is the memory, must be classified according to a definite scheme.

  Without retention in the memory, says Hugh, there is no learning, no

  wisdom. ‘‘Indeed, the whole usefulness of education consists only in the

  memory of it.’’8

  The example Hugh gives is how to memorize the Psalms. There are 150

  in all, and to learn them one constructs a series of mental compartments,

  numbered consecutively from 1 to 150 – in other words, a rigid system of

  cells that has a definite starting-point. To each number is attached the first