On the Shadows of Ideas also supplies several other brief descriptions of model memory architectures, these also formed on Llullian wheels. Bruno’s own mental structures must have been far more complex, and must surely have included real architectures like the vast Gothic interior of San Domenico as well as the whirling circles of Ramon Llull.
Bruno realized that even the simplest of these systems might sound excessively complicated to a reader, and preemptively lampoons a detractor in the book’s prologue:
Pharfacon, Doctor of Civil and Canon Law, Philosopher and Man of Letters, believes that this art weighs down its practitioners rather than lightening their burden, because whereas without the art there are only things to recollect, with the art we are obliged to recollect things, places, and images, lots of them, by which no one will doubt that natural memory is only further confused and baffled.
Bruno’s immediate reply to the pedantic Pharfacon drips sarcasm: “Wit that sharp ought to be carded with an iron comb.” But the criticism was a real one, and Bruno addressed it later in the book by arguing that the artificial memory worked more efficiently than rote memory because it exploited the actual physical process of recollection (in essence we use the same argument today, but now we speak of human development rather than the physiology of the soul). Bruno lodged the process of recollection in the immortal soul he called anima, and called the art itself “a habit of the reasoning soul”—artificial not in the modern sense of something false, but in the sense of something created by discipline, a skill, like holding a pen, or an exercise as primal as walking upright. Hence he saw the art itself as an integral part of the human mind: “a technical extension or ordered reserve in the imaginative faculty, consisting in species of receptacles that flow in from the windows of the soul, divided into different parts, to receive all things seen and heard and retain them according to the pleasure of the soul.”
The real point of the artificial memory, Bruno argued, was to order sense perceptions, imagination, and, ultimately, understanding to reflect the basic harmony of the world itself. The very rightness of the process is what made it easier to carry out than the Pharfacons of the world would suspect:
Just as a hand joined to an arm, a foot to a leg, or an eye to a head is more recognizable than when it is separated, likewise with parts and whole species, let nothing be set aside and out of order (which is utterly simple, perfect, and beyond number in the primal mind) if we intend to connect them with each other and unite them: What then can we not understand, remember, and do?
Memory, then, served as the prelude to action, by organizing experience in a usable way. On the most basic level, this is how a child learns; in the same way, Aristotle claimed that adult actions also responded to previous sense perceptions. Bruno claims in addition that adult actions proceed most usefully from organized knowledge, from a world that makes sense. On the Shadows of Ideas goes on to declare that the organizing impulses expressed in the art of memory begin at nature’s most minute level of organization, the “seeds of those first principles” that were his name for atoms:
This art can be called nothing else but a faculty of nature inborn with reason, together with the seeds of those first principles in which there is the power, when they are attracted outside themselves by different objects as by so many charms, and are illuminated by the active intellect as if by a radiant sun, and receive influences from the eternal Ideas as if from the course of the stars, when they have been fertilized by the supreme being, to order all things in actuality and pursue their own end to the full extent of their strength.
In On the Shadows of Ideas, the first of all his surviving works, Bruno writes as a philosopher and as a poet, mixing dense analytical language from his Scholastic training with the vibrant imagery of Plato and his followers. Its title deliberately evokes the symbolic shadows and forests of his early Platonic readings. In the first decade of the sixteenth century, Giles of Viterbo had already used the phrase “shadow of idea” to explain what he meant by his image of footprints in the Forest of Matter: “A footprint is not an idea … it is something that lies outside idea, or is a shadow of idea.”
Giles goes on to call this shadow of idea a “medium,” both the “mean” between darkness and light and the “means” by which human thought leaves the state of unknowing that Plato described as a cave, and the poet Virgil as a “blind prison.” Bruno, echoing Giles of Viterbo, describes his own “shadows of ideas” as footprints: “Shadow is not of darkness, but rather the footprint of darkness in light, or the footprint of light in darkness, or participant in light and darkness.” Like Giles, he describes those shadows of ideas as a medium between the darkness of ignorance and the light of wisdom: “Nor does Nature suffer an immediate progression from one extreme to the other, but only through mediating shadows…”
Like his “shadows of ideas” themselves, Bruno’s book proposed to act as a medium for the king’s own progress from shadowy knowledge to expertise in the art of memory. Bruno tried to keep its language simple and its concepts clear, but without giving his whole technique away. Without Bruno present to explain his art in person, On the Shadows of Ideas is still something of a mystery. But we can see the sense of power it must have promised to the king and his courtiers. When Bruno’s art brought forth even the most concrete event or ordinary object into the light, this effort at recollection was a revelation as much as a mechanical act. For among the patterns written into the primordial seeds of nature was the history of the soul itself. In a famous image, Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus recounted how every human soul (anima) had fallen from a primeval grace into the prison of the physical body. In occasional flashes of insight, at the sight of a beautiful object, or rapt in contemplation, a soul will grow wings and fly upward to glimpse what Plato called ultimate reality. Marsilio Ficino and Giles of Viterbo called it patria lux, “light of the homeland,” a radiance that made the sun dull by comparison, a brightness whose glory made nothing on earth so desirable as returning back. Every good deed, every search for God, responded to that primordial memory of sheer joy in the divine presence experienced as pure light. Disciplined memory, as a form of contemplation, prepared the soul to revisit this heavenly homeland. Bruno (like Plato, Ficino, and Giles of Viterbo before him) described the feeling of this homecoming as the sensation of emerging from shadow to bask in the light of the sun.
Always, therefore, Bruno’s art of memory focused on these ancient soul-memories as well as the immediate world of sights, sounds, thoughts, and words, and the more powerful the soul-memories, the more powerful the art of recalling them: “A clearer soul, more exposed to divine Ideas, will take up the forms of objects with greater concentration, just as those who have sharper vision are able to discern what they see more easily and correctly.”
The syllables Bruno describes in such detail in the second section of On the Shadows of Ideas, stored on their five concentric wheels, are only a preliminary, small-scale exercise in what should become the soul’s grandest enterprise, its emergence, as he says himself, from the Forest of Matter:
The light—life, understanding, the primal unity—contains all species, perfections, truths, and degrees of phenomena. Whereas those things that occur in Nature are different from one another, contrary, and diverse, in [the light] they are like, harmonious, and single. Try, therefore, if you are able with your powers, to identify, harmonize, and unite the phenomena you perceive, and you shall not exhaust your faculties, you shall not upset your mind, and you shall not confound your memory.
For Bruno, importantly, the world itself was neither entirely dark nor entirely evil. The practitioner of Giordano Bruno’s art of memory, at least as proposed in On the Shadows of Ideas, will eventually see beyond those shadows of ideas to pure idea; it is the same progress envisioned by Plato, with the difference that Bruno puts idea not in a world beyond but in the world as it is:
We decided that this art languished beneath the shadows of ideas, until it would either spur on sluggish Natu
re by going ahead of her, or direct and guide her if she is deviant and exorbitant, or strengthen and support her if she is exhausted, or correct her if she goes astray, or follow her if she is perfect, and emulate her industry.
His pamphlets on memory, written in academic Latin, could express only part of that world for Giordano Bruno. As a writer, and probably as a thinker as well, he was split from the beginning into three personalities: one had a Dominican’s philosophical rigor, one a Platonist’s poetic exaltation, and one a dark wit born in his parents’ little house on the slopes of Monte Cicala and stiletto-sharpened on the streets of Naples. The caricatured detractors who mutter their imprecations in the prologue to On the Shadows of Ideas provide a foretaste of the characters who populate another of his works from 1582. Again, the terrain is that shadow land of the Forest of Matter, but the medium is comedy, for this was also the year in which Giordano Bruno published his sprawling play, The Candlemaker.
In its dedication to a mysterious “Signora Morgana B.,” ostensibly a woman of Naples (or perhaps Nola), Bruno describes his philosophy as hovering on the margins between day and night:
Time takes away all and grants all, everything changes, nothing is destroyed; only one thing cannot change, one, alone and eternal, and only one can abide eternally, consistent and identical. With this philosophy my spirit grows large, and my intellect is magnified. Thus, whatever the point should be of this coming evening, if the change is real, I who am in the night await the day, and those who are in the day await the night; everything that is, is either here or there, near or far, now or later, sooner or later. Rejoice, then, and if you can, be well, and love the one who loves you.
His audience receives a less solicitous plea, a sonnet in which we are to imagine the author, naked as a baby, wheedling some rich, learned man to honor his farce with a dedicatory poem and himself with a tip:
O you who suckle at the Muses’ tit,
And in their creamy broth prefer to swim,
Lips foremost, Sir, now listen to my whim:
If you by faith and charity are lit,
I wheedle, ask, and beg of you a bit
Of epigram, encomium, ode, or hymn,
To flutter from my vessel’s prow or stem
For Mom and Dad’s especial benefit.
Alas, I’d love to go about in style;
Alas, I’m barer than an ancient seer;
And worse: I may be forced, as I’m so vile,
To show the ladylove whom I revere
My prick and ass, like Adam all the while
He went about his cloister unaware;
And as I beg a pair
Of breeches, in the meantime from the valley
I see a cavalcade of pedants sally.
Yet in his letter of dedication to Signora Morgana B., Bruno also explains, in tones more passionate and serious than the rest of his riotous text, that his comedy is a work about the art of memory. Addressing a woman who by that time existed for him only in memory, he writes: “You, cultivator of the field of my heart, with divine water that springs from the fountain of your spirit, you slaked the thirst of my intellect … What is offered to you through this Candlemaker may clarify certain Shadows of Ideas that scare off the wild animals or, like the devils in Dante, keep the donkeys at bay.”
Whether Morgana B. was a real woman or an imaginative ideal, we learn in Bruno’s letter to her that he has drawn his portrait of Naples along its broad lines for a precise reason. His characters, with their stock personalities, their pranks, and their disguises, work on the stage as the memory images from On the Shadows of Ideas work within the mind, crying for individual attention, then receding, combining with other images, and all the while playing out the picaresque enterprise of survival in the real world. The plot of The Candlemaker revolves around three well-off older men, each a victim in his own way of misplaced passion, who for their sins of deranged desire are deceived, cuckolded, robbed, and beaten by the other characters: Bonifacio, an epicene maker of candles (whose phallic symbolism Bruno exploits relentlessly), loves Vittoria the courtesan and neglects his young, beautiful wife, Carubina. Bartolomeo, the alchemist, loves gold and silver and neglects a wife, Marta, who is elderly and wise. Manfurio, the schoolteacher, has never married; he loves young boys and tries to woo them with pitiful displays of his own pedantry. Meanwhile, the artist Gioan Bernardo creates paintings, devises plots, and jumps merrily into bed with Vittoria and Carubina without invoking love; Bruno himself would later describe sex with similar practicality as “serving nature.”
At a running time of over five hours, The Candlemaker may never have been intended for production, but Bruno shows a deep familiarity with theater nonetheless, and upsets the conventions of sixteenth-century staged drama with comic abandon. The Candlemaker has no prologue; instead, it begins with an antiprologue, followed by a proprologue, which is interrupted by a talkative janitor, who is revealed as the deliverer of the prologue only after the action starts. Many of The Candlemaker’s readers have taken the play as a work of pure philosophy rather than staged drama, a text meant, like Plato’s dialogues, for intimate, individual reading rather than public performance. Yet Plato himself had begun as an aspiring tragedian, and dialogues like the Symposium make for superb drama when they are acted out. Bruno’s philosophical drama can also be staged successfully.
The Candlemaker’s letter of dedication and its choice of setting suggest that Bruno also wrote the play as a kind of autobiography, rearranging the memories of his own life in an act of creation. He turns his mind back to Morgana B. as a confirmed exile, evoking the biblical parable of the rich man and Lazarus the pauper, who once begged at his doorstep; when both have died, the rich man burns in hell for his greed as he watches the pauper Lazarus rest in the bosom of Abraham. As Abraham tells the rich man, their fates have been reversed, and between them there now “lies a great gulf fixed”: the impassable border between heaven and hell. If Signora Morgana B. is also resting in the bosom of Abraham, she may be dead, and the great gulf that separates her from Bruno is not the distance between Paris and Naples, but rather the distance between death and life:
Back when we could still touch hands, I first addressed “My joyous thoughts” to you, and then “The stem of living water.” Now that between you, who rest in the bosom of Abraham, and myself, who desperately burns to ash, without expectation of that succor of yours that used to refresh my tongue, there lies a great gulf fixed … In the meantime, be well and become fatter than you are, because for my part I hope to recover my lard where I lost my green youth, if not under one guise, then under another; if not in this life, then in another.
With his absent lady and his vivid picture of a city he had not seen for six years and in fact would never see again, Bruno seems to suggest that there is a special kind of reality attached to the Naples he holds in his memory, huge, cruel, and chaotic as it may have been. By 1582, in an equally huge, chaotic Paris, as a royal reader at the Collège de Cambrai and private tutor to the king of France, the whipped dog, “irritated, recalcitrant, and strange, content with nothing, stubborn as an old man of eighty,” had risen about as high in the world as a philosopher could rise.
And then Fortune turned the wheel.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Song of Circe
PARIS, 1582–LONDON, 1583
MOERIS: Lady Circe, will you please explain to me: What are those lights glowing in the night? What could lie concealed beneath their surface?
CIRCE: Those are the learned, the wise, and the illustrious, in among the idiots, the asses, and the obscure.
—The Song of Circe, 1582
By 1582, Giordano Bruno had attained a certain degree of worldly success. At the same time, exiled and excommunicated, he felt as much like an outsider as ever. The title page of his Candlemaker describes him not as a royal reader or a courtier of King Henri III but as “Bruno the Nolan, the Academic of no Academy; nicknamed the exasperated.” A motto follows the title: “In tristiti
a hilaris, in hilaritate tristis”—“Cheerful in gloom, gloomy in cheer”—that same philosophy of even-tempered detachment that Bruno first heard expressed by his father. For a man whose nickname was “the exasperated,” detachment must have been more an ideal than a reality. Both Bruno’s writings and the reports of his contemporaries describe him as a man more passionate than tranquil, an effusive lecturer who held his listeners spellbound more often than not. His students would prove uncommonly loyal. One of them, Raphael Eglin, described what his lectures were like: “Off-the-cuff, see how well you can follow along with your pen, talk and think at the same time; that’s how quick his wits were, and that was the power of his mind!”
Literally, “lecture” meant “reading,” and many sixteenth-century professors did precisely that, standing at their lecterns with a copy of Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Peter Lombard, and droning away. The Parisians who practiced this ancient style of teaching looked on the little Italian with suspicion, about his accent, his enthusiasm, his popularity, and the ideas that sometimes departed so radically from the texts on which his “readings” were ostensibly based.
Bruno also provided his own texts on occasion. The Song of Circe, published, like On the Shadows of Ideas and The Candlemaker, in Paris in 1582, was obviously meant to accompany his lectures; there is even an advertisement for his course in the middle of the text: “There is only one difficulty: no one can learn this art on his own. He learns it all from the teacher.” The little book’s letter of dedication, addressed to the important statesman Henri d’Angoulême by his secretary Jean Regnault, notes that Bruno’s art of memory is both effective and economical:
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