In the Mirror of the Past

by Ivan Illich

  In De tribus, Hugh places himself in the tradition of memory training. However, Hugh’s novice is warned not to be jumpy. His memory is not being trained for legal attack and defence but for contemplative penetration of Holy Scripture. He learns to stay firm in one place, as if he were in the choir stall of a Gothic cathedral surrounded by several dozen multicolored frames:

  My child, Wisdom is a treasure, and thy heart is the place where you want to keep it […] there are distinct hiding places for gold, for silver, for gems. You must come to know these different places to recover what you have hidden in them. You must become like the money changer at the fair whose hands speedily move from one satchel to the other, always reaching for the right coin.

  This patient and restful fixation of the learner in his proper place is for Hugh an equivalent to the grounding of wisdom. ‘Confusion is the mother of ignorance and forgetfulness. Discretion makes intelligence shiny and memory strong.’ The pupil is to place his right foot on the beginning of an imaginary line, onto which he will then mark a sequence of Roman numerals running all the way to the horizon. Each one of these discrete numerals from I to beyond XLVIII will then serve the learner as a kind of ledge onto which he can place a concept or an arbitrary visual symbol that labels it. On one of these ‘ladders’ he might list all the rivers that appear in the Bible: the four that flow forth from Paradise, the four that the Israelites had to cross, and the four that water the Holy Land. On another ladder the virtues or the Angels or the Apostles might find their place. While the right foot of the novice keeps all the lines converging, he will reach out, like the money changer at the fair, to recover what he has learned.

  The third work I want to examine is much larger and made up of two volumes. It contains a complete set of rules for the construction of Noah’s Ark in the pupil’s heart. It is not meant for novices, but for mature Brothers, although what seems to be taken for granted in his circle would today stamp one as a freak, as a performer in a circus. In the same way in which Noah saved the animals during the flood, the pupil will preserve his memories in the midst of the sinful world’s violent storms. In detail, Hugh describes how this ark is to be built: as a many-tiered floating box, with staircases and ladders, rafters and spars. This imaginary raft serves Hugh as an immense three-dimensional bulletin board. The mast and rudder, each separate part of each door frame, is present to him in every detail. And to each of these structural elements he has attached a memory of a thing. Whatever juicy morsel he has picked up on his pilgrimage through the pages of a book has been pinned by him to a spot of the ark to which he can reach out when he meditates in the dark. With his adult pupils he insists that the monk has left his abode on earth; that he sails through historia with historia’s model — the Ark of Noah — floating in his heart. If Hugh’s Ark were unfolded as a blueprint, with the labels a readable size, a parchment covering a classroom would be needed to print everything he attached to his structure.

  Memoria is dying like the forest

  I have tried repeatedly to read from these three books to the students I teach at the University of Pennsylvania. Each time one or two, really puzzled, began to compare their own certainties with those of Hugh. But most spent the semester attempting to evade the necessity of facing an age when people did all the remembering rather than leaving the job to machines. They belong to a generation which accepts not only the disappearance of forests, but of memoria as well. One forestry student suggested an analogy: yes, forests are dying. But haven’t virgin forests died out long ago? Why shouldn’t mixed forests go the same way to extinction? Tree farming will be in, and laws will make sure that there are playgrounds in the farms. This will bring children much closer to nature than hazardous forests now permit.

  When my students open a book, they do not set out on a pilgrimage. In the age of the tape recorder it has become hard to convince any of them to memorize a list of dates. And rare are those colleagues who were privileged to have had a teacher of rhetoric who trained their ability of recall. Memory, when I discuss it with most, has something to do with rote and megabytes, or archetypes and dreams. For them, the page as a pagus — a cultured expanse of fields and buildings that invite one for a walk — it is a romantic fantasy or an escape from the unconscious, not the other side of reality, as it is for Hugh. Even stranger seems the construction of a life-boat for History in the heart.

  Not just two sets of incomparable metaphors, but two mental topologies separate Hugh’s world from ours. Two kinds of pages act here as mirrors, as metaphors, and also as co-generators of two distinct mental spaces. I know of no better way to clarify the distance between such heterogeneous mental spaces than an examination of the respective pages. The page layout can be examined as a mirror of the epochal Weltanschauung, but also as its mold.

  Comparison of three ‘pages’

  To do so I want to compare not just two but three types of pages: the pagina through which Hugh imagines himself moving, the text which has been familiar to students from the thirteenth to the late twentieth century, and the electronic shadow of a digitalized document file that Wordperfect or Wordstar now enable me to manage on the screen.

  Within the last two decades, ‘text’ has acquired a new and vague meaning not only in philosophy and science, but also in ordinary speech. It can refer to a paragraph written in English, a program written in Pascal, a characteristic sequence of amino-bases in a gene, or the sequence of tones in a bird song. Having been brought up on a mixed fare of Biblical exegesis and Karl Kraus, Gide and Mencken, it took me some time in the early sixties to adapt to the new uses of this word in ordinary speech. I still remember how I first noticed this spillover from structuralist and biological usage into the meaning of text, at the time when English departments became part of the ‘school of communications.’ In 1970, more out of loyalty than out of conviction, I agreed to write a foreword for a colleague’s book. When the publisher sent the finished product, I was disturbed by the fact that the ‘text’ of his essay had been radically changed since I had written the foreword. I was upset by this lack of respect for the written word. At a party, more than a decade later, I again ran into the author. I wanted to know what he was doing now. I was a guest in his department, and by ‘doing’ I of course meant ‘writing.’ ‘Fantastic things,’ was his reply. ‘I have bought a text composer and you cannot imagine what kinds of things it can do. I fed our book into it, and it gives me finally a fully satisfactory text.’ I was not just shocked but offended as I saw a ‘text’ cut loose from any page.

  Until that moment I had not been aware to what degree I had sanctified the text, to what depth I am beholden to its inviolability. I just cannot extricate myself from its tissue. Unlike Augustine or Hugh, I have been born into a macro-epoch of Western history during which text-derived notions define society, nature and ego. I am not an old rabbi or monk whose home is in the sacred object, who can meander through the book as if it were a valley or desert. I live among copies, articles, and critical editions. I am, through and through, a child of a post-medieval world in which everything which is perceived is also fatally described. My eyes do not wander, they take in the text. I voice and I hear the text that I have taken in. In Hugh’s time, when a cow changed owners, an oath ended the transaction; one hand on the cow’s rump and the other on beard or balls while audible words made the sale. A hundred years later already, the exchange was likely to result in a writ. What confirmed it was not an action but an object which describes the animal and the two parties. The nexus of thing to persons was no longer sworn-to possession but certified holding. Truth came to be embodied in protocols.

  This is the world into which I was born. This makes me increasingly into a has-been, a stranger in the new world of homeless text that appears for editing, ghostlike on the screen.

  The end of bookishness

  George Steiner has given a name to the self-image that results from being born into the text. He calls them ‘bookish’ people. According to Steiner, bookishness is
a historical singularity, a mental climate which results from a unique coincidence of technique, ideology and social texture. It depends on the possibility to own books, to read them in silence, to discuss them ad libitum in echo chambers like academies or coffee shops or periodicals. This kind of relationship to the text has been the ideal of schools. Paradoxically, however, the more schools became compulsory for a majority, the smaller became the percentage of people who are bookish in this sense. For most people born into the middle of the twentieth century, schooling prepared for the text on the screen.

  For Steiner, bookishness comes with print. While I find his phenomenology of bookishness admirable, I argue that the unique bookish character of Western perception is older than the technique of printing with moveable characters. In my opinion, bookishness comes into existence when the visible text undergoes a mutation, when it begins to float above the page and, 300 years before printing, its shadow can appear here and there, in this or that book, on parchment or in the ‘soul.’ This happened at the time of Hugh’s death, two generations before universities were founded. The text itself became a pilgrim that could come to rest here and there. It became a ship laden with goods which could anchor in any harbor. But it could not be read, its treasures could not be unloaded, unless it had come to rest at a pier. I am amazed but not ashamed to notice how deeply I am marked by this bookish sense for the text.

  And I am certainly not alone. An almost trivial experience confirms it. Living as I do on the fringes of institutions, one thing I had to give up long ago was the stenographer. When I was in my twenties and thirties it seemed obvious that I could call someone and dictate. This is how much writing has been done since the art was invented. Then came the dictaphone and, later, the computer. Stenographers became rare treasures, secretaries became expensive, typists mere operators of text-managing machines, while editors called for floppies. For people who are not in the organization, it became mandatory to type what they had penned, and this meant to learn to use the computer. Under these circumstances, I have had the opportunity to teach this minimal skill to almost half a dozen of my closest associates. The machine, after all, works like a typewriter for people with weak fingers, to which a few functions are added. And the first function the newcomer must learn is ‘DELETE.’ I have observed how six people, all of them learned readers, reacted to their first encounter with the delete key: all were upset, two actually became sick. The disappearance of a blocked sentence, and the closing of the gap by an onrush of words, were experienced by each of them as something offensive. This is not how we forget, nor is the command ‘RESTORE’ an analog to how we remember. For a bookish mind there is something deeply disturbing in the way in which the terminology of humanist criticism is appropriated by the programmer of machine commands. What appears on the screen is not written. It is writing as little as Magritte’s ‘pipe’ is a pipe.

  When I sit in front of the computer screen, I face an object which is beyond the horizon established by alphabetic literacy. Hieroglyphics and Maya codices are beyond the skyline of letters. But, historically speaking, these antiques — like Assyrian clay tablets, pyramid texts and Maya bark codices — are out of my inner line of vision, they lie beyond the horizon in back of me. They are models of bridges into the past of another time, as distant from my text as the George Washington Bridge is from the lianas that Incas plaited across the canyons of the Andes. What I face, what lies in front of me, is a flood of programmed arrangements that train me to select, retrieve, block, insert, delete, save, restore, merge, release and go to, to toggle on and off between files that are neither present nor absent. And when I have spent a sufficient number of hours in front of the screen, it has an effect on me. It takes some time for my eyes to readapt themselves to the adobe walls and ceiling beams of the room in which I sit. It requires an effort to discard the tool kit of cybernetic concepts that I used to transfer my manu scriptum into a computer file.

  To recall means to let things appear, to let them emerge from below the surface of the water, to allow them to step out of the mist. It also means to turn around and look backward with longing eyes, straining the ear to pick up a tune that has become faint. It means to raise the dead by conjuring up their shadows. All these metaphors work when I re-call and re-dress the forgotten. But this is not what I do as a historian of the page. My intent here is the recovery of a past mode of pastness. I want to recover the page as it looked for Hugh of Saint-Victor. I want to gain understanding of the way in which the page brought the past back for him. His memoria, and not what memory has become in the age of computers, is the subject of my inquiry. And to come close to this subject I need a discipline which keeps me alert to my own way of looking, while I interpret his writings about the ars legendi.

  Kuchenbuch’s crab

  In the search for a historiographic discipline which recovers the past without ever forgetting its distance from the present, Ludolf Kuchenbuch has found a parable. He speaks of historiography through the eyes of a crab. Most animals get away by turning around, and facing ahead. The crab moves backward, while its popping eyes remain fixed to the object they flee. The screen is my image for the present. Phoenician, Hebrew, cuneiform and hieroglyphic script are back there, out of my reach. I want to explore what happens if I begin to move backwards, with my eyes fixed on the present. And during a first stage of such a blind trip into the past, what gets between me and the screen are things I recall from my own past experience.

  As I move away from the screen onto which my eyes remained fastened, the first stop I make is in Cornell. I cannot forget the occasion, the night Che Guevara was killed. I was there to study the archives of Myron Stykos who — with a huge grant from the Ford Foundation — had gathered thousands of Latin American editorials dealing with birth control. He wanted to classify the reasons for which people approved or disapproved. I wanted to use the same material to find out what coil, spiral and pill and condom meant. With his economic resources, Stykos had even then been able to use a computer. For a whole night I re-programmed it, straining my limited knowledge of Fortran. This was my first encounter with the machine. If I now remember the sleepless night alone in the lab and the later conversations with engineers, one thing becomes clear to me: then, twenty-five years back, anything approaching the text composer I now take for granted was not utopian, but it certainly was not something commonly envisaged. No doubt, information theory had already begun to drench common talk. Systems analysis had begun to enter hard and social sciences. Cybernetic terminology had come into fashion in the Academy. But in newspapers, any use of these new words was frankly mystifying if they were not somehow explained.

  Had I gotten up from the work station, turned around and, in my memory, walked back to the mid-sixties, almost inevitably I would have kept on those special glasses I wear to type my manuscript into Wordperfect. I would have moved back through the books I have read since then, from Penrose or Moravec or both the late and earlier writings of Chomsky, and to the first encounters with Förster or his pupils Varela and Maturana. I would have focused my attention on how I came slowly to see things as I see them now. I would have assembled materials for the socio-genesis of my current concepts and percepts. But by moving back in a crab-like manner, my main attention is drawn to how my world was then. My discipline consists in remembering the surprise as its elements were shattered or dissolved. I try not to look at a past moment with foresight, but to know the present with crab-like hindsight. In the mid-sixties, text, though no longer bookish, was still essentially related to paper and print.

  As I move about ten years further back, into the late fifties, the screen goes out of sight. Only a pale glitter above my mental horizon indicates the work station from which I have moved back. At the University, no one seriously thought of a Department of Communications. I remember an evening with visiting biologists in a seafood restaurant on the south coast of Puerto Rico. These colleagues had come for a conference on genetics and spoke about information that was textually
encoded in genes. I understood what they were saying: the analogies between message-strings and biological variations were striking. But there was from the beginning something uncanny for a medievalist: did these people really speak of a submicroscopic text in the book of nature? Whom did this eerie text address? It took me years to sort out the mental discomfort caused to me by the necessity of accepting this novel metaphor. It was obvious that these biologists used ‘text’ for a sequence of characters which no one had written, no one was meant to understand, no one was meant to interpret. They spoke of ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ as functions performed by things, not by people.

  As I reflect on these two first stations in my crab-like crawling through landscapes of past innocence, I am tempted to stop at the next station: my first encounter with the idea that language can be studied as a code. Remembering my own mental framework in the late forties, and reminding my colleagues of theirs, I would have a sufficient distance from the present to describe and then analyze the gulf between the mental space then and now. If I did this, my main attention would be drawn to the way in which the existence of the new use of text has affected the popular mind rather than technical or scientific discourse. The symbolic impact of suggestive things, like ‘the’ computer, that act as sacred symbols, and the symbolic impact of conjuring words, like ‘the’ text, would hold my main interest. But at this time I only want to create the proper mood for such an analysis. I want to achieve this by going back to the rather distant past when a new technology had a faintly comparable effect. By pointing out the great difficulties faced by the historian in interpreting the change of the page in 1200 A.D., I hope to enliven the courage of those who focus on the recent past. To throw light on what I see as the end of the era of bookish reading, I want to look at its beginning and again, in crab-like fashion, move back to the time just before the University came into existence.