The art of memory

 

From: An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness

I was thinking about Frances Yate's wonderful book, 'The Art of Memory' the other day. I haven't read it for many years but I was reminded of it because not long ago the artist Rosie Vohra had been asked to make a personal selection for exhibition within the Leeds Arts University library and she had chosen an artist's book that I made over 40 years ago, 'An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness'. I wrote the text for it at a time when I was under the influence of Yates' book and some of the images directly reflect the types of structures she used as illustrations in the book. Looking at the images again I was reminded of the fact that I was also trying to make sense of computer technology. We had been trying out a new type of wax printer, that took wax coated paper sheets of cyan, magenta, yellow and black and ran them one after the other through a series of rollers that passed underneath a heater, whilst at the same time thousands of pins  pushed down on the sheets in the areas designated by your design, that had been converted into CMYK separations, thus transferring the wax to the print paper. It was a clumsy process and we only ever had that one printer and it was never replaced. However, because there were now four layers of wax, there was a certain richness to the surfaces laid down and I wanted to make use of that. The final images were printed off and bound together with a text that I had typeset also using a computer and that I thought was it. At the time I thought it was a very good piece of work, but now on re-examining the book I realise that I ought to have bound glassine paper into the book between pages, because over the years the wax has begun to rub off onto the facing pages. However the fact that the book was out on display gave me a chance to photograph it and of course rethink what I might be able to do if I revisited the idea. 

From: An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness

Frances Yates introduced me to several ideas that have cropped up again and again in my work; in particular because memory enhancement was part of rhetoric training and rhetoric was about getting your ideas across to other people in memorable ways. Something that as an artist I'm constantly having to think about and as a former lecturer who used to introduce students to communication theory, I owe it to myself to always remain aware of these issues. 

Playing with the idea of what comes where in terms of a visual hierarchy

Since making the book, I have become much more interested in animism and ideas that touch upon a 'flat ontology' or level playing field, when we come to look at our relationships with other things. The medieval idea of the great chain of being, a hierarchy with God at the top, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants, elements (fire, water, etc.) and finally, inanimate objects like rocks at the bottom, is still in many ways how human beings think of the world and how it relates to them. Perhaps because of the spread of atheism, God and angels no longer have pride of place, but that often means that we humans then take top spot. In my watercolour image above, a cow has reached the top of the stairway but is about to fall down, leaving a field of wheat in top spot. I was playing with hierarchies, trying to subvert the order of things as usually pictured by humans.

However going back to Yates and her explication of how memory training was used, in particular in relation to Cicero's work on rhetoric, one of the big issues was making images that were startling in their appearance and also linked to what you want to remember by some sort of likeness. For instance, testis is a Latin word for “witness” and was used in Cicero's time in relation to witnessing one's manhood, therefore the words testify, testimonial and testament share a common etymology with the word testicle. Cicero at one point suggests that in a speech, if you want to remember that now is the time to speak about certain legal matters, you could mentally place a giant pair of testicles at a particular spot within a building that you were in your mind walking through, to help you remember the various components of your speech. It's a good image and one I must try out as a drawing at some point. We have all at one time or another tried to remember stuff and have realised that we can do this much easier if we can find a link to something else, especially a link that also takes a memorable shape and locates what we are trying to remember in a pictured space that you can mentally hold in your mind. For instance; if you want to remember a shopping list, you can visualise each item in its place on the shelves of a supermarket. Then you can picture yourself walking through the various aisles and picking up what you need. A renaissance memory theatre operates in a similar way; theatres, such as the Globe, were places most people knew, just as a supermarket is now. Therefore in people's minds they could visualise the structure. Aisles and rows of seating could be set out in a way we are all familiar with and to this day we still go to a theatre or cinema, expecting to make our way to row H, seat 12 etc. It was a space that was easily cross referenced and particular spots pinpointed. Within this space, you could then place the various things you wanted to remember. However certain theorists at the time, such as Giulio Camillo, went further and decided that they could control the system and give it an overall structure that related to that idea of the great chain of being, a hierarchical system, that fixed into place and ordered all things.

Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre

This is how Frances Yates describes Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre; 

“The Theatre rises in seven grades or steps, which are divided by seven gangways representing the seven planets. The student of it is to be as it were a spectator before whom are placed the seven measures of the world ‘in spettaculo’, or in a theatre. And since in ancient theatres the most distinguished persons sat in the lowest seats, so in this Theatre the greatest and most important things will be in the lowest place. That there would be no room for an audience to sit between these enormous and lavishly decorated gangway gates does not matter. For in Camillo’s Theatre the normal function of the theatre is reversed. There is no audience sitting in the seats watching a play on the stage. The solitary ‘spectator’ of the Theatre stands where the stage would be and looks towards the auditorium, gazing at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising grades."

My present day version would be the memory supermarket, shelves stacked with knowledge packets instead of cereals or frozen foods, the fresh food aisles being now places to find new untested ideas, the cleaning products section perhaps devoted to philosophy and ways of thinking, such as the use of Occam's Razor. The bread shelves might be devoted to staple knowledge and the cake section where you might find titbits of information. The science of electro-magnetic fields might begin with the electrical goods section, whilst chemistry was located in the cooking supplies area and biology located where potted plants are. I think you get the drift.

James Joyce was fascinated by Giordano Bruno, who was one of the inventors of the art of memory. In Ithaca, the 17th part of Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom stops “chanting” a Jewish “anthem… in consequence of defective mnemotechnic”; a reminder that in his mind Joyce was trying to bridge between the everyday and the mythic. He uses everyday events as a series of triggers to reference Homer's Odyssey; this final chapter of Ulysses recounts the very mundane events that happen as Leopold Bloom takes Stephen Dedalus home to number 7 Eccles Street for a cup of cocoa and to discuss the night's experiences; the chapter's title being an allusion to Odysseus's return home to Ithaca. Joyce suggests that every day is a journey and in its own way that journey can be as eventful as the voyages of Ulysses. 

The chapters of Ulysses in their own way are also therefore a type of memory structure, the important issue for myself being that everyday events and things can be used to help us think about big issues. I have written a blog post about the hand as a memory system, (as always check out the 'see also' section at the end of each post), a reminder of how much of our thinking is embodied.
The linking of things by finding connections is also something that can be used in the construction of magic and is the reason ritual objects have the power they have. In order to work, magic objects must have a point of contact with something that gives them traction or meaning, the contact if not directly physical, usually being a likeness of some sort. This process is termed the 'Law of Similarity' or 'Sympathetic Magic'. It can also operate by 'touch' which is a very physical connection. For instance a witch doctor could curse the ground that you might walk on; if so you will need protection, to stop that curse getting into your body. This is why historically in India and China and in many other cultures, people used to wear ankle bracelets. A curse would need to pass up and through the ankle, in order to get into the torso, which is the seat of all our vital organs and a charm bracelet worn around the ankle could prevent this. The bracelet also acting as a physical reminder of the need to be mindful of psychic attacks. 

My work developing contemporary votives at one time overlapped with the design of charms, each one a response to a conversation about someone's worries. The charm bracelet above was designed as a type of three dimensional memory object, each charm shaped to reassure the wearer that some sort of psychic protection was in place. Gradually I was becomming aware of things like memory beads, rosaries and South American quipu, all external to the body and operating as recording or memory devices that began with touch and yet were also to be seen. They were of course operating as external brains.

References:

Barker, G. (2023) Votives and Charm Bracelets Materialising Health-Related Experiences Through ‘Sacred’ Objects. In: Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Materialist Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body: Palgrave Macmillan, London

Joyce, J. (2010) Ulysses Wordsworth Editions

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. London: University of Chicago press

Yates, F. (2014) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition London: Routledge

Yates, F. (2014) The Art of Memory London: Bodley Head

See also:

Connecting the singularity 

Memory drawing and hands

Faraday's lines of force

Magic

Deer teeth, perception and symbolic language

Votives and charm bracelets

Drawing and communication theory

Knots