The Lost Art of Memory

The Lost Art of Memory
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles, BCC, DNGH

Countryside UU Church, September 6, 2009

Geneva UU Society, November 29, 2009

Labor Day

I don’t know how you intend to spend Labor Day, but for Lindsay and me it will be a day of rest and gratitude. For us,  that gratitude is about how we have each found careers that are fulfilling, and our labor is labor we enjoy doing and appreciate. Someone once said, “Choose work you enjoy and you never work another day in your life.” I like that.

We will grill up a couple of steaks, open a bottle of champagne and spend some time reminiscing about years gone past. As we’ve known each other for more than thirty years, and have shared a common profession through all of that time, there will be a lot of reminiscing. For us, Labor Day, will be a day of Remembering.

And so my topic today is about memory.


The Arts of Memory

Human consciousness is not stable. The abilities of our minds today are different from those who have lived in the past.

In our age we rely on books, videos, signs and computers to augment what we remember. Increasingly, we do not store information in our head. With each passing year more and more of us actually walk around with internet-connected smart-phones on our person, and can summon information from cyberspace at any time in almost any place. Biological memory is at a discount for us, because we have many other ways to reliably store and recall information.

But it was not always so. In times past people did not have ready access to information stored externally. Paper and ink were expensive. Many people could not read, and for those who could, books were rare. People had to remember things easily, quickly and accurately. Their brain actually worked different than our own.

One of the newest advances in neurophysiology has been the discovery that the brain is constantly re-wiring itself. As we process different forms of stimulation, the nerve cells in the brain swell, split and physically move to form new connections to adapt to the new stimulus. In the era of cyberspace, our brain has become physically different from the brain of those who lived in the past.

The Arts of Memory were so important to past civilizations that they formed a legitimate field of academic study. It was possible to actually earn a doctoral degree in memory, and some of the finest minds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance studied these arts carefully.

Now it should be understood that what I am talking about this morning is “artificial memory,” or the craft of studying information that you want to be able to later recall. I am not speaking about “natural memory” where we recall grudges, slights and the list of Wrongs Done to Us. It is usually best if we leave that sort of past recollection to God’s memory and try not to dwell on it. The Arts of Memory concern themselves with those things we do want to recall.


How It Was Done

At the core of all of the systems of formal memory is the fact that our minds store information by associating ideas together. Therefore, the Arts of Memory are all based on systems of associating information together in an orderly way.

The ancient Greek orators were the first to work this out. Both Aristotle and Plato refer to the skill of “artificial memory.” But what we know of it mostly comes from a Roman orator, Cicero, from his book on rhetoric, De Oratore.

He tells the story of a nobleman of Thessaly named Scopas, who hired the poet Simonides of Ceos to create a poem in his honor, and chant it to his guests at a banquet. Afterward, two men appeared at the door as asked Simonides to step outside and talk. As soon as he had done so the roof of the banquet hall collapsed, and the host and all of the other guests were crushed beyond recognition.

Later, in an effort to assist the relatives of the deceased in identifying the remains for burial, Simonides was able to recall who each was by visualizing each person as he had sat around the table. From this was created a system of memorization called “Loci,” Greek for “Locations.”

As it was ultimately developed, a public speaker would imaginatively walk through his or her house, just in his or her mind, in a specific pattern that never changed. At different places in this imaginative journey, the orator would imagine a picture or scene that reminded him or her of what they were trying to recall.

For example, if the speaker wanted to remember that the first point of a speech was about a the politician Pericles, he or she might image a statute of Pericles standing in front of the doorway of the home.

If the second point was about Pericles’ use of warhorses in combat, the speaker might image a warhorse in full battle gear standing in the front hall.

If the third point of the speech was about a new treaty with the Spartans about importing wine, the speaker might imagine a Spartan warrior sitting in the living room drinking a goblet of wine. These images are easier to recall then rote memorization of text.

Then, when the time came to give a speech, the orator would ask him or herself  “What is in the doorway?” The answer, “A statue of Peracles,” reminded the speaker of how to begin the speech. When it came time to recall the second section of the oration, the speaker would ask “What is in the hall?” The answer, “A warhorse,” would remind the speaker of what to say next.

Very complex, long speeches could be recalled in this way. Our own language retains an echo of this technique when someone giving a talk might say “In the First Place….” or “Now, in the Second Place.”

An unknown teacher of Rhetoric in Rome in about 85 B.C.E. compiled a textbook of all the techniques known at the time to improve and perfect memory. The book, called Ad Herennium, became a classic and was much used in the Middle Ages by religious orders to assist scribes and monks in remembering long passages of scripture and sacred texts so they could be transcribed accurately. The Dominican Order was especially well schooled in this Art of Artificial Memory.

Now associative memory is not some magic formula. It requires work and practice.

There is a wonderful joke making the rounds among those of us who use the Arts of Memory. A man was having a terrible time with his recall. Finally, his wife took him to a psychologist who taught him how to associate ideas with mental pictures. It did help. Some time later a friend came upon the couple and asked how the memory training was going. “Great!” said the man. To which the friend asked the doctors name. “Ah…..” said the man. “Let me see….a flower, red, long stem, thorns….” “Rose” his wife said. “That’s it” said the man. Then he turned to his wife and said “So Rose, what was the name of that doctor again?”

Now associative memory is not perfect, but it is far more accurate than attempts at rote short-term recall such as when cramming for a test. The latter sort of memory is almost worthless for anything other than passing a test.

But associative memory was only the beginning. In the 16th century students of the Art of Memory began to develop what has since been called the “Memory Palace,” or as St. Teresa called it, the “Interior Castle.”

The concept was simple. It was an elaboration of the Loci system. Except, instead of walking through one’s home, one created instead a fantasy of a palace or castle. In one’s imagination one always moved though the palace following the same route, and one used places along that route as loci to imagine pictures that were associated with the learning one sought to member.

But a palace is large, and there would be many more places that one could use to remember things. And, by adding rooms to the palace, one could elaborate the structure without limit to constantly add new things to it. As you were literally making up the rooms, you could make them startling and therefore easy to recall.

For example, there could be a room filled with broken violins, and another full of polished spoons. Provided you always imagined yourself moving though the rooms of the sections and wings of your Memory Palace in the same order, you could create an infinite number of Loci that could allow you to remember, accurately, a vast number of things.

In a way, it’s a bit like the Pensieve from the fictional Harry Potter universe, where you store memories until needed.

This was the full development of the Arts of Memory and every educated person during the Renaissance used them. I’ve used a Memory Palace since college when I first learned of the concept from a history professor. I have found it enormously helpful in remembering the myriad details of my four areas of professional training: Culinary Arts, Philosophy, Ministry and Hypnotism.

In the Renaissance, The Society of Jesus used the Memory Palace as a way to send missionaries to China and to achieve power in the court of the Shogun at the request of the Pope.

If you are curious about this, I highly recommend the wonderful book The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by historian Jonathan Spence.

Ricci was an Italian Jesuit who was sent to China in 1583 as a missionary. Realizing that to be successful he must convince the Imperial Court of the superiority of Western culture, he taught the Memory Palace technique to a generation of Confucian scholars who needed to commit to memory the vast Analects of Confucious. He did rise in power in China, and his sympathetic letters about Chinese society influenced how Europe thought about their Eastern neighbor.

Then, in the Renaissance, practitioners of mysticism figured out a way to use the Arts of Memory for something no one had ever considered.

Neo-Platonism

To understand how this happened requires one to understand a bit about ancient Greek philosophy. One of the greatest of these philosophers was Plato. The teaching of Plato were re-discovered during the Renaissance and became hugely popular and influential.

One of the things Plato taught was reincarnation. Plato believed that souls were periodically reborn as part of an effort to learn new things and perfect themselves. However, Plato believed that in the period between incarnations, the soul existed in a pure state, in touch with the eternal source of all knowledge and wisdom.

Birth was a fall from this state of knowledge, where we forgot the eternal truths we had known. As we studied and learned, we were not so much acquiring new information as we were remembering information we had known when in the place between lives. The key idea is that Plato taught that learning new things was actually a process of remembering things that one had forgotten when one existed in a purely spiritual state.

“Ah Ha!” said mystical philosophers during the Renaissance. If learning was actually a process of remembering eternal truths, couldn’t one construct a Memory Palace in such a way that as one imagined oneself walking through the rooms, one would be reminded of the eternal truths and knowledge that one knew between lives but had forgotten at birth?

That’s what they tried to do, and it set them on a collision course with the Roman Catholic Church.

Giordano Bruno

I could spend a good deal of time this morning listing all of the philosophers who tried to invent a Memory Palace that would let them acquire spiritual knowledge. I could tell you about Isaac Newton, the Memory Theater of Giulio Camillo, Roger Fludd whose Memory Palace became the template for Shakespeare's Globe Theater, or Ramon Lull. Instead, I will just select one, Giordano Bruno.

Bruno was born in 1548 C.E. He became a Dominican and learned the Art of Memory from them. However, he soon went beyond his teachers. He devised a system of Memory Palaces based not on buildings but upon Astronomy and Astrology. His books became very influential.

Today Bruno is remembered as one of the founders of modern scientific thought. His books on mathematics and astronomy are still important. He was an early proponent of heliocentrism, the conviction that the earth orbits the Sun, 16 years before Galileo.

While it is impossible to know what to make of the claims, many people in the Renaissance who imagined themselves walking through the Memory Palaces described by Bruno, felt they had experiences where they “remembered” new information.

Physicians “remembered” how to treat diseases that were untreatable, and cures were reported. Mathematicians made discoveries. Many people found themselves “remembering” solutions to personal problems. It became the “pop psychology” of its time.

Now I have no idea what to make of this myself. I do not use the Arts of Memory for this purpose and frankly, it sounds like what these people were doing was a sort of self-hypnotic free association to stimulate creative imagination. But whatever it was, it went over big.

Then Bruno went too far. In his later works he began to include mythological and pagan gods into his system, and claimed that it would allow one to “remember” teachings that were older than Christianity and just as true.

That was too much for the Church. Bruno was arrested by the Inquisition and burned at the stake for heresy in 1600. In 1889 an international committee erected a statue of Bruno on the site of his execution in recognition to his contribution to the sciences of astronomy and mathematics. The statue stands there to this day.

After Bruno’s murder, Church rules were formulated to set limits on what the Arts of Memory might be used for. It was fine if you wanted to use a Memory Palace to remember sacred books, secular knowledge or the details for a complex project. It was not fine to use one to try to “remember” lost knowledge from past times. Burno’s books on the Art of Memory were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorium, or the list of books forbidden by the church.

Then, the printing press came along and books could be produced more readily. More people became literate, and the Arts of Memory went into decline because they were no longer needed in the same way. People had books to help them remember.

The Value of Memory

Yet all of this is more than a reflection on an antique practice. I think we have forgotten the value of memory in our time.

I’ve often commented that I believe that our society is at the beginning of a new Dark Age. It will not be a Dark Age of technology, because I think technology will flourish. It will be a Dark Age of High Culture and Civility.

As I watch with horror the mindless shouting that too often goes on in our contemporary political process, I wonder whatever happened to the value of reasoned dialogue. In ages past people who may have genuinely disagreed with others were capable of talking with civility; understanding that there are many issues about which reasonable people of good will might differ. We have forgotten how to do that.

After the Great Depression of the 1929, financial controls were put in place to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. Yet, systematically those controls have been dismantled in our time, leading to the Great Recession that we all struggle with now. Why didn’t we remember the way it used to be and why those limits and controls were put into place?

Our memory has become short. We no longer use our minds in the way we once did, and so the lessons of history and the experience of our community no longer come to mind. Perhaps because we no longer think the same way, we forget the caution of George Santayana, who said, “Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.”
 
Equally so, I think, for those who simply have forgotten the lessons of history and don’t look them up unless there is some reason.

As the brain is always rewiring itself to improve its capacity to respond to the stimuli it is receiving from its environment, the very nature of human consciousness is in flux. Indeed, we are conducting a world-wide experiment in human consciousness right now, with no forethought and absolutely no controls.

We do not have a clue what exposure to violent stimuli from video games is doing to the neural networks of the children of our age. I can tell you the the brain will respond by rewiring itself to cope with violent stimuli. What that means in terms of our future, I can’t know.

The Internet has made a vast change in human civilization; equal if not more important than the development of the printing press. But we have no idea what it is doing to our minds.

However, conduct this experiment. Ten years ago probably everyone in this room could have picked up a book on some topic of interest, and immersed themselves in it for 30 minutes at a stretch; processing ideas in a logical and linear fashion.

Try it now. Pick up such a book. Look at your watch and note the time, and try to lose yourself in the book for a half hour. Most of you will not be able to do it. You will get about ten minutes in, and you will start becoming restless. Your brain is looking for the hyperlink it thinks should be there. It wants you to click on it and jump to the next interesting topic. Your consciousness has changed. You no longer process information in the same way.

Perhaps this change is needed. In his day the ancient philosopher Aristotle was said to have known, by memory, all of the knowledge of the world. Perhaps he did, because in part there was not all that much to know. That’s not true now. While I think we might be developing a new kind of human consciousness in our time-- one that will be a mile wide, and an inch deep--maybe we need to do that.

In any case, no one would be harmed by studying again the Lost Arts of Memory, or at least remembering them as an occasion to wonder about what lies ahead.

And that’s my sermon.

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The Lost Art of Memory--Service

Chalice Lighting (Psalm 27, NRSV, adapted)

With Spirit as our light and hope, whom shall we fear?
With Spirit as the stronghold of our lives, of whom should we be afraid?
Though an army be encamped against us, our hearts shall not fear;
Though conflict rise up against us, yet we will be confident.

We kindle the light of our chalice to remind us to be courageous during difficult times, and to be the lamp unto our feet as we walk our spiritual path.

Reading        The Interior Castle, Saint Teresa of Avila

While I was beseeching Our Lord today that He would speak through me, since I could find nothing to say and had no idea how to begin to carry out the obligation laid upon me by obedience, a thought occurred to me that I will now set down, in order to have some foundation upon which to build.

I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms just as in Heaven there are many mansions.

Now if we think carefully over this, sisters, the soul of the righteous man is nothing but a paradise, in which, as God tells us, He takes His delight. For what do you think a room will be like that is the delight of a King so mighty, so pure and so full of all that is good? I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity. In fact, however acute our intellects may be, they will no more be able to attain to a comprehension of this than to an understanding of God; for as He Himself says, He created us in His image and likeness. Now if this is so--and it is--there is no point in our fatiguing ourselves by attempting to comprehend that beauty of this castle; for, though it is His creature, and there is therefore as much difference between it and God as between creature and creator, the very fact that His Majesty says it is made in His image means that we can hardly form any conception of the soul’s great dignity and beauty.

[She then goes on for 300 pages describing what she has just said cannot be described.]


Offertory    The Rev. Victoria Weinstein, Norwell MA, aka Peacebang

Jesus said, ‘Where your heart is, there shall your treasure be also.’ Our hearts are with this community – not because it is perfect, not because it is easy to be in community, and not because we are always happy here, but because here we are called and recalled, again and again, to our highest aspirations and ideals.
The Church at its best provides not only the comfort of fellowship and care, but the spiritual stretch we need to go beyond the littleness of our own lives and grow in moral maturity. Let us now share out a portion of our financial treasure where our hearts are.

Reading    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowing, p. 596

“Come,” said Dumbledore on his left, and he put his hand under Harry’s elbow. Harry felt himself rising into the air; the dungeon dissolved around him; for a moment, all was blackness, and then he felt as thought he had done a slow-motion somersault, suddenly landing flat on his feet, in what seemed like the dazzling light of Dumbledore’s sunlit office. the stone basin was shimmering in the cabinet in front of him, and Albus Dumbledore was standing beside him.
    “Professor,” Harry gasped, “I know I shouldn’y’ve --I didn’t mean--the cabinet door was sort of open and---
    “I quite understand,” said Dumbledore. He lifted the basin, carried it over to his desk, placed it upon the polished top, and sat down in the chair behind it. He motioned for Harry to sit down opposite him.
    Harry did so, staring at the stone basin. The contents had returned to their original, silvery-white state, swirling and rippling beneath his gaze.
    “What is it?” Harry asked shakily.
    “This? It is called a Pensieve,” said Dumbledore. “I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”
    “Er,” said Harry, who couldn’t truthfully say that he had ever felt anything of the sort.
    “At these times,” said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, “I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.


Prayer - Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro

May we discover through pain and torment,
the strength to live with grace and humor.
May we discover through doubt and anguish, 
the strength to live with dignity and holiness.
May we discover through suffering and fear, 
the strength to move toward healing.
May it come to pass that we be restored to health and to vigor.
May Life grant us wellness of body, spirit, and mind. 
And if this cannot be so, may we find in this transformation and passage
moments of meaning, opportunities for love
and the deep and gracious calm that comes 
when we allow ourselves to move on.


Responsive Benediction

And now may the Truth that makes us free,
And the Hope that never dies,
And the Love that casts out fears,
Lead us forward together,
Until the Dayspring breaks,
And the Shadows flee away.