Does a thing called Memory have a future?
Memory is not, I fear, what it used to be. Not mine, not yours, and not the culture's at large. Memory for me is always fresh, in spite of the fact that the object being remembered is done and past. Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was- that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way. I've found myself musing lately over whether memory even has a future. You might be relieved or merely amused to hear that I've concluded that it does, albeit with a catch. It seems to me that the future of memory is more and more bound up with the future of poetry, another form of human endeavor that has perhaps seen better days. Indulge me for a few moments while I enlarge on this theme just a bit.
The ancient Greeks reserved a lofty place in the classical pantheon for memory, whom they personified as a female Titan by the name of Mnemosyne.
The classical glossaries tell us that Mnemosyne was herself the cosmic daughter of Heaven and Earth, and that sounds about right. The birth of memory — we're in the realm of myth and metaphor here, yet I suspect that even the most hard-headed linguists and anthropologists would agree that something unfathomably momentous in the course of human events transpired with the emergence of memory as a force to be reckoned with. And when we consider that the root of the word for memory in Greek (mnemonikos) is tantalizingly close to that of mindful (mnemon), it becomes all that much harder to downplay the supreme role of that grand dame Mnemosyne in making us who and what we are.
No wonder, then, that for most of recorded history, memory has been regarded as a high art, and even a sacred one, closely akin to the arts of divination and inspiration. And before history could be recorded, back before the advent of alphabets and hieroglyphics and such handy innovations as papyrus and styluses and quills and vellum — well, those were surely the glory days of memory, for memory was all we poor forked creatures had to keep things in mind. These were the days before history, at least as we now think of history. But poetry is another story. Poetry was already ancient before there was history, and that's because poetry was memory's darling. In ways we now can scarcely imagine, memory breathed life into poetry and poetry in turn made memory something truly memorable.
The first poet we can assign a name to in the Western tradition is Homer, though we really haven't the faintest idea who Homer was or whether there was only one of him. But we do know what Homer's medium was — it was the air he breathed, and the acts of memory he called into being when he delivered up his lines. Memory for a Homer was nothing very mechanical as what we now call "memorization"; the function of memory in Homeric oral expression was, in the truest sense of the word, the power of "re-membering," that is, to bring things back or put things back together, to recover experience and emotion and turn them into forms of fluent energy and intensity.
Seen in this light, it is not so terribly surprising that even well into the age of sophisticated writing systems, memory continued to occupy an esteemed position as one of the essential disciplines of civilized culture. Memory was a serious business, and trying to get to the bottom of how memory works taxed some of the great minds of Western Civilization. St. Augustine, to cite but one illustrious example, devotes several intensely searching passages in his Confessions to the mysteries of memory, confessing tellingly at one point, "Yet I do not understand the power of memory that is in me, although without it I could not even speak about myself."
So where does that leave us, we modern offspring of Mnemosyne? Memory is still a serious business, but now it comes manufactured for us, almost infinitely "expandable" as the high tech ads like to crow and configured in mind-boggling quantities of megabytes and gigabytes. Back in the dark ages, when I first trotted off to high school armed with a Royal typewriter (which despite the suggestive brand name was no memory palace, I can assure you), memory could still be thought of as one of the intellect's prime assets, much as it was for the ancient orators and epic poets. Today, however, memory has become an industry, a commodity; and we have more memory at our disposal than we know what to do with. Memory is one of the triumphs of technology, but where does that leave the art of memory, I ask you? Is it inevitable that human memory is doomed to atrophy now that we have memory machines to do our remembering for us? Are we on the verge of disowning the mother of the muses, and in her place giving over our affections and devotions to the motherboard of the muses?
Don't bet on it. On the contrary, we may be entering a most auspicious age for the memory arts to make a comeback, and this time in a more purely artful form. Now that we are all essentially subjects of a virtual empire of computational memory, there is no longer much practical reason to slave away on the upkeep of memory's structural integrity. That's in the hands of the systems gurus and the webmasters now. A mixed blessing, perhaps, but might it not has the positive effect of granting us greater liberty to do what we will with our own private estates of memory? The way I see it, the revolution in information technology that has made such astonishing gains in taking over what might be called the grunt work of memory has potentially freed up all kinds of room in our minds for newly reclaimed fields of memory to take root and flower.
I fret the pieces and fragments of memory because too often we want the whole thing. When we wake from a dream we want to remember all of it, although the fragment we are remembering may be, and very probably is, the most important piece in the dream.
I know that this article seemed to be a little bit long, that is because the idea is so intriguing for me. To sum up everything, all I can say is that, Memories are timeless treasures of the heart, a photograph taken by the heart to make a special moment last forever. It is also a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, and the things you never want to lose.
Memory, then, no matter how small the piece remembered, demands my respect, my attention, and my trust.
