Memory, p.27
Memory, page 27
The striking and exciting feature of Fludd’s memory system is that the memory buildings which are to be places in the heavens in this new combination of the round and the square arts, are what he calls ‘theatres’. And by this word ‘theatre’ he does not mean what we should call a theatre, a building consisting of a stage and an auditorium. He means a stage. The truth of this statement that the ‘theatre’ which Fludd illustrates is really a stage, will be amply proved later. It will, however, be useful to state it here in advance before starting on the memory system.
The ‘common place’ of the ars rotunda, states Fludd, is ‘the ethereal part of the world, that is the celestial orbs numbered from the eighth sphere and ending in the sphere of the moon’. This statement is illustrated by a diagram showing the eighth sphere, or zodiac, marked with the signs of the zodiac, and enclosing seven circles representing the spheres of the planets, and a circle representing the sphere of the elements at the centre. This represents, says Fludd, a ‘natural’ order of memory places based on the zodiac, and also a temporal order through the movement of the spheres in relation to time.fn4
On either side of the sign Aries, two small buildings are shown. They are tiny ‘theatres’, or stages. These two ‘theatres’, in this actual form with two doors at the back of the stage, are never illustrated again nor referred to in the text. An occult memory system always has many unexplained lacunae and I do not understand why Fludd never afterwards mentions these two ‘theatres’. I can only suppose that they are placed here on the cosmic diagram as a kind of advance statement of the principle of this memory system, which will use ‘theatres’, buildings containing memory loci after the manner of the ars quadrata, but placed on the great common place of the ars rotunda, that is placed in the zodiac.
Exactly facing the diagram of the heavens, on the next page of the book, there is an engraving of a ‘theatre’. The diagram of the heavens and the picture of the ‘theatre’ are placed on opposite pages in such a manner that, when the book is closed, the heavens cover the theatre. This theatre, as already stated, is not a complete theatre but a stage. The wall facing us, as we gaze at it, is its frons scaenae, containing five entrances, as in the classical frons scaenae. This is, however, not a classical stage. It is an Elizabethan or Jacobean multi-level stage. Three of the entrances are on ground level; two are arches, but the central one can be closed by heavy hinged doors which are shown half open. The other two entrances are on an upper level; they open on to a battlemented terrace. In the centre, as a very noticeable feature of this stage, there is a kind of bay window, or an upper chamber or room.
This picture of a ‘theatre’ or stage is introduced by Fludd with the following words:
I call a theatre [a place in which] all actions of words, of sentences, of particulars of a speech or of subjects are shown, as in a public theatre in which comedies and tragedies are acted.
Fludd is going to use this theatre as a memory place system for memory for words and memory for things. But the theatre itself is like ‘a public theatre in which comedies and tragedies are acted’. Those great wooden theatres in which the works of Shakespeare and others were played were technically known as ‘public theatres’. In view of Fludd’s strong convictions about the undesirability of using ‘fictitious places’ in memory, can we assume that this is a real stage in a public theatre which he is showing us?
The chapter containing the illustration of the theatre is headed ‘The description of the eastern and western theatres’ and it appears that there are to be two of these theatres, the one ‘eastern’ and the other ‘western’, identical in plan but different in colour. The eastern theatre is to be light, bright and shining, since it will hold actions belonging to the day. The western theatre will be dark, black and obscure, belonging to the night. Both are to be placed in the heavens, and refer, presumably, to the day and night ‘houses’ of the planets. Is there to be an eastern and a western theatre for each of the signs of the zodiac? Are they to be placed as we see those two little stages on each side of Aries on the plan, but not only with one sign but all round the heavens? I rather think so. But we are in the realms of occult memory and it is not easy to follow how these theatres in the heavens are supposed to work.
The closest comparison for this system is Bruno’s system in Images in which elaborate arrangements of memory rooms containing places for memory images (as in what Fludd calls the ‘square’ art) are affiliated to a ‘round’ or celestial system. Similarly (or so I believe) Fludd’s ‘theatres’ are memory rooms which are to be affiliated to the round heavens by being placed in the zodiac. If he intends that two such ‘theatres’ are to be placed with each sign, then the ‘theatre’ which he illustrates would be one of twenty-four identical memory rooms. The ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ or day and night theatres introduce time into a system which is attached to the revolution of the heavens. It is of course a highly occult or magical system, based on belief in the macrocosm–microcosm relationship.
On the bay window of the ‘theatre’ are inscribed the words THEATRUM ORBI. Since Fludd and the highly educated engraver certainly knew Latin it seems difficult to believe that this can be a mistake for THEATRUM ORBIS. I suggest therefore (though with diffidence) that the dative case is intentional and that the inscription means, not that this is a ‘theatre of the World’ but one of the ‘theatres’ or stages to be placed with or in the world, that is in the heavens shown on the opposite page.
‘Each of the theatres will have five doors distinct from one another and about equidistant, the use of which we will explain later,’ says Fludd. Thus the five doors or entrances seen in the picture of the ‘theatre’ are confirmed by the text which states that the theatres have five doors. There is agreement between picture and text about this. The use of the five doors in the theatres which Fludd explains later is that they are to serve as five memory loci, which stand in a relationship with five columns to which they are said to be opposite. The bases of these five columns are shown in the foreground of the picture of the ‘theatre’. One is round, the next square, the central one is hexagonal, and then come another square one and another round one. ‘There are to be feigned five columns, distinguished from one another by shape and colour. The shapes of the two at each extremity are circular and round; the middle column will have the figure of a hexagon; and the intermediary ones will be square.’fn5 Here again the picture corresponds with the text, for the picture shows the bases of columns of these shapes and arranged in this order.
These columns, continues Fludd, are of different colours, corresponding to ‘the colours of the doors of the theatres opposite to them’. These doors are to be used as five memory loci and are to be distinguished from one another by being remembered as different in colour. The first door will be white, the second red, the third green, the fourth blue, and the fifth black. The correspondence between the doors and the columns is perhaps indicated in the picture of the ‘theatre’ by the geometrical forms shown on the battlemented terrace. I do not understand how these correspondences are supposed to work in detail, though it is clear that the main central door on ground level would correspond to the main central column in the shape of a hexagon, and the other four doors to the four circular and square columns.
With this set of ten places, five doors and five columns, in all the ‘theatres’, Fludd is proposing to remember things and words in his magical memory system. Though he does not mention the rules of Ad Herennium in connection with the doors and the columns he certainly has these in mind. The doors are spaced to form suitable memory places. The columns are of different shapes so that they may not be too much alike and confuse the memory. The notion of remembering memory loci as of different colours as an additional help for distinguishing between them is not in Ad Herennium but is often advised in the memory treatises.
The system works through being hitched to the stars, or rather to the ‘principle ideas’ as Fludd calls them in a chapter on the relation of the planets to the signs of the zodiac. This chapter gives the celestial basis of the system; and it is immediately followed by the chapter on the five doors and five columns in the memory theatres. The heavens work together with the theatres, and the theatres are in the heavens. The ‘round’ and the ‘square’ art are united to from a memory ‘Seal’, or an occult memory system of extreme complexity. Fludd never uses the word ‘Seal’, but his memory system is undoubtedly of a Brunian type.
From A.R. LURIA, The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968), translated by Lynn Solotaroff
It was only natural, then, that the visual quality of his recall was fundamental to his capacity for remembering words. For when he heard or read a word it was at once converted into a visual image corresponding with the object the word signified for him. Once he formed an image, which was always of a particularly vivid nature, it stabilised itself in his memory, and though it might vanish for a time when his attention was taken up with something else, it would manifest itself once again whenever he returned to the situation in which the word had first come up. As he described it:
When I hear the word green, a green flowerpot appears; with the word red I see a man in a red shirt coming toward me; as for blue, this means an image of someone waving a small blue flag from a window … Even numbers remind me of images. Take the number 1. This is a proud, well-built man; 2 is a high-spirited woman; 3 a gloomy person (why, I don’t know); 6 a man with a swollen foot; 7 a man with a mustache; 8 a very stout woman – a sack within a sack. As for the number 87, what I see is a fat woman and a man twirling his mustache. (Record of September 1936)
One can easily see that the images produced by numbers and words represent a fusion of graphic ideas and synesthetic reactions. If S. heard a word he was familiar with, the image would be sufficient to screen off any synesthetic reactions; but if he had to deal with an unfamiliar word, which did not evoke an image, he would remember it ‘in terms of lines.’ In other words, the sounds of the word were transformed into colored splotches, lines, or splashes. Thus, even with an unfamiliar word, he still registered some visual impression which he associated with it but which was related to the phonetic qualities of the word rather than to its meaning.
When S. read through a long series of words, each word would elicit a graphic image. And since the series was fairly long, he had to find some way of distributing these images of his in a mental row or sequence. Most often (and this habit persisted throughout his life), he would ‘distribute’ them along some roadway or street he visualised in his mind. Sometimes this was a street in his home town, which would also include the yard attached to the house he had lived in as a child and which he recalled vividly. On the other hand, he might also select a street in Moscow. Frequently he would take a mental walk along that street – Gorky Street in Moscow – beginning at Mayakovsky Square, and slowly make his way down, ‘distributing’ his images at houses, gates, and store windows. At times, without realising how it had happened, he would suddenly find himself back in his home town (Torzhok), where he would wind up his trip in the house he had lived in as a child. The setting he chose for his ‘mental walks’ approximates that of dreams, the difference being that the setting in his walks would immediately vanish once his attention was distracted but would reappear just as suddenly when he was obliged to recall a series he had ‘recorded’ this way.
This technique of converting a series of words into a series of graphic images explains why S. could so readily reproduce a series from start to finish or in reverse order; how he could rapidly name the word that preceded or followed one I’d select from the series. To do this, he would simply begin his walk, either from the beginning or from the end of the street, find the image of the object I had named, and ‘take a look at’ whatever happened to be situated on either side of it. S.’s visual patterns of memory differed from the more commonplace type of figurative memory by virtue of the fact that his images were exceptionally vivid and stable; he was also able to ‘turn away’ from them, as it were, and ‘return’ to them whenever it was necessary.
It was this technique of recalling material graphically that explained why S. always insisted a series be read clearly and distinctly, that the words not be read off too quickly. For he needed some time, however slight, to convert the words into images. If the words were read too quickly, without sufficient pause between them, his images would tend to coalesce into a kind of chaos or ‘noise’ through which he had difficulty in discerning anything.
In effect, the astonishing clarity and tenacity of his images, the fact that he could retain them for years and call them up when occasion demanded it, made it possible for him to recall an unlimited number of words and to retain these indefinitely. Nonetheless, his method of ‘recording’ also had certain drawbacks.
Once we were convinced that the capacity of S.’s memory was virtually unlimited, that he did not have to ‘memorise’ the data presented but merely had to ‘register an impression,’ which he could ‘read’ on a much later date … we naturally lost interest in trying to ‘measure’ his memory capacity. Instead, we concentrated on precisely the reverse issue: was it possible for him to forget? We tried to establish the instances in which S. had omitted a word from a series.
Indeed, not only were such instances to be found, but they were fairly frequent. Yet how was one to explain forgetting in a man whose memory seemed inexhaustible? How explain that sometimes there were instances in which S. omitted some elements in his recall but scarcely ever reproduced material inaccurately (by substituting a synonym or a word closely associated in meaning with the one he’d been given)?
The experiments immediately turned up answers to both questions. S. did not ‘forget’ words he’d been given; what happened was that he omitted these as he ‘read off’ a series. And in each case there was a simple explanation for the omissions. If S. had placed a particular image in a spot where it would be difficult for him to ‘discern’ – if he, for example, had placed it in an area that was poorly lit or in a spot where he would have trouble distinguishing the object from the background against which it had been set – he would omit this image when he ‘read off’ the series he had distributed along his mental route. He would simply walk on ‘without noticing’ the particular item, as he explained.
These omissions (and they were quite frequent in the early period of our observation, when S.’s technique of recall had not developed to its fullest) clearly were not defects of memory but were, in fact, defects of perception. They could not be explained in terms of established ideas on the neuro-dynamics of memory traces (retroactive and proactive inhibition, extinction of traces, etc.) but rather by certain factors that influence perception (clarity, contrast, the ability to isolate a figure from its background, the degree of lighting available, etc.). His errors could not be explained, then, in terms of the psychology of memory but had to do with the psychological factors that govern perception.
Excerpts from the numerous reports taken on our sessions with S. will serve to illustrate this point. When, for example, S. reproduced a long series of words, he omitted the word pencil; on another occasion he skipped egg; in a third series it was the word banner, and in a fourth, blimp. Finally, S. omitted from another series the word shuttle, which he was not familiar with. The following is his explanation of how this happened:
I put the image of the pencil near a fence … the one down the street, you know. But what happened was that the image fused with that of the fence and I walked right on past without noticing it. The same thing happened with the word egg. I had put it up against a white wall and it blended in with the background. How could I possibly spot a white egg up against a white wall? Now take the word blimp. That’s something gray, so it blended in with the gray of the pavement … Banner, of course, means the Red Banner. But, you know, the building which houses the Moscow City Soviet of Workers’ Deputies is also red, and since I’d put the banner close to one of the walls of the building I just walked on without seeing it … Then there’s the word putamen, I don’t know what this means, but it’s such a dark word that I couldn’t see it … and, besides, the street lamp was quite a distance away. (Record of December 1932)
From MARY J. CARRUTHERS, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1992)
A remarkably fierce animal suddenly looms into a Biblical interpretatio by the Dominican scholar, Hugh of St Cher, which may help to shed light on how the voces animantium could be used for organising material in the memory. It occurs in his comment on the phrase ‘in medio umbrae mortis,’ Ps. 22: 4. ‘Et nota,’ he says in a phrase which, I have already suggested, is both an invitation to remember (in reading) and a trigger for recollection (in composing), ‘quod inter omnes peccatores, detractores proprie dicuntur umbrae mortis,’ ‘among all sinners detractors are most fittingly called shadows of death.’ For death indeed spares no one but carries off everyone equally; likewise detractors detract everything. Wherefore, a detractor is signified by a bear (ursus). A bear has a great big voracious mouth, just like a backbiter or detractor. And it has three rows of teeth, which Hugh of St Cher proceeds to moralise in terms of a backbiter’s nasty characteristics.
