Memory, p.28
Memory, page 28
Where did the bear come from? Judson Allen, who carefully studied this matter, says that Hugh’s comment is found in no other Psalter gloss; it is his own. Hugh of St Cher cites the most famous bear in Scripture, the one with all the teeth in Daniel’s dream (Dan. 7: 5). This text supplies the details of the image: ‘tres ordines erant in ore ejus, et in dentibus ejus,’ ‘three rows were in his mouth, and in the teeth’ (the King James Version so differs from the Vulgate that I have translated the Latin directly).
The bear has a wide, devouring mouth, as does death, as do backbiters – the ‘moralising,’ hermeneutic connections are reasonable enough. And the connection of death with biting is clear, basically by means of the homophony of Latin mors, ‘death,’ and morsus, ‘bite.’ Furthermore, though Latin detractor has no homophonic or etymological connection to mors or morsus, the late Latin participle mordentem, from mordere ‘to bite’ and, by a metaphorical extension, ‘to make a caustic comment,’ clearly connects to ‘detractors’ in meaning, and to ‘death,’ ‘biting,’ and ‘teeth’ in sound. The Old French word, mordant, ‘bitter speaking,’ would have been familiar to Hugh for he was French; he may well also have known the word backbiter from English students at Paris. Such a mnemonically useful tissue of homophonies accords with John of Garland’s advice regarding the use of the sounds of all kinds of languages to help fix etymologies and interpretations in the memory. But none of these words requires a bear.
I suspect that the reason why a bear entered Hugh of St Cher’s compositional memory is because the word ursus, like umbra, starts with a U. Ursus, together with its voces – the most vivid of which is its big mouth, according to Isidore, who derives ursus from os, ‘mouth’ – and texts relevant to it, such as this obvious one from Daniel, would be stored in Hugh’s memory under ‘U’, helping to mark etymologies, distinctions, and interpretations of words and texts which also start with ‘U’. And so, when composing his distinctio on umbra, the U-animal comes to mind, and it has characteristics (voces) which, happily, can this time be pressed into service of the point he wishes to make. In other words, what first led Hugh to a bear was not its hermeneutical aptness, but the simple fact that ursus and umbra have the same initial letter. Ursus leads to its etymology in os, oris; hence ‘teeth,’ and the happy homophony of mors and morsus that I sketched out earlier. So the bear’s appearance in the written text is a vestige of Hugh’s mental organisational scheme. That it also serves his interpretation is, of course, why that connection is preserved in the final composition.
From ROBERT IRWIN, Night and Horses and the Desert (1999)
Ibn Khaldun, having noted that poetry rather than the Qur’an was used to teach Arabic in Andalusia, went on to urge poets to train themselves in their art by memorising the poems of their great predecessors, especially those included in al-Isfahani’s anthology, the Kitab al-Aghani. Ibn Khaldun believed that one was what one had committed to memory; the better the quality of what had been memorised, the better it was for one’s soul. For Ibn Khaldun and his contemporaries, rote-learning was a source of creativity rather than a dreary alternative to it. The impromptu quotation of apposite verses or maxims (so greatly esteemed by those who attended literary soirées) was only made possible by a well-stocked memory. Similarly the ability of poets to extemporise within traditional forms depended in the first instance on memory.
Riwaya, which in modern Arabic means ‘story’, originally referred to the act of memorisation and transmission. The written word was seen as an accessory, a kind of aide-mémoire for people who preferred to rely on memorisation and oral transmission. Often manuscripts were copied with the sole aim of committing to memory what was being copied. Reading aloud also helped to fix a book in the memory. Incidentally, reading silently in private was commonly disapproved of. One should read aloud with a master and by so doing insert oneself in a chain of authoritative transmission. Medieval literature was a continuous buzz.
Repetition was crucial to memorisation. According to one twelfth-century scholar, ‘If you do not repeat something fifty times, it will not remain firmly embedded in the mind.’ Treatises on technical and practical subjects, such as law, warfare, gardening or the rules of chess, were commonly put into verse or rhymed prose in order to assist in their memorisation. Men worried ceaselessly about how to improve their memory. Honey, toothpicks and twenty-one raisins a day were held to be good for the memory, whereas coriander and aubergine were supposed to be bad. Ibn Jama’a, a thirteenth-century scholar, held that reading inscriptions on tombs, walking between camels haltered in a line, or flicking away lice, all interfered with memory.
From DANIEL ARASSE, Anselm Kiefer (2001), translated by Mary Whittall (2006)
His highly specific artistic practice is one of the sources of the overdetermination that characterises Kiefer’s work. It also explains what is unique about Kiefer in the midst of the collective work of memory that informed German art and culture in the 1960s and 1970s. What Kiefer does is not so much a work of memory as a work on memory. While the former would attempt to recall and bring order to memories and so make it impossible to forget, the questions Kiefer was asking during the 1970s were of a subtly different nature. Firstly, what to remember? What recollections and ideas should be allowed into our memories? For a German who was born in 1945 and reached the age of twenty-three in 1968, this primarily means how should he recall and represent Nazism, and the relationship to the more distant German past that it claimed to possess? Secondly, how to remember? The second question is about form, but for that very reason it is crucial, particularly for a young German artist whose memory is without ‘recollections’, because he has no personal memories of the Nazi years (unlike Beuys, notoriously), and because the only ‘memory’ of it he can have is one built out of pre-existing documents, whether in the form of words (spoken or written) or of visual images. Kiefer proceeds as if he were constructing memories of (and with) things that he himself cannot remember. He appropriates objects, texts and images – the only ‘recollections’ available to him – and integrates them into other settings, which he then uses to create works that eventually come to constitute a personal memory of the Third Reich and his own German heritage.
The issue of the quantity and accuracy of the photographic documents he borrowed from Third Reich propaganda and other publications to use as the basis of his own representations will be deferred until later. As a starting point, one object should provide sufficient evidence of the complexity and concerns of his art: the zinc bath, which over the years has played a major role in many works on very different themes. In 1969 we encounter it in the books Heroic Symbols and To Genet. We find it again in 1975, in the books and pictures devoted to Operation Sea Lion; in 1978, in the book Hoffmann von Fallersleben on Heligoland; and in 1980, in the book Alaric’s Tomb. It reappears in Tutein’s Tomb (1981–83), and finally in the picture The Red Sea (1984–85). Over those fifteen years, Kiefer put this apparently incongruous object to some very different uses. Bathtubs had already been put to artistic use before Kiefer turned to them: in 1960, Beuys had made a ‘wounded’ bath the subject of a work which turned out to be particularly prophetic of his future art, and in 1969, with Bathtub for ‘Ludwig van’, a zinc bath filled with sixteen busts of Beethoven made of white sugar, brown chocolate and lard, Dieter Roth visually expounded (and denounced) the cult of the German composer which had turned him into an edible piece of kitsch. But when Kiefer made a bathtub one of his personal motifs, it was for different reasons. As he himself has said, he found it interesting because it was a ‘souvenir’ of the Third Reich: during the 1930s the National Socialist party had issued a bathtub of that type to every household to ensure the daily cleanliness of the German people, and the tub Kiefer used was one he had found in the attic of his grandmother’s house, where he lived until 1951. From the very beginning, his use of this ‘souvenir’ differed both from Roth’s and from Beuys’s. The bathtub went back to childhood in Beuys’s case as well, but he used it allegorically to evoke the trauma of birth. To Kiefer it recalls Nazism and, very specifically in the case of Operation Sea Lion, the plans for the invasion of Great Britain which, as military legend has it, Hitler’s generals discussed by using model boats in bathtubs. The Nazi bathtub, inherited from his grandmother, became a personal souvenir, and part of the process of constructing a memory of Nazism and its practices – as is implicit in the note written in French on page 6 of the book To Genet: ‘Attempt to walk on the water in my bathtub in the studio’ …
At this juncture we need to visit a distant past. Among the many artes memoriae known since antiquity, there is one that deserves particular attention, one that was known over a very wide area and has long been connected with the visual arts. The Ad Herennium, a text wrongly attributed to Cicero, describes a technique intended primarily for orators. In order to memorise a speech, an orator should think of a building (preferably one he knows well), select a certain number of precise places (loci) in it, in a predetermined order, and position images (imagines) within them. The images should be as striking and unusual as he can make them, and he must be able to associate them with the ideas and arguments of his discourse. When he makes his speech, all he has to do is move through the building in his mind and find each argument in its proper place. Clearly (and this is the key point for our purposes) the choice and order of the loci are crucial: they must remain fixed while the images deposited in them can (and should) change according to the speech being made and the arguments that need to be memorised.
From an historical point of view, a comparison of the techniques of artes memoriae with Anselm Kiefer’s artistic practice would be arbitrary. All the same, the correlation does cast some light on the unusual methods involved in the work on memory he undertook in the 1970s and 1980s. During those two decades, Kiefer seems to be progressively constructing a Memory Theatre from his work, and using it to interiorise and structure the passed-on ‘memories’ of a German past he knew only at second hand.
Memory and Science
From ARISTOTLE, History of Animals (4th century BC), translated by W.D. Ross (1928)
Many animals have memory, and are capable of instruction; but no other creature except man can recall the past at will.
From WILLIAM HARVEY, Animal Generation (1651)
The things perceived by sense remain in some animals; in others they do not remain. Those in whom they do not remain, however, have either no knowledge at all, or at least none beyond the simple perception of the things which do not remain; others, again, when they perceive, retain a certain something in their soul. Now, as there are many animals of this description, there is already a distinction between one animal and another; and to this extent, that in some there is reason from the memory of things; and in others there is none. Memory, therefore, as is said, follows from sense; but from repeated recollection of the same thing springs experience (for repeated acts of memory constitute a single experience) …
Wherefore … there is no perfect knowledge which can be entitled ours, that is innate; none but what has been obtained from experience, or derived in some way from our senses; all knowledge, at all events, is examined by these, approved by them, and finally presents itself to us firmly grounded upon some preexisting knowledge which we possessed: because without memory there is no experience, which is nothing else than reiterated memory; in like manner memory cannot exist without endurance of the things perceived, and the thing perceived cannot remain where it has never been.
From FRANCIS GALTON, ‘Psychometric Experiments’, in Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883)
When we attempt to trace the first steps in each operation of our minds, we are usually balked by the difficulty of keeping watch, without embarrassing the freedom of its action. The difficulty is much more than the common and well-known one of attending to two things at once. It is especially due to the fact that the elementary operations of the mind are exceedingly faint and evanescent, and that it requires the utmost painstaking to watch them properly. It would seem impossible to give the required attention to the processes of thought, and yet to think as freely as if the mind had been in no way preoccupied. The peculiarity of the experiments I am about to describe is that I have succeeded in evading this difficulty. My method consists in allowing the mind to play freely for a very brief period, until a couple or so of ideas have passed through it, and then, while the traces or echoes of those ideas are still lingering in the brain, to turn the attention upon them with a sudden and complete awakening; to arrest, to scrutinise them, and to record their exact appearance. Afterwards I collate the records at leisure, and discuss them, and draw conclusions. It must be understood that the second of the two ideas was never derived from the first, but always directly from the original object. This was ensured by absolutely withstanding all temptation to reverie. I do not mean that the first idea was of necessity a simple elementary thought; sometimes it was a glance down a familiar line of associations, sometimes it was a well-remembered mental attitude or mode of feeling, but I mean that it was never so far indulged in as to displace the object that had suggested it from being the primary topic of attention.
I must add, that I found the experiments to be extremely trying and irksome, and that it required much resolution to go through with them, using the scrupulous care they demanded. Nevertheless the results well repaid the trouble. They gave me an interesting and unexpected view of the number of the operations of the mind, and of the obscure depths in which they took place, of which I had been little conscious before. The general impression they have left upon me is like that which many of us have experienced when the basement of our house happens to be under thorough sanitary repairs, and we realise for the first time the complex system of drains and gas and water pipes, flues, bell-wires, and so forth, upon which our comfort depends, but which are usually hidden out of sight, and with whose existence, so long as they acted well, we had never troubled ourselves.
The first experiments I made were imperfect, but sufficient to inspire me with keen interest in the matter, and suggested the form of procedure that I have already partly described. My first experiments were these. On several occasions, but notably on one when I felt myself unusually capable of the kind of effort required, I walked leisurely along Pall Mall, a distance of 450 yards, during which time I scrutinised with attention every successive object that caught my eyes, and I allowed my attention to rest on it until one or two thoughts had arisen through direct association with that object; then I took very brief mental note of them, and passed on to the next object. I never allowed my mind to ramble. The number of objects viewed was, I think, about 300, for I had subsequently repeated the same walk under similar conditions and endeavoured to estimate their number, with that result. It was impossible for me to recall in other than the vaguest way the numerous ideas that had passed through my mind; but of this, at least, I am sure, that samples of my whole life had passed before me, that many bygone incidents, which I never suspected to have formed part of my stock of thoughts, had been glanced at as objects too familiar to awaken the attention. I saw at once that the brain was vastly more active than I had previously believed it to be, and I was perfectly amazed at the unexpected width of the field of its everyday operations. After an interval of some days, during which I kept my mind from dwelling on my first experiences, in order that it might retain as much freshness as possible for a second experiment, I repeated the walk, and was struck just as much as before by the variety of the ideas that presented themselves, and the number of events to which they referred, about which I had never consciously occupied myself of late years. But my admiration at the activity of the mind was seriously diminished by another observation which I then made, namely, that there had been a very great deal of repetition of thought. The actors in my mental stage were indeed very numerous, but by no means so numerous as I had imagined. They now seemed to be something like the actors in theatres where large processions are represented, who march off one side of the stage, and, going round by the back, come on again at the other. I accordingly cast around for means of laying hold of these fleeting thoughts, and, submitting them to statistical analysis, to find out more about their tendency to repetition and other matters, and the method I finally adopted was the one already mentioned. I selected a list of suitable words, and wrote them on different small sheets of paper. Taking care to dismiss them from my thoughts when not engaged upon them, and allowing some days to elapse before I began to use them I laid one of these sheets with all due precautions under a book, but not wholly covered by it, so that when I leaned forward I could see one of the words, being previously quite ignorant of what the word would be. Also I held a small chronograph, which I started by pressing a spring the moment the word caught my eye, and which stopped of itself the instant I released the spring; and this I did so soon as about a couple of ideas in direct association with the word had arisen in my mind. I found that I could not manage to recollect more than two ideas with the needed precision, at least not in a general way; but sometimes several ideas occurred so nearly together that I was able to record three or even four of them, while sometimes I only managed one. The second ideas were, as I have already said, never derived from the first, but always direct from the word itself, for I kept my attention firmly fixed on the word, and the associated ideas were seen only by a half glance. When the two ideas had occurred, I stopped the chronograph and wrote them down, and the time they occupied. I soon got into the way of doing this in a very methodical and automatic manner, keeping the mind perfectly calm and neutral, but intent and, as it were, at full cock and on hair trigger, before displaying the word. There was no disturbance occasioned by thinking of the forthcoming revulsion of the mind the moment before the chronograph was stopped. My feeling before stopping it was simply that I had delayed long enough, and this in no way interfered with the free action of the mind. I found no trouble in ensuring the complete fairness of the experiment, by using a number of little precautions, hardly necessary to describe, that practice suggested, but it was a most repugnant and laborious work, and it was only by strong self-control that I went through my schedule according to programme. The list of words that I finally secured was 75 in number, though I began with more. I went through them on four separate occasions, under very different circumstances, in England and abroad, and at intervals of about a month. In no case were the associations governed to any degree worth recording, by remembering what had occurred to me on previous occasions, for I found that the process itself had great influence in discharging the memory of what it had just been engaged in, and I, of course, took care between the experiments never to let my thoughts revert to the words. The results seem to me to be as trustworthy as any other statistical series that has been collected with equal care.
