Timothy Miller Novels Notions Natterings: Memory is a dangerous neighborhood

An odd thing happened recently. I was thinking of an old friend who's in the hospital. A song came to mind: the Doobie Brothers' For Someone Special. And then I thought of the first jukebox I first heard the song on (pointed out to me by a friend as the B side of Takin' It to the Streets).

It was the jukebox in the first bar I worked at, over forty years ago in New Orleans, a college bar located in the armpit of Tulane University called The Boot. I could picture that jukebox, its location just inside the entrance to the bar, like a squat sentinel. Then something scary happened.

I started, without willing it, to picture the bar itself, not as a gestalt, but foot by foot, almost inch by inch, the tables, chairs, lamps, mirrors, in detail, pool tables, barstools, the back bar: telephone, trashcans, coolers, ice stations, taps, the foosball handles we had ready in case of fights (there were many, many testosterone-laced fights), pinball machines, liquor room, kitchen, a complete inventory, bursting through to the attached convenience store, the attached frozen yogurt place (Dr. Banana's, tricked out to look like a bamboo hut) and then I was outside, at the corner of Broadway and Zimpel where it got really freaky because my memory became a drone, mapping out all those streets, the magazine kiosks and frat houses, the bar a block away (Tin Lizzie's), recalling every change and remodel that occurred through the years.

I knew I had to pull back somehow because I was starting to build up the entire city in my mind, every footstep I had taken and was afraid of being lost in the tide of memories. At the same time, there was a feeling of anointedness, as if I was experiencing not memory but prophecy--at about 6 G's of gravity.

I don't know if this has ever happened to you. I don't know if it's a common or rare occurrence. I could feel brain cells lighting up that had been dark for years, all the people I'd worked with, all the regulars, and it was not a comfortable feeling. I'd had some good times working at that bar, but dark times, too, things I'd rather not remember, and all the filters were off. I was finally able to shut it down, but writing about it now teeters to reactivation.

After a day of puzzling over this, I thought of course of Marcel Proust and the madeleine moment. Proust is the author of Remembrance of Things Past, the seven-volume opus (world's longest novel) which was supposedly triggered by his dipping a madeleine cookie in his tea, something he had done as a child, which unleashed an ocean of vivid memories. Proust coined a term for this experience: involuntary memory. I'm not sure that term is adequate to the experience. Call it memory at gunpoint. Or perhaps chained memory.

Which chimes with J. H. Mace in his book Involuntary Memory. According to Mace there are three situations which trigger involuntary memories: spontaneous, usually in response to sensory stimuli--Proust's "madeleine moment": memories arising from related memories in a chain; and memories associated with trauma, such as PTSD.

Well, I do have some fairly traumatic memories of my time at the Boot (as well as some gorgeous ones) engraved upon my memory, and perhaps this accounts for the unnatural gravimetric energy I felt during the dream. I won't claim PTSD. But the memory can be a dangerous neighborhood.

But what if your memories were all chained together? What if one memory was linked to the next till by remembering one incident, one object, you remembered everything? Would it be a blessing or a curse? Would you be able to order your memories, or would they overwhelm you, drown you in the past? If memories links in a chain, could that chain be hoisted up, end over end, till we find the anchor, the ur-memory of being expelled from the womb into the terrible bright light?

Our attitude toward memory is shockingly quotidian. We view it as a daytimer, a grocery list scratched out on a notepad, a series of post-it notes stuck to the door of the fridge. It's a reminder of where we left our keys, what time the movie comes on. That is what we call working memory. The tip of the iceberg.

Which brings me to Ariel Hawksquill and the Art of Memory. If you're not familiar with Miss Hawksquill I strongly recommend you turn off this device and pick up the novel Little, Big by John Crowley. Hawksquill is a character in the novel, "greatest mage of this age", whose power seems to rest entirely on the Art of memory.

And what is the Art of Memory?

From the novel:

“The Art of Memory, as it is described by ancient writers, is a method by which the Natural Memory we are born with can be improved tremendously, beyond recognition in fact. The ancients agreed that vivid pictures in a strict order were the most easily remembered. Therefore, in order to construct an Artificial Memory of great power, the first step (Quintilian and other authorities agree on this, though they diverge at other points) is to choose a Place: a temple, for instance, or a city street of shops and doorways, or the interior of a house — any place that has parts which occur in a regular order.

"The next step is to create vivid symbols or images for the things one wishes to remember — the more shocking and highly-colored the better, according to the experts: a ravished nun, say, for the idea of Sacrilege, or a cloaked figure with a bomb for Revolution. These symbols are then cast onto the various parts of the memory Place, its doors, niches, forecourts, windows, closets, and other spaces; and then the rememberer has simply to go around his memory Place, in any order he wishes, and take from each spot the Thing which symbolizes the Notion which he wishes to remember."

The art he's describing is by no means a fictional construct. It was twigged by Crowley from the fascinating Frances Yates, historian of esoterica, in her volume The Art of Memory. She details the origins of the art and its development through the centuries. by the ancients. The great Roman orator Cicero writes of it in the Ad Herrenium, his treatise on rhetoric, of which he considered memory an essential element.

Think of memory not simply as a process, a knitting of neurons, but as a physical space. Think of it as a house, a palace, and the things we want to store in it as knick-knacks, or treasures if you like. This from the Ad Herrenium:

"The artificial memory includes locations and images. By locations I mean such scenes as are naturally or artificially set off on a small scale, complete and conspicuous, so that we can grasp and embrace them easily by the natural memory—for example, a house, an intercolumnar space, a recess, an arch, or the like. An image is, as it were, a figure, mark, or portrait of the object we wish to remember; for example, if we wish to recall a horse, a lion, or an eagle, we must place its image in a definite location."

When Crowley published Little, Big in 1981, the art of memory was a fairly obscure concept. Now I see it's gone mainstream. There's a whole website devoted to the practice, replete with with instructions, competitions, and promises of community. Watching a movie called You're Cordially Invited the other night, I witnessed Will Ferrel explaining the technique to Reese Witherspoon, almost in Crowley's (or Yates's or Cicero's) very words. So it's received the Hollywood stamp of approval.

What Will didn't mention were the dangers of the art, as posited by Crowley.

"It can happen—if you practice this art—that the symbols you put next to one another will modify themselves without your choosing it, and that when next you call them forth, they may say something new and revelatory to you, something you didn’t know you knew. Out of the proper arrangement of what you do know, what you don’t know may arise spontaneously. That’s the advantage of a system. Memory is fluid and vague. Systems are precise and articulated. Reason apprehends them better."
Is even natural memory already a palace, or at least a structure of some sort, a mansion, a trailer home, a lean-to? Is it a space, whether mapped or unmapped?
Of course this occurs in Natural Memory as well. Distance and context reshape our memories. Memories are transmuted into stories, and may often be embellished for the sake of a good story. What are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, constructed from a chain of memories? Memories are not inviolable, but shifting between understanding and misunderstanding, swapping truth and fiction around to create a more coherent, more memorable story.
Memory is a dangerous neighborhood.

The Glass Hill

I am reminded of--for some reason it popped into my head-- the fairy tale about the glass mountain. You may have come across it when you were young. There are several variants--some quite bloody--but the one I recall is The Princess on the Glass Hill. The hero is a boy named Boots, and I'll leave you to ponder that coincidence. He's t

he son of a farmer, the youngest son of three, as is usually the case in such stories. As it happens, he lives in (or happens on) a kingdom where the king's palace is encased in a great glass dome, and the king has installed his daughter at the very top of the dome. To win her hand (and half the kingdom), a suitor must scale the dome and receive three golden apples from the lap of the princess. Many princes and knights have tried and failed. Our plucky young lad decides to give it a go.

But not alone. Up his sleeve he has three mighty steeds that he won in an earlier test of courage, as well as three suits of armor--of copper, silver, and gold.

On the second day, mounted on a stronger horse, wearing the silver armor, he achieves a good two thirds of his goal before the horse fails him. The princess, perhaps a little enamored of this magnificent rider, throws him another golden apple before he disappears.

The third day dawns. Resplendent in the golden armor, mounted on the third indomitable beast, Boots reaches the top pf the mountain and receives the last golden apple from her trembling hands.

What does this story mean? Who can say what a fairy tale means? They're crafted by a people's collective unconscious, forged over the years as they are handed down from storyteller to storyteller. So when I assign meaning to this tale it may be hubris or it may be my birthright as the heir to those storytellers. And since the story had lain dormant in my memory until I was writing about memory, it must have been tagged in my memory as having to do with memory. So here goes:

The princess is a stand-in for Memory. Perhaps a memory, when you are searching your mind, will toss you clues like golden apples to encourage you, because a memory wants to be reached, to be remembered, wants its cell door flung wide to the light. We know memories vary by the impress of their weight upon the mind. Am I saying they may have agency, too? Was what I experienced I experience a memory jailbreak?

Maybe I'm reading too much into the story, looking for metaphors where none exist. But it feels right, and that may be all that matters. It feels like I came across an apple in my memory place whose meaning had modified and blossomed. But does the transformation of a memory change its meaning? Does the mixing of metaphors cloud a memory?

I know this: memory is not simply a dusty shelf. Perhaps memory is a princess or perhaps a siren, urging us on to our doom--or to half the kingdom. Maybe each memory is a mind, and every mind wants to be known. Maybe the hooves of your horse will crack the dome into a thousand shards tumbling down like silver rain, and free the palace's inhabitants.