the memory palace of matteo ricci by jonathan d. spence

In 1596 Matteo Ricci taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci tells this story. He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember: the most ambitious construction would consist of several hundred buildings of all shapes and sizes; "the more there are the better it will be," said Ricci, though he added that one did not have to build on a grandiose scale right away. One could create modest palaces, or one could build less dramatic structures such as a temple compound, a cluster of government offices, a public hostel, or a merchants' meeting lodge. If one wished to begin on a still smaller scale, then one could erect a simple reception hall, a pavilion, or a studio. And if one wanted an intimate space one could use just the corner of a pavilion, or an altar in a temple, or even such a homely object as a wardrobe or a divan. your host, Matteo Ricci

In summarizing this memory system, he explained that these palaces, pavilions, divans were mental structures to be kept in one's head, not solid objects to be literally constructed out of "real" materials. Ricci suggested that there were three main options for such memory locations.

First, they could be drawn from reality - that is, from buildings that one had been in or from objects that one had seen with one's own eyes and recalled in one's memory.

Second, they could be totally fictive, products of the imagination conjured up in any shape or size.

Or third, they could be half real and half fictive, as in the case of a building one knew well and through the back wall of which one broke an imaginary door as a shortcut to new spaces, or in the middle of which one created a mental staircase that would lead one up to higher floors that had not existed before.

The real purpose of all these mental constructs was to provide storage spaces for the myriad concepts that make up the sum of our human knowledge. To everything that we wish to remember, wrote Ricci, we should give an image; and to every one of these images we should assign a position where it can repose peacefully until we are ready to reclaim it by an act of memory. Since this entire memory system can work only if the images stay in the assigned positions and if we can instantly remember where we stored them, obviously it would seem easiest to rely on real locations which we know so well that we cannot ever forget them.

But that would be a mistake, thought Ricci. For it is by expanding the number of locations and the corresponding number of images that can be stored in them that we increase and strengthen our memory. Therefore the Chinese should struggle with the difficult task of creating fictive places, or mixing the fictive with the real, fixing them permanently in their minds by constant practice and review so that at last the fictive spaces become "as if real, and can never be erased."

It was this general facility for remembering the order of things that had been elaborated into a system over the succeeding centuries; by Ricci's time it had become a way for ordering all one's knowledge of secular and religious subjects, and since he himself was a Catholic missionary Ricci hoped that once the Chinese learned to value his mnemonic powers they would be drawn to ask him about the religion that made such wonders possible.

Pronounce mnemonic with a silent first letter.

the art of memory by frances a yates

In this classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page, Frances A. Yates' The Art of Memory traces the art of memory from its treatment by Greek orators, through its Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance, and finally to its use in the seventeenth century. This book, the first to relate the art of memory to the history of culture as a whole, was revolutionary when it first appeared and continues to mesmerize readers with its lucid and revelatory insights.

Yates' illumination of the profound relationship between the scientific method and earlier attempts at mastering the universe by magical means, that stands out as a single, most important aspect of the book.

Francis Yates has created a detailed examination of memory techniques and their evolution over the course of generations. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing through the Middle Ages, Yates shows how the art of remembering began as a sort of parlor trick and developed into an important skill in both religion and the occult.

In fact, this book has taken me in many different directions regarding memory: Loci, mnemonics, mnemotechnics, history, mysticism, magic, mathematics, Egyptology, alchemy. This book is very special because of the implications that a "art of memory" has on our history, and I believe in our future.

the art of memory: terence davies' distant voices, still lives by adrian danks

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988 UK 85 minutes) Terence Davies

Davies presents these vignettes as shards of memory which conversely contradict and rhyme with one another. The basic effect of this is to produce a complex emotional, social and familial landscape in which no character (not even the violent and unhinged father) is drawn simplistically or holistically. These memory images contrast and compete with one another to produce a range and ambiguity of character rare in such a fragmented and heartfelt autobiographical cinema. The effect is like that of memory stratified, where memory-images trigger other memory-images, creating a structure which seems to lack predetermination. Rather than an expected randomness a sense of wholeness, and a uniqueness of structure, emerges within which no compositions, expressions, gestures or snatches of music (flooding the soundtrack or defiantly sung by one of the film's many stoic female characters) seem out of place.

Distant Voices, Still Lives delves into the mechanics of memory (which it never conceives of as mechanical at all) and the mechanics and possibility of representing this memory in cinema. In the process it investigates the capacity of fictional cinema to act as memory book or family album. The film illustrates an important tension between evocative, realistic and tellingly detailed portrayal and the inaccessibility of the material portrayed to us (which can only be represented, distanced, voiced, stilled). Essentially what it offers is an emotionally charged self-conscious cinema throughout which we can sense the presence of the camera as it isolates an empty stairwell, cranes up from a sea of umbrellas, lingers over a composition, or perfectly frames and situates character within space. In the end Davies' film shows us duration, emotion, memory, the constructedness of space, and their interconnectedness.

This title is a homage to Frances A. Yates' fascinating book on mediaeval and Renaissance memory theatres. Davies' films can be seen as cinematic equivalents to such theatres (essentially spatialised systems or receptacles for memory and thought) in that they attempt to establish a model of memory as much as evoke a particular set of memories. His films can also be related to such memory theatres in terms of their mixture of the ephemeral (the memories themselves) and the material (the structures they are placed within). See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

Reference

purple china diary - the novel two

9 January 2008

Café in Harbin – Second Seeds of the Novel

Memory can be drawn as in Palestinian trauma victims – in different parts of the world memory can be elicited / freed / returned by different methods – dance, music, song, art, film – so also could memory be stored by the ‘memory keeper’ who can perform all these feats – do a dance, perform a song, show a film, perform theatre, recite a poem – the memory keeper is giving back all those things that have been culturally lost – the shark song of fiji all these things could be researched – the memory keeper goes on a journey [this could all be a bit crass] – the memory keeper does not know why she knows these things – she does not not who she is – she has lost her own memories – the journey restores this memory gradually – with each gift she herself receives something back – karma – ying yang – where to start – where to end – it is hard to know who she is – maybe she is Nicole – she can start with first stories in Canberra – pink can run through the book as a colour of fear – when she sees the colour she disassociates and it is at this point that she with ‘cultural artefacts’ – the memory keeper is complex, intelligent – story cannot be paternalistic – has to be subtle – subtle as a Taoist poem but as tough as a zen master – the acts of memory keeping are intimate and private - - ‘cross the river feeling the stones’ – if the book follows the poem must be found first – also correlation with desolation row – character a nineteen year old – inside like Nicole – who disassociates – character like john who reconstructs memories from auction artefacts – bits of film in memory – dada / surrealism – she is an artist

purple china diary - the novel one

7 January 2008

Night Train – The First Seeds Of The Novel

There is a book called The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

The memory keeper: The central character keeps memories as people can no longer keep them – the opposite of constructed memories as portrayed in Bladerunner – people are under stress like the loss of memory in Gabriel Marquez – there is not a loss of general memory as in One Hundred Years Of Solitude only a selective memory – a memory of certain things – this person travels around the world- travels as the angels travel in Hertzog’s Wings Of Desire – the person cures people by replacing ‘untrue’ memories with ‘true’ memories – she is the opposite of the communist collective propaganda and the Western propaganda of fear – her own history has to be very special – with a tremendous struggle for a zen moment which occurs in a very special place – Taoist stories could be used as a modern metaphor of the journey- it is a story of zen enlightment but not as pop as murikami – it is all about memory – loss of memory – cultural memory and the regaining and democritisation of memory – the liberation of being given the seed to grow again – each section could be marked by a chinese character with each character gradually making a poem – the enlightment of the poem thus ends with the enlightment of the novel – the novel can actually be constructed around the poem and characters – thus the need to go to china on writing scholarship – or other countries for that matter – a china/japan conjunction would be very interesting ! zen meets tao - the spiritual conjunction of the good cultural memory of each Nation – I can put everything that I have read and learnt into an individual knowledge and picture ‘trying to make my own melodies’ – Miles Davis – Mao says ‘crossing the river by feeling stones’ and Zhan Taiyan, the man who dismantled the peoples commune in 1980, said ‘practice is the sole criterion for testing the truth’