I’ve been reading for this E-Magazine for years. The subject of memory is frequently in my thoughts. On occasion during my life I have had memory loss as a result of epileptic seizures. It is a strange experience to not know who you are and why you are in a place you don’t know. But what I am really interested in is not loss of consciousness but methods for increasing the possibilities of memory and how different cultures do this.
In the early 1980s I read Frances Yates book, The Art of Memory (1966) and that answered some of my questions. In 2016, I discovered Lynne Kelly’s Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (2015). Since then she has published The Memory Code (2016) and Memory Craft (2019). Each book has become more populist and in some ways loses the huge insights of the first. At the same time, it makes the ideas more accessible and broadens the examples. It was a trip to Stonehenge that set Lynne Kelly on her journey and from there she has examined the memory techniques used not only in prehistory, but also among Indigenous cultures on every continent and in Medieval Europe.
I was familiar with these ideas because in the 1980s I read a great deal about Indigenous cultures and thought about the ways in which this might apply elsewhere. For example, the jumpers that sailors on the west coast of Scotland wore were knitted with very specific clan patterns. In the event of the body of a sailor washing up on the coast, there was a good chance that he would be recognisable by his patterned jumper. In Australia stories that include features of the landscape become important mnemonics for stable and accurate memory. These memories are critical to survival in order to find water, food and shelter in inhospitable environments. What the memories encode are the means for making the environment a relation. The following is from my novel written between 1982 and 1991.
You
are teaching me the ancient iconography of this land: the coils, circles,
spirals, figures and shapes drawn in the sand. You are teaching me the language
of the landscape: to follow the routes to waterholes and hilltops. Later you
will teach me how to find my way across the desert.
I draw shapes in the sand,
reciting stories of the land in my head. The earth is my paper, my hand the
pen. I am learning the ancient art of memory. (The Falling Woman. 1992, p. 189).
I wrote my novel in place of a PhD on ‘The Structure of Belief Systems in the Ancient World’. My supervisors tried, instead, to turn me into a postmodernist. I gave up that PhD, but now and then I consider what I might have written given a more friendly environment.
Back to Lynne Kelly’s work; it is fascinating and I hope that her ideas are taken up. In this short-term memory world of Google, of everything just a click away, we really need people with long and accurate memories. Her books give lots of examples of ways to create stable memory meaning that maybe you won’t need your phone, just your brain.
Some links:
The Art of Memory: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/1847922929
Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: https://www.amazon.com.au/Knowledge-Power-Prehistoric-Societies-Transmission-ebook/dp/B00Y37ZDJ4
The Falling Woman: http://spinifexpress.com.au/Bookstore/book/id=64/
© Susan Hawthorne, 2019.
(Meet Mago Contributor) Susan Hawthorne.
Susan Hawthorne – I found this article on memory fascinating. Like Susan, I think in this one click ‘like’ (what does that mean) icon world – holding memory and retrieving memory seems critical, especially for those of us who are feminists. Our cultural memory has been so distorted that we need “other ways of knowing” to help us capture what has been lost. Scholars like Susan and Helen and so many more are helping us to do that, thankfully.