SLSL Intro "The Rooms of Memory"

[Dave Monroe]

   "I was to get even worse at this, as is evident
from the junkshop or randomly assembled quality to
many of the scenes in 'The Secret Integration.'  But
because I like more than dislike this story, I
sometimes will blame it more on the cluttered way that
items accumulate in the rooms of memory." (SL,
"Intro," p. 20)


>From Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1966) ... 

   "At a banquet given by a nobleman of Thessaly named
Scopas, the poet Simonides of Ceos chanted a lyric
poem in honour of his host but including a passage in
praise of Castor and Pollux.  Scopas meanly told the
poet that he would only pay him half the sum agreed
upon for the panegyric and that he must obtain the
balance from the twin gods to whom he had devoted half
the poem.  A little later, a message was brought in to
Simonides that two young men were waiting outside who
wished to see him.  He rose from the banquet and went
out but could find no one.  During his absence the
roof of the banqueting hall fell in, crushing Scopas
and all the guests to death beneath the ruins; the
corpses were so mangled that the relatives who came to
take them away for burial were unable to identify
them.  But Simonides remembered the places at which
they had been sitting at the table and was therefore
able to indicate to the relatives which were their
dead.  The invisible callers, Castor and Pollux, had
handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by
drawing Simonides away from the banquet just before
the crash.  And this experience suggested to the poet
the principles of the art of memory of which he is
said to have been the inventor.  Noting that it was
through his memory of the places at which the guests
had been sitting that he had been able to identify the
bodies, he realised that orderly arrangement is
essential for good memory.

   'He inferred that persons desiring to train this
faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental
images of the things they wish to remember and store
those images in the places, so that the order of the
places will preserve the order of the things, and the
images of the things will denote the things
themselves, and we shall employ the places and images
respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters
written on it.'" (pp. 1-2; citing Cicero, De Oratore)

http://www.silcom.com/~dlp/yates.html

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/2632.ctl


Cicero, De Oratore (55 B.C.E.) ...

http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/oratore.shtml

http://www.uah.edu/student_life/organizations/SAL/claslattexts/cicero/deoratore.html


And see as well ...

Carruthers, Mary J.  Book of Memory:
   A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture.
   New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

http://www.cup.org/titles/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521429730

Rossi, Paolo.  Logic and the Art of Memory:
   The Quest for a Universal Language.  Trans.
   Stephen Clucas.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/14148.ctl

Spence, Jonathan D.  The Memory Palace of Matteo
   Ricci.  New York: Penguin, 1985.

http://www.penguinputnam.com/Book/BookFrame/0,1007,,00.html?id=0140080988

Not to mention ...

http://www.silcom.com/~dlp/mnem3.html

http://www.companionsoftheglyph.org/mf/gb01.htm

http://www.brainchannels.com/Memory/history.html

http://www.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage/Feature%20Articles/ArtofMemory/ArtofMemoryPt4.html

http://www.dnafoundation.com/priv/artofmem.htm

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