Memory is so much a part of us that it might as well be an
organ, like the lungs or the heart. It is as much relied upon as they, equally
unconsciously and, when needed, spontaneously. And when is it not needed?
We have to remember to turn off the light when we leave
home. We have to remember which one from a bunch of keys opens what. We must
not forget the umbrella left under our theater seat. Such things may be as
natural as breathing, but breathing does not require remembering as the other
things do.
When memory works for us, we feel no gratitude; but when it
fails us, how furious we become. Imagine not remembering to pull up the chair
when about to sit down at table; yet inconceivable as it seems, haven’t we done
so? And that is how embar-rassing all kinds of failure of memory can be.
What keeps memory so persistently in my own mind is
awareness of the lack of it. At age 87, I suppose I am entitled to lapses of
memory, but doesn’t it seem unpardonable not to remember why I went from one
room to the next, to forget something within seconds? Not to remember who that
person is who accosts me with intimate knowledge of me? Not to have remembered
an important item on my shopping list?
I especially envy people who remember whole poems, lots of
poems. They make for a wonderfully portable library we can refer to on all
sorts of occasions. Not for nothing were schoolchildren, in the days when
education still mattered, made to memorize poems. Why, even on an exam in a
Milton course at Harvard, one could score just by writing down a few verses
from memory. (I couldn’t. But then I didn’t care for Milton.)
Memory, though, can be a solace: remembering good things
from your past. But is that an unequivocal good? Or was Dante right with
“Nessun maggior dolore/ Che ricordarsi del tempo felice/Nella miseria,” which
Longfellow translated as “There is no greater sorrow/ Than to be mindful of the
happy time/ In misery.” But, happy or not, how often we encounter memory in
everyday speech, reminders—memorials—of its importance.
Just think: memo pads, memoirs, Memorial Day, memorabilia,
memorization, time immemorial, within living memory, and so many other words or
phrases. And, somewhat less often, from the Greek, mnemonic and mnemonics. The
Latin memoria is obviously present in
Latin-derived, Romance languages, as in French, mémoire. But also, as in English, and other kinds of languages.
Take the German, Memoire and memorieren. Take the Hungarian, where
the prevalent term for memory is emlékezet,
but there is also the more intense
memória, specially in the phrase tökéletes
memória, total recall.
Too much memory, granted, can become a burden. The great
writer Jorge Luis Borges has a story, “Funes the Memorious,” about Ireneo
Funes, a fellow who remembers absolutely everything. We read, among other
things, “Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but
even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.” And again: “He
remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th
April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled
grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and
with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of
the battle of the Quebracho.” No wonder the poor creature could hardly sleep
and died young.
Borges himself was no slouch when it came to memory. One of
the world’s greatest polymaths, his writings unostentatiously display reading
and erudition hard to imagine, let alone equal. Not without interest here is
the epigraph in English (which he spoke fluently) from Francis Bacon’s Essays: “Solomon saith: There is no new
thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination that all knowledge
was but remembrance, so Solomon gives his sentence that all novelty is but
oblivion.”
Well, almost everything has its seductive antithesis, and so
too has memory. The marvelous poet Guillaume Apollinaire has written in praise
of oblivion, “Où est le Christophe Colomb à qui l’on devra l’oubli d’un
continent?” (Where is the Columbus to whom we’ll owe the oblivion of a
continent?) And with what melodious eloquence Swinburne has written, “But the
best and the worst of this is/ That neither is most to blame/ If you have
forgotten my kisses/ And I have forgotten your name.” This is so good as to
make the solecism “most” for “more” entirely forgivable.
Nevertheless, memoria, Mnemosyne of the Greeks, is a
goddess. Let me quote the delightful Dr. Lempriere’s invaluable Classical Dictionary: “Mnemosyne, a daughter of Coelus and
Terra, mother of the nine Muses by Jupiter, who assumed the form of a shepherd
to enjoy her company. The word Mnemosyne
signifies memory, and therefore the
poets have rightly called memory the mother of the Muses, because it is to that
mental endowment that mankind are indebted for their progress in science.”
Nicely put by the Reverend Lempriere (especially that very Victorian “enjoy her
company”). Yet only one of the Muses was the inspirer of science, Urania, the
Muse of astronomy. The eight others were the patronesses of history, various
kinds of poetry, music, drama and dance.
What is so wise about this myth
is that it proclaims the quasi-divine origin and status of the arts, history,
and science, and that it recognizes the importance of memory in their creation.
For they are all based, at least in part, on memory: summoned-up feeling,
memorialized experience, a recalled something or other.
Perhaps the most amazing thing
about memory is that, though we may call upon it, it just as likely seeks us
out on its own, pleasantly, sadly, wondrously. As the Serbian poet Milan Rakić
put it, “When the heart cries out, thought is to blame.” That thought, more
often than not, is the voice of memory, happy, unhappy, or just surprising.
I myself am a bit surprised by
the particular choices in bits of poetry my memory has made, and that I have
remembered, with rhyme in most cases, but for no obvious reason. Well, yes,
there is a reason in some cases, as with that great concluding line of The Divine Comedy, that almost justifies
slogging through the Paradiso:
“L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle” (the Love that moves the sun and
the other stars), which remarkably loses almost nothing in translation.
But why, from all of Apollinaire’s
marvels, remember “Ce lourd secret que tu quémandes” (this heavy secret that
you beg for), which haunts me more stubbornly than I can comprehend. In
context, it refers to the lover’s secret self, for whose disclosure even the
beloved must beg. But I don’t remember the context, merely it. It may have to
do with the music of this line of verse, the cunning sequence of vowel sounds,
ending in the melancholy nasal “an” and the ghostly mute “e.” Also the echo
effect between ce and que and the onomatopeic lourd.
More comprehensible is the
staying power of a quatrain from Rilke:
Befriedigungen
ungezählter Jahre
Sind
in der Luft. Voll Blumen liegt dein Hut
Und
ein Geruch aus deinem reinen Haare
Mischt
sich mit Welt, als wäre alles gut.
And in sadly prosaic translation:
Appeasements
of innumerable years
Are
in the air. Your hat lies full of flowers
And
a scent from your pure hair
Mingles
with [the] world as if all were well.
Here there is no question of the
beauty and power of the verse. There is, first, the situation. Rilke is writing
a poem to Marthe Hennebert, a tearful working girl he crossed in a Paris
street. He consoled her and became her lover. I imagine them sitting on grass
in a setting not unlike Seurat’s Grande Jatte. The girl’s hat is full of
flowers, picked or bought, and their scent, the German says, “mingles with
world,” where the German, like English, would expect an article before the
noun. Plain “Welt,” however, becomes not the whole world, but something both
more intimate and transcendent: part of the surroundings, nature, something
greater thus made more immediate.
Then there is the verse, with its
music. First, the rhyme scheme: the feminine “Jahre” and “Haare” neatly
alternating with the masculine, tonally different, “Hut” and “gut.” There is
piquancy in such different vowel sounds, the floating disyllables arrested by
anchoring monosyllables. There is the
wonderfully polysyllabic “Befriedigungen” with its dying fall, subsiding from
five syllables to the quadrisyllabic “ungezählter,” thence to the two syllables
of “Jahre,” followed in the next verse by several monosyllables. There is also
a kind of arpeggio in the four u’s, progressing from “Geruch” to the
culminating “Hut.” There is the lovely inner rhyme of “deinem reinen,” the bright
diphthongs flowing into the dark “Haare.” And there is the delicate assonance
in “mischt sich mit,” followed by the alliteration of “Welt” and “wäre.”
More beautiful yet, perhaps, and immensely moving, is he
drama of the final verse. Here, in a scene of quasi-pastoral serenity and
intimate charm, surely we can expect God to be in his heaven and all well with
the world. But no! “Als wäre alles gut”—a melancholy “as if all were well.”
For, after all, what is perfect? The splendor is only of the moment, and
nothing lasts.
On account of these bits of Apollinaire, Swinburne, Dante
and Rilke, I remain deeply beholden to memory, memoria, Mnemosyne. She is truly a goddess.
