the archaic age: the poet, the prophet, and the just king. These were the vessels through whom a power called Aletheia spoke. The knowledge she offered was “a form of divinatory omniscience”; she gave the poet “the power to ‘decipher the invisible,’” to recall not the past exactly but the atemporal suchness of things, their otherwise obscure being.
And although this divine power may overcome or negate obscurity and mystery, by Detienne’s reading she is not split or separated from those ground conditions: “Aletheia and Lethe are not exclusive or contradictory . . . ; they constitute two extremes of a single religious power.”
In archaic Greece, these twin forces belonged to a set of related dualities, Aletheia aligned with memory, justice, sung speech, light, and praise, and Lethe aligned with oblivion, hiddenness, silence, darkness, and blame. Aletheia “was not the opposite of lies or falsehoods”; she was the opposite of all these other things, or rather she is one portion of an ambiguous force that can enlighten or darken, can lead to speech or silence, praise or blame. The Muses are agents not just of memory but of memory-forgetting (as in Hesiod, where their song brings both memory and “the forgetting of ills,” or in the Iliad, where they punish a boastful Thracian singer by making him “forget his artful playing”).
Let us then reclaim forgetting as a component of truth, there being “no Aletheia without a measure of Lethe.” When a diviner or poet penetrates the invisible world, Memory and Oblivion both are present. And what is the name of this double thing found at the seam of silence and speech, praise and blame, light and darkness? Call it imagination, call it poetry.
THE BIRTH OF A MEMORY ART. Cicero’s book on oratory recounts the origin story of the Memory Palace tradition, the one in which an orator commits to memory the elements of his speech by mentally placing an image for each of his points in a sequence of locations, as if in the rooms of a palace. Cicero has a certain Antonius express his gratitude “to the famous Simonides of Ceos, who is said to have first invented the science of mnemonics,” and then has Antonius tell the story:
Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas . . . , and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honour of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem. . . . The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody.
It seems that the young men were in fact Castor and Pollux, grateful for being noted in Simonides’s poem and protecting him from a punishment about to be inflicted on the stingy patron:
In the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement. He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities.
TESTES. A second Latin book on rhetoric, the Ad Herennium, gives instructions for forming Cicero’s “mental images.” Above all we’re told to make them dramatic. Don’t just imagine your friend’s face; imagine the face smeared with blood. “Ordinary things easily slip from the memory while the striking and novel stay longer.”
Sometimes “one entire matter” can be recorded by composing a single such striking image, the example given being that of a lawyer called to defend a man charged with poisoning another in order to gain an inheritance, a crime committed despite the presence of many witnesses. To remember this case, the lawyer is advised to form an image of the murdered man lying in bed with the defendant at his bedside holding a cup in his right hand, tablets in his left, and, hanging from the fourth finger of that hand, a ram’s testicles.
How to decode that image? Apparently, the cup is there to recall the poison, the tablets to indicate the inheritance, and those ram’s testicles, well, maybe testiculos is meant to suggest testes, witnesses, or perhaps—because ram scrota were used to make purses—the image suggests money used to bribe the witnesses.
Whatever the case, out of such curious and crazy seeds eventually grew the arts of memory that were to dominate European rhetoric and religious speculation for centuries to come.
DRAWN DOWN INTO TIME. While these stories out of Latin rhetoric are of interest in their own right, I offer them in the context of Marcel Detienne’s sketch of the archaic Lethe-Aletheia mythology, for it is Detienne’s argument that in the history of memory and forgetting it was especially the sixth-century Simonides of Ceos who took those twinned powers away from their archaic masters—the bard, the diviner, and the just king—and gave them over to the sophists and rhetoricians, practitioners of persuasion and illusion. In Cicero’s account, notice that Simonides is a hired hand, writing for a fee, and that as such, he is the literary equivalent of a court painter, his employer being a wealthy aristocrat. “By the classical period,” writes Detienne, “the system of thought that privileged sung speech as a religious power had become no more than an anachronism. . . . The poet’s job now was to exalt the nobility and praise the rich landowners.” With Simonides, “memory became a secularized technique” and forgetting consequently a failure of technique, a mental deficit rather than a shaping power working in tandem with its twin.
Whereas in the archaic age these powers belonged to certain special persons, in the classical age they are available to any student of “the science of mnemonics.” Whereas previously the poet spoke without artifice (“speaking Aletheia came as naturally as breathing”), now there are schools of rhetoric. Whereas previously the voice had been singular and efficacious, atemporal and commanding, now it is but one among many and bent not on assertion but on persuasion. Where previously the goal was a release from human time, now time became “the best of things,” Simonides said, because “it is in time that one learns and memorizes.” Where in the archaic age the sequential waters of memory and forgetfulness organized the petitioner’s quest for prophetic knowledge, in the classical age a set of memory tricks helps an absentminded lawyer remember that his client is accused of murder.
BOREDOM. Writing about the cosmology of the Trobriand islanders, the anthropologist Susan Montague tells us that the Trobriand universe is a vast disembodied space filled with both minds and energy. Cosmic minds are all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful, able to manipulate the energy of the universe toward whatever end they desire.
But in spite of, or rather because of, these remarkable endowments, cosmic minds have a problem: cosmic boredom. They have the power to do anything they wish, but because they have no needs, that power has no purpose. They may be all-knowing, but to be all-knowing means there’s nothing to think about. So they sit around bored to death or, rather, bored to life, because as it happens, they have invented a way to relieve cosmic boredom: it is to play the amusing game of life.
To play, you must be born into a human body, and to be born as such, you must forget the fullness of what you knew and work only with what can be known through the body. A human being is someone who has abandoned the boring surfeit of knowledge so as to come alive.
LIQUIDATION. Working to heal herself of the trauma of rape, Sohaila Abdulali took it upon herself to counsel young women, teaching them about rape’s dangers and effects. At first she found it upsetting to include her own story
