Loopy Loci
From CloudPad
May I fill your head with half-images? Incomplete thoughts?
Do you dream in colour? Can you manipulate a 3D object in your mind's eye? I remember once hearing that we must train the mind to visualize in 3D (do i remember this correctly?). What does it take to do this? Multiple perspectives, tactility, physical experience, simulation, "playing"... What is the relationship between the memory, imagination and space? Memory is said to be spatial; visualization is a learned skill. I don't quite know what the next step is. What about hyperobjects? Can we easily visualize hyperobjects? Do we have any basis for doing this in real life? I can picture Dali paintings in my mind; I can find software to rotate Escher's impossible landscapes through 360 degrees of perspective. Or my favourite example, the hypercube. There are many 3D projections of this 4D hyperobject. Using those 3D visualized images, can you transform a hypercube's shadow into one of those alternate projections?
How are memories stored in a larger, communal context? The incidence of the phrase "personal memory palace" is rather high, but what of public memory structures? In almost every article regarding the Art of Memory, one invariably comes across the legend of Simonides; memory and greek culture were essentially one and the same until they invented the alphabet in 700bc or something. The rhapsodists, the poets, the sophists, were walking receptacles of culture. They literally represented the Word. Astounding feats of memory have been on the decline ever since the democritization of the written word. So in this way a whole culture could be transmitted to the next generation, a whole cultural collective memory. Is there a word for this, when one regards the whole of a culture's collective memory as a single object that perhaps has a particular shape?
In ages past, the law of the king extended as far as a messenger could travel, on foot or by horse, in a day. Beyond a day, precise memory of a message would degrade. A would-be autocrat needed collaborators in even the lowest levels of leadership who could make decisions independently. With the techniques of modern information propagations, an authoritarian leader can issue orders directly to the lowest levels. The king's palace, "the law receptacle", represents an organizational structure whose parameters can be understood within the context of institution, bureaucracy, hierarchy, etc. Lao Tzu said that profit comes from what is there, and usability comes from what is not. The physical manifestations of power were visible, easy to remember what they meant and what they stood for, and thus were easily to visualize. A stratified memory structure? The invisible ( i.e. "what is not") are the behind-the-scenes principles, like divide-and-conquer, etc. I am curious about images of destratification, the carnivalesque, the structure whose information is IMMANENT, stored "horizontally". The Memory Palace thus divides into the Memory Institute and the Memory Lab (Mnemory?).
Can an everyday structure stand-in for a memory palace, or should it be a special construct with a special purpose? Can a space become infested with unwanted memories? How does one cleanse the loci of a place - can a palace ever be "reused" or recycled? I think one of the important considerations in our postmodern art of memory is that we do not have to "memorize" the whole structure. We use hyperlinks as memory prompts. One does not "hold" the whole structure in one's mind. One reconstructs the palace from the beginning of the loci path to the end. Multiple visits thread various routes. The reconstruction proceeds along the lines of a mathematical derivation from first principles. The ramifying building that is ever constructing itself, destructing when one looks away (at least, in one's head. on the interweb, well, i dunno, it stays put, you just have to remember where you put it). In this, every moment is a phenomenological experiment. Every question is an epistemic probe. How DO we know what we know?
The articles on the method of loci and the historical art of memory make cryptic allusions to some way of placing memories in loci, but I find these examples are intractable, arcane. I'd like to find those primary sources those Columbia researchers used to "select memory objects according to the ancient criteria." I get the peg-mnemomic technique, but I am interested in finding more info on the bits about jarring the memory by "association, humor, contrast, or alliteration." i always feel a little sad when i think of Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake for spreading the hermetic art of memory to anyone that would listen. Bruno was amongst the first to seriously study cultural products like folktales and stories. Trying to go open-source with the proprietary "memory palace" software.
when Achilles made his choice between a long and dull life ("he was a good man, a good husband and grandfather, but then he was forgotten") and a brief yet glorious life (to be sung about for ages to come), he could not have known that a long and dull life may be remembered for eternity as reverberations in the family tree. That maybe one day you could leave a timecapsule message for generations in the future. A whole new era of ancestor worship has been made possible. The memory palace has, in one of its wings, a consecrated space for the Alter Altar, a place for the Other Voices to assemble. Have you heard anything about the IMMORTAL project (microsoft? - http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/300636_msftimmortal22.html). So that personalized HOME PAGE thing, this week microsoft released Windows Vista. continuing the visual metaphors of an infinite stack of scrolls, lying flat ontop of one another. Data archaeologists required. But if my HOME PAGE looked like my house, how would anyone find anything? Do you have any idea how cluttered my house is? Is that why we need a memory palace? So memories do not get compressed into the countless aveoli that furnish my home? How do we "sort" in 3D? Do we need a container in hyperspace?
This paragraphs of this document are topical, and we experience them in the order of appearance. My last question for now, (though not nearly approaching the level of final say), is about the creative process. Extemporization / Improvization. This is what we're talking about when we talk about the traditional memory palace. A person did not memorize a previously written document, because there was no previously written document, just a collection of images. These images were placed in loci/objects, but that does not mean that they could not interact. The result is pure poetry. The interplay between images, the manipulation of symbols in the mind's eye, is a major component in the orchestra of creativity. This is where NEW STUFF comes from. New Ideas. Memory Palaces, as a visual language, or as data represented spatially, are fertile ground for new ideas. Further questions abound: the visualizing capabilities of certain kinds of literature, of increasingly abstract mathematical realms or scientific visualizations, Italo Calvino's stories about dinosaurs and subatomic particles, something different is happening. Back to those "non-Euclidean" or relativist pictures, those exotic physical states - can they trigger personal memory?
Half-images and incomplete thoughts are really all we have to work with, aren't they?
