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| Pieter Claesz, Vanitas, 1630 |
What is common among the following: the sentence, “King Henry Died Drinking Chocolate Milk”, the medieval/ Renaissance emblem of the death’s head with the motto, “Memento Mori”, and BARBARA? All three are mnemonic devices — the first intended to recall the metric measurements (the first letter of each word is the same as that of the names of the measurements: K for Kilo, H for Hecta and so on); the second meant to remind each man of his end (“memento mori” means “Remember your Death”); and the third representing the deductive truth that in a valid syllogistic argument, if both the premises are universal affirmative propositions (called ‘A’), then the conclusion too must be affirmative (hence ‘BARBARA’, with the three ‘A’s).
The clues may sound confusing, but will make sense to students of mathematics, literature or the visual arts and of logic, respectively. In fact, the chief purpose of mnemonic devices is to dispel confusion by helping people remember. Although with the coming of artificial intelligence, and before that, of the printing press, the ‘art of memory’ has lost much of its relevance, there can be no harm in recalling (with a little assistance from scholars such as Francis Yates) this much-valued practice that flourished during the Renaissance.
The art of memory goes back to ancient Greece, to the time when the roof collapsed on a banquet attended by the orator and poet, Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BC), and he had to remember the seating order of the guests at the table in order to identify the dead. Simonides was helped in his unpleasant task by the fact that he could associate specific places in the hall with particular faces. Encouraged, he developed a system of preserving information whereby vivid images would first be conjured up in the mind’s eye and would then be placed in familiar locations, such as a room, to facilitate total recall. Simonides’ method was a huge hit with orators, who had to cram large chunks of texts and then regurgitate them before the audience.
Plato, too, attached much importance to memory. But his world of Forms — universal, immutable, eternal — was a way out of the muddle of historical memory. The Platonic child who comes trailing clouds of glory does not need experience to become a philosopher. He can take one look at his storehouse of pre-natal memory of the Forms and leap in his mother’s arms in the knowledge that he is already wiser than most. Things went well for the philosopher-child until John Locke appeared on the scene, and spoilt it all by declaring that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, on which the first etchings are made by experience derived from sense perception. Before Locke, the Renaissance art of memory had combined the Platonic conception of philosophy as a search for order beyond the chaos of the intelligible world with the rather un-Platonic conviction that such knowledge was best acquired by finding the correct visual imagery. De Umbris Idearum (1582), the first mnemonic work by the excommunicated Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno, featured complicated wheels that would capture reality through images.
Although Bruno’s method has largely been discredited, I think his basic idea does work. I have always fared worst in mathematics because I can never construct private myths around sums or picturize them. They are so intractable, so fixed in their shapes, much like Plato’s Forms. (And, of course, I do not have Kishore Kumar’s talent that enabled him to memorize mathematical formulae by making tunes out of them.) On the other hand, I adored geography, history, not to say literature, because reading these subjects was like watching a film. You study Alexander’s conquest and imagine the lovely young man marching through Mesopotamia, study the topography of West Bengal and fancy yourself moving from the red earth of the Rahr plains to the forests of Dooars in the wink of an eye. Yet memory does betray — as I found out when in the Madhyamik examination, I got a Letter in mathematics and not one in either geography or history.