Imagination as Memory
I taught a class one summer at a kids camp about creativity. It was a self-defense class. In that class, I explained that before “creativity” became a popular notion, there were a whole bunch of different and complex ideas about imagination. In the West, a lot of those ideas focused not around innovation, but memory. Not about new things, but old.
We mostly think of memory in terms of cold hard data: names, facts, dates, but this is just our bias for the practical and material world. According to written sources from the Renaissance and earlier, we know that memory was often discussed in much broader terms. It had an ethical as well as aesthetic component. For instance, many documents make note of folks memorizing texts or famous passages from books, often philosophical or spiritual ones, for purposes of cultivating virtue.
The method for doing this was the wide range of practices that go under the name Ars Memoria, or Art of Memory. This is another one of those topics the internet loves, so I’ll leave it to others to flesh it out. In case you aren’t familiar, here’s the short version: You associate the things you want to memorize with shocking or vivid imagery. And you “place” these images in a mental space, constructing your own “memory palace,” where you can wander and return.
This technique still works amazingly well (the kids in the camp I taught it at picked it up immediately and with shocking efficiency) and you can waste a good hour or two checking out modern day wizards on Youtube who use this ancient technique to perform magical feats of recall. My favorite is Yanjaa:
Huge credit here goes to Frances Yates, whose research on this tradition broke important ground and remains relevant.1
As Yates details, the practice of memory developed and evolved over the years. But two points are worth noting for our purposes:
(1) One strain of the practice stressed the ethical dimension, as a way to “re-mind” oneself of the spiritual. Again, because of our own biases, we tend to misunderstand this and think it refers to something simplistic like “Remember- Thou shalt not steal!” or “Don’t forget to brush your teeth!” No. It’s important to remember (lol) that memory here is less about slogans and more about experience. One enters and wanders through the memory palaces in time, and experiences the vivid imagery, as opposed to instantly recalling words.
Why go to all this trouble? Because the purpose is virtue, which is not accomplished just by recalling rules, but by strengthening one’s bond to the spiritual. For example, instead of just saying something trite like “patience is a virtue,” you would actually see, as close to 3-d as you can get, something like a burning man hurriedly running into a fire over and over. Maybe even smell him. It is as if these images were held in the heart, and not just the head.
(2) Yates, through these old memory manuals, demonstrates how this relationship to images affected various artists and writers. She mentions Giotto and Dante specifically. She makes a convincing case that these practices were a vital influence on our earliest ideas of modern art and literature. After all, no one reads Dante’s inferno for the plot. The whole trilogy makes more sense when seen as just an elaborate memory palace of vivid images. The book is not something reducible to just a message, but is valuable primarily as an experience.
Many of the ars memoria manuals stressed that everyone, artists or not, should come up with their own vibrant mental images. But this democratization rarely happens. Instead, it is easy to see how good artists can use their skill to project their own images into the minds of others, turning the art of memory into an art of suggestion, or persuasion. This is, essentially, the same thing as modern day advertising. That is why my class was described as self-defense.
However, while ad execs don’t mind doing this, at some point, modern artists grew uncomfortable with this sort of manipulation. They got greedy and thought that art should not just be a way to influence others, but could be a way of knowing the world itself. And this too was rooted in ideas of memory.
Anamnesis
Kafka once said, “You know more Yiddish than you think you do.” Plato might have agreed. For Plato, knowledge was “in there”, even if you didn’t know it. The key to finding that knowledge was not reason, but memory. “Seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.”2
Huh?
According to this theory, before we were born our souls were in hades (or the larger cosmos, it gets complicated) and grooving out to the cosmic inner workings thereof, but this knowledge was forgotten when we ascended/descended to become born into our fleshly existence. However, traces of this wisdom remained. Sometimes, whether through spiritual discipline or just dumb luck, we are able to stumble onto the most fleeting of these traces, grabbing the merest whiff of the cosmic that might just lead us back to the trail. This theory is known as anamnesis and, as crazy as it might sound, many of us can still recall a moment or two in our lives, usually childhood, when these sorts of cosmic intuitions made a profound impact.
Anamnesis and Music
Whether it is true or not, it became a huge influence on music. After all, what did people experience while floating in those heavenly realms?
Since the soul originates from the supernal world, the source of life, where it had been accustomed to hearing the melodious song of the ministering angels and the heavenly spheres, whenever it hears music in its corporeal abode, it feels at ease and experiences a delight similar to that to which it was accustomed when still at one with its element, listening to the sweetness of the celestial voices. On account of this extreme bliss it can prove capable of receiving divine inspiration. (From a 14th century Jewish text cited in a footnote in Fenton’s A Jewish Sufi on the Influence of Music)
Kabbalah scholar Moshe Idel spells out the connections between Jewish music and anamnesis in this fascinating article.
But this is hardly unique to Jews. This idea spent centuries bouncing between pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim circles. Here’s another Jewish version of this story from a 14th century letter found in the Cairo Genizah (a huge recycling bin of old Jewish texts that was never emptied and re-discovered in the modern era.)
On this account the saints and disciples of the prophets would employ diverse musical instruments to stir the soul through the beauty of their various rhythms, causing it to long for its noble origin and subtle source and reminding it of its sublime abode. (Fenton)
This passage introduces the two basic ways of looking at musical anamnesis: One view sees it as soothing and the other view sees it as creating a spiritual longing. This dichotomy is a long-running theme,
When the soul will concentrate, she will play plaintive melodies and will remember her supreme world, and will join the supreme joint(?) and will have a rhythmic sweet melodies.
That is Idel’s awkward translation from Muserei ha-Filosofim, Maxims of the Philosophers, a 13th century Hebrew translation of Greek sources via Arabic texts. Idel tells us to take note of that “plaintive” word (Ma‘atzivot), as it will come up again. And it does. In Idel’s (again slightly awkward) treatment of a 15th century Italian work of Johanan Ben Isaac Alemanno, he quotes “…So it will happen to the intellectual [philosophical] soul that knows how to play melodies because of a special quality she has, which are saddening.”
And of course, we get versions which say both. Rabbi Shem Tov ben Yosef Falaqera, quoted by Idel, also 13th century:
They assert also that as soon as the soul hears a melody of balanced composition and rhythmic measure she rejoices and find delight therein and yearns for her Creator, longing to reach Him. Consequently, the soul contemns [holds in contempt] the miseries and the accidents of the temporal world and meditates upon the upper world. Such is the aim of the music performing sages.
So, is sacred music balanced and sweet? Or yearning and nostalgia-inducing?
Yearning
Temperance in what concerns the sense of hearing, requires that one listen to harmonious melodies and stirring tunes that increase longing for the heart's desire and impede it from turning aside to all else.
On this account the saints and disciples of the prophets would employ diverse musical instruments to stir the soul through the beauty of their various rhythms, causing it to long for its noble origin and subtle source and reminding it of its sublime abode
Melodies belonging to Gods instantiate therefore the divine presence within the soul while she is in the body. Recollection constitutes therefore the counterpart of the possible ascent of the soul to its source, by drawing the divine inspiration down.
That’s from Iamblichus, a Neoplatonist, although this is a common theme in Ancient musical theory. There are other examples quoted in Idel and A Jewish Sufi on the Influence of Music. The point (oy this is getting long) is that this sad, sweet yearning for the absent becomes a profound spiritual discipline and forms a central strain in religious and eventually “secular” romantic art up to the 20th century. And this practice is both deeply imaginative and also based profoundly in memory, in ways that “creativity” and its focus on presence, obscures.
It is fashionable these days to poke small holes in the big narrative Yates put together, but her research on the Art of Memory is still incredibly valuable.
Pay no attention to the fact that Plato/Socrates proves this argument via reasoning.