Fresh Air Fiend (4 page)

Lately I have been wondering about the relationship between memory and creation, and between memory and perception—and behavior, too. It all seems scrambled together. I say "lately" partly because of this half-century birthday and also because of several dramatic changes in my life: becoming separated from my wife, traveling extensively in the Pacific, resuming residence in my American house. My life has been full of changes, all of them unexpected. When I was young and felt downtrodden I thought,
My life will be pretty much what it is now,
because people were always prophesying, saying they knew exactly what was going to happen to me, even if I didn't—another example of people alarming me with their lies.

I often think that I became a writer because I have a good memory. When I say "a good memory" I do not mean that it is a totally accurate memory, only that it is a very full and accessible one, packed with images and language. Montaigne, who discusses the question of memory in his essay "On Liars," claimed to have had a terrible memory. He makes the case for the virtues of having a bad memory (such an afflicted person is less worldly, less ambitious, less garrulous), and asserts that "an outstanding memory is often associated with weak judgment." There are other treats in store for the deeply forgetful person: "Books and places which I look at again always welcome me with a fresh new smile."

Montaigne suggests that he is utterly helpless. And while it is true that remembering depends on habit, it also depends on the use of deliberate techniques. I agree in general with Dr. Johnson's observation, reported by Boswell, that "forgetfulness [is] a man's own fault."

Yet often the very drama of events prints them on our memory.

At the age of two I started a fire under my crib. I put a match to some newspapers, as I had seen one of my older brothers doing just a few days before. Without any alarm I was a spectator to a great tumult in the house as my burning mattress was flung out the back window onto the lawn.

Not long after that I squeezed through the loose picket of a fence and cut my scalp on a rusty nail on the top bar. The resulting scar was a white crescent, and for a long time, whenever I got a short haircut, people said, "What's that on your head?" I must have been very young—how else could I have gotten through that small opening in the fence?

A few days after my sister Ann Marie was born, in 1944, when I was three, I was being looked after by a neighbor while my mother stayed in the hospital. Lonesome for my father, I noticed he wasn't home. Believing he was at church—it was a Sunday—I eluded the baby sitter and walked there, a quarter of a mile away. I distinctly remember the long crossing of a four-lane road known as the Fellsway—I was so small I could not see over the hump in the middle to the other side. I sat on the church steps calling out "Daddy!" and there I was found by my panicky father. A search party had already been sent to a nearby brook, believing I had fallen in and drowned. I suppose this was my first attempt at independent travel.

The first book that was read to me was
Make Way for Ducklings
(it had a Boston setting), and the second was
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,
by Dr. Seuss. As soon as I could read I wanted to be a hero.

I can name nearly every child who was in my first-grade class, Miss Purcell's, at the Washington School, in Medford. We wrote with big thick pencils. In the third grade Miss Cook introduced us to ink—we had inkwells and used sharp steel nibs; the difficulty of forming letters with those sputtering nibs is vivid to me today. I know Psalm 23 because it was Miss Cook's favorite when I was eight. I knew the distinct odor of everyone's house, friends and relatives', where I was taken as a child: the assertive and often offensive reek of cooking and different people. Blindfolded, I could have identified thirty of those smell-labeled households.

I have more recollections of this kind, which go under the name "episodic memories" and I am well aware of their approximate truth. "Remembering is not a re-excitation of innumerable, fixed, lifeless, and fragmentary traces," Sir Frederick Bartlett wrote in
Remembering.
"It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reaction or experience, to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote-capitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be."

I have altered my memories in the way we all do—simplified them, improved them, made them more orderly. Memory works something like this: stare at a square and then close your eyes; the afterimage will gradually soften into a circle—much more symmetrical and memorable. Goethe was the first to write about this phenomenon.

"Few have reason to complain of nature as unkindly sparing of the gifts of memory," Dr. Johnson wrote in
The Idler.
"The true art of memory is the art of attention." This observation is vividly illustrated in the life of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who traveled and proselytized in China in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He is known to Sinologists as the man who drew the first map of the world for the Chinese, and in so doing conveyed many facts disturbing to the Ming court: that China might not be the Middle Kingdom, that other large countries exist on the planet, and that the earth is round.

Ricci developed a highly complex mnemonic system, which served him well as a missionary (he carried a whole library of Christian theology in his head) and as a linguist (he became so skillful in the language that he wrote a number of books in Chinese). His memory also endeared him to the Chinese and won him Christian converts. In his study of the man and his times,
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,
Jonathan Spence described how "Ricci wrote quite casually in 1595 of running through a list of four to five hundred random Chinese ideograms and then repeating the list in reverse order."

The memory palace that Ricci advocated was an imaginary mental structure that might be based on a real building. This construction, great or small, was the best repository for knowledge. It could be vast, full of rooms and halls, corridors, and pavilions, and in each chamber we could place the images of things we wanted to recall. Ricci wrote, "To everything that we wish to remember we should give an image; and to every one of these images we should assign a position where it can repose peacefully until we are ready to claim it by an act of memory."

The scholar Francesco Panigarola, who may have taught Ricci in Italy, and who wrote on memory arts, could remember as many as 100,000 images at a time. And as a Jesuit, Ricci was well aware of the importance Ignatius of Loyola attached, in his
Spiritual Exercises,
to memory as a means of contemplation. Ricci himself credited the concept of the memory palace to a Greek poet of the sixth and fifth centuries
B.C.
, Simonides of Ceos. But the arts of memory were a part of classical learning, and in listing the memory experts of the past, Pliny's
Natural History
was as powerful an inspiration to Ricci as it was to Jorge Luis Borges four hundred years later—the result in Borges's case was his wonderful story "Funes the Memorious."

Ireneo Funes, the hero, has a marvelous memory, and one day the narrator loans him a copy of Pliny. Later, he visits Funes, who begins by reciting the book by heart—in the darkness of his room.

 

...enumerating, in Latin and in Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory recorded in the
Naturalis historia:
Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered the law in twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventor of the science of mnemonics; Metrodorus, who practiced the art of faithfully repeating what he had heard only once.

 

But Funes is unimpressed by any of this. His own memory is as good but much stranger, for after a fall from a horse he became paralyzed, and in waking from the trauma of the fall he discovered he had the gift of an instantly imagistic memory:

 

He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had seen only once.... Two or three times, he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction required a whole day. He told me: "I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world.... My memory is like a garbage heap."

 

Borges describes one of Funes's bizarre projects, how he has invented an original system for numbering, giving every number "a particular sign, a kind of mark." The number one might be
the gas,
two might be
the cauldron,
and so on:

 

in place of seven thousand thirteen he would say (for example)
Maximo Perez;
in place of seven thousand fourteen,
The Railroad;
other numbers were
Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale....
In place of five hundred he would say
nine.

 

Assigning an image to a word, Funes has reached the number twenty-four thousand. The narrator is at pains to point out that Funes is almost incapable of sustained thought or of generalizing. Funes can't understand why the word "dog" stands for so many shapes and forms of the animal, and more than that, "it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front)."

In this oblique story of the memory palace of Ireneo Funes, Borges gives final expression to the clear link between memory and creation.

 

As a schoolboy I had no memory palace, but I did have a manageable sub-Funes system of converting anything I wished to remember into an image. My intelligence was emphatically pictorial, and in this I was buoyant, but I foundered whenever a subject became unreasonably abstract. I still regard the best sentences as those which throw up clear images, and the worst as opaque, intangible, unvisualizable—like this one!

I performed well in school because rote capitulation was so important. Learning was memorizing: history was names and dates, geography was capitals and cash crops, English was reciting poems by heart ("The sun that bleak December day / Rose cheerless over hills of gray"). Biology was the simplest of all for me, not just a memory exercise but a new vocabulary: nictitating membranes, epithelial cells, osmosis, and the exotic-sounding islets of Langerhans (in the pancreas). Early in life, on the basis of my easy grasp of biological nomenclature and what I consider aesthetic reasons—all those euphonious names—I resolved to be a medical doctor. Even after I had abandoned the ambition, I went on telling people that it was my chosen profession—its being respectable and moneymaking, no one would question the choice.

I survived school because I remembered everything: my memory saved me. It was an odd, undemanding, and unsatisfactory education, and I think, because so little writing was involved in it, that its oddness helped make me a writer. For one thing, I read whatever I liked—in a jumble, preferring adventures about fur trappers or castaways, ordeal stories that involved cannibalism
(Boon Island
by Kenneth Roberts comes to mind), and books considered smutty or outrageous in the 1950s:
Generation of Vipers, Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Because of the censorship and repression of the period, language itself—seeing certain forbidden words on a page—was a stimulant, a thrill. I avoided anything literary. I was not taught any formal approach to essay writing. I was forced to invent my own writing technique.

This homemade reading list and my impressionistic method of writing did not serve me well at college. I was criticized for not being rigorous or trenchant. "Who says?" was a frequent comment by my teachers in the margins of my essays. I was offering personal opinions, not literary judgments. This did not worry me. My academic aim was never to excel but only to get it over with and move on. I was impatient to graduate: my reading had given me a taste, not for more reading or writing, but for seeing the wider, and wilder, world. I had felt small and isolated living in the place where I had grown up. I had read to find out about the world. I despaired of surviving being swallowed up by my hometown of Medford. I wanted to leave.

There was another obstacle. In college I was curious and energetic, but there was a weariness in the novels I read, in life in general, a sense of doomsday approaching. The postwar dreariness had penetrated into the fifties and even overlapped the sixties, and in the vogue for the placeless novel or play or poem, the dominant emotion was frustration and anger expressed as exhaustion. It was a sense of powerlessness, and it was almost certainly political: this was an age of racial segregation, fallout shelters, the Bomb, deep conservatism, overbearing religious views, and a denial of women's rights. Books were banned and put on trial. The literary expression of the period was a kind of confusion. It was the era of
Waiting for Godot,
the setting of which is an almost bare stage. Bare stages were in fashion. So were novels without much sense of place—I am thinking of the French
nouvelle vague,
but there were British and American imitators. Naturally, Eliot's
The Waste Land
was extremely popular.

I found this all unhelpfully abstract. My main objection, although I did not know enough to formulate it at the time, was that my own memories were of no use, my own experience somewhat irrelevant to the metaphysics of the modern novel or poem. Apart from blackouts and the shouts of air raid wardens—but why would the Germans want to bomb Webster Street? I wondered—I had no useful memory of World War Two, and that set many of us apart in the sixties. I had no sense of the Waste Land—I came from Medford, after all, which was a frustrating but funny place. We used to say Medford was famous because Paul Revere had ridden through it in 1775, but in fact we were more proud of the tough gangs of south Medford who slugged it out with the gangs from Somerville. Medford had particularities: my teacher Mr. Hanley, who had a wooden leg; Harry Walker, the drunken policeman who once lost his badge and gave us a quarter when we found it; hangouts like Joe's poolroom and Brigham's ice cream parlor and Carroll's diner; the dank, muddy smell of the Mystic River.