archives of images

I'm reading a really fascinating book called "The Art of Memory" by Frances Yates, which traces ancient Greek techniques of "artificial memory" through European history. In the medieval chapter, there's talk of a 14th century English friar by the name of Robert Holcot:

Holcot's Moralitates are a collection of material for the use of preachers in which the 'picture' [memory] technique is lavishly used....He places such images, in imagination, on the pages of a Scriptural text, to remind him of how he will comment on the text. On a page of the prophet Hosea he imagines the figure of Idolatry to remind him of how he will expand Hosea's mention of that sin. He even places on the text of the prophet an image of Cupid, complete with bow and arrows! The god of love and his attributes are, of course, moralised by the friar, and the 'moving' pagan image is used as a memory image for his moralising expansion of the text.

The preference of these English friars for the fables of the poets as memory images, as allowed by Albertus Magnus, suggests that the artificial memory may be a hitherto unsuspected medium through which pagan imagery survived in the Middle Ages. (pp. 98-99)

Something about pagan doodles on the pages of Hosea seems connected to our project in some odd way I haven't yet thought through, but I thought I'd post it here.

Sachsenhausen

Well, it's been a while since I've posted. That's partly because I've been trying to get out from under the stack of papers that needed grading, and it's partly because I've been meaning to say something about my visit to the former KZ camp at Sachsenhausen north of Berlin, and it's a difficult thing to get 'right'. Anyway, I think it's time to try...

Right from the start, I want to make it clear that, although it was our discussion of ghost towns that made me think of this, I'm definitely not conflating the concentration camps with any of the places we have been talking about, whether Rodney, Kayaköy, or elsewhere. The KZ camps are the physical relics of a very particular history and I don't in any way want to dilute that specificity.

What made me think of Sachsenhausen is only this - it is a place to which many people now go in the expectation that it will somehow put them in touch with a history that needs remembering. But my own experience of going to both Sachsenhausen and Dachau is one of running into the *gap* between the present and the past. Walking around the spaces that those camps once occupied, I found myself wondering how I 'should' be feeling, what this experience 'ought to' be communicating to me, what constitutes the 'right' way to react in a place of this kind. And, at the same time, I found myself suspicious of the emotions that did creep up on me there on the grounds that they might be 'too easy', self-indulgent rather than compassionate, not commensurate with the gravity of what had actually happened in that place. In other words, rather than experiencing some kind of powerful connection with history, the experience for me was of a kind of deep-seated uncertainty about my own emotional responses, about the possibility of every really understanding the past, and about the potential vanity of my attempt at 'remembering'.

I don't know if this is a common experience or not. I'm writing about it because it is relevant to those questions we've raised about whether a history is inscribed in a place and, if so, how. I'm not sceptical about that possibility - in fact, I'm sure there is something to it - but my own experience of going to places that are saturated with history is that I don't tune in on a kind of pure emotional wavelength but actually spend most of the time feeling conflicted, inadequate, and uncertain how to feel, think, or behave.

I'm not sure how to finish this post. I think it's right to go to these places - I'm not sceptical about making that journey at all. But I'm always puzzled when people talk about how moving they found it because, to me, the experience, while very powerful at one level, isn't what I would normally describe as 'moving'. That's a term I use for watching dance or listening to a speech at someone's leaving party. Walking round Sachsenhausen is powerfully disorienting - almost a kind of reproach - rather than 'moving' in the way I usually use that word.

Hope this makes sense. Will post more if I can work it out in my mind...

Here is Where

reading the paper this morning I came across an article about this project, which is cool, I think...

principles of uncertainty

I'm so glad you and jess got something from the maira kalman. Here's a link to the most recent book of hers, which I love a lot... (I think she is currently working on a book about American democracy of which the jefferson essay is one section: if you look on the times website there are links to others in that series...)

maira kalman

It's beautiful! And Jess thinks so too. She says: are there any books that Maira K. has done in that style? There are, I think, but are there any you recommend?

time wastes too fast

nothing to do with the River Trip or Archives of Exile directly, but what a piece of work Maira Kalman did here (you remember I showed you some of her work when we met in the winter?)

wow. somehow I want you to have this, richard...

collectivity/collaboration/companionship

You wrote here about your feelings on the idea of travelling with a ragged little caravan of people dropping in and out as you make the journey.

If we're going to think about memory here - and, in particular, the idea of the layering of memories onto a map, i think the fact that the journey will be a collective, collaborative, companiable experience is interesting. It might lead to a work, or a document (?), that is structured by *your* consciousness - because you'll almost certainly be the only person who makes the whole journey - but that also includes material, "memories", made by *others*. And I suspect that memory IS, in fact, like that - I don't think i made my memories all alone. Far from it. Memory is a kind of collaborative process, isn't it?

memory

I very much like that idea of an eclectic range of material being *layered* onto a map, which - I agree - seems like a beautiful image of human memory. I've recently been reading Le Jardin des Plantes by the French novelist, Claude Simon. It was his last novel - he published it in 1997 when he was 84 - and it represents a wonderful attempt to express something of the texture of human memory within the scope of the novel.

It consists of a series of recollected fragments and often he will return to the same material in a new fragment, developing it slightly or altering it a little in the way we do when we recall moments of the past. The fragments are not uniform in style - in fact they vary considerably - and again that evokes the lack of uniformity in actual memory (some memories are vivid; some are vague; some are detailed; and others are sketchy outlines). There is a pattern of assocation among the fragments, so the mention of, say, a tap in one fragment will be echoed by the mention of a tap in the next, even though the memories are otherwise unconnected. And there are sometimes multiple blocks of text on the page, bringing different fragments into some kind of assocation that is not explicit but implied by the structure of the page itself. Of course these page layouts aren't maps. But they *are* map-like in that they organise memories visually. Here's an example:



Maybe my description makes Simon's novel sound so avant-garde as to be unreadable. But the extraordinary thing about it is that it's *very* readable, despite its unusual organisation.

Thinking about a work that evokes the structure of memory in its own form made me think of Simon's novel, which has impressed me a lot.