Ars Memoriae 記憶術

Kanji as a Memory Palace

I remember once sitting in a bar with a group of Japanese colleagues and someone mentioned “summer nights”– and that was it, as if on cue, they all chanted in perfect unison the lines from Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book:

Natsu wa yoru. In summer, it is the night. It is of course delightful when the moon is out, but no less so on dark nights when countless fireflies can be seen mingling in flight. One even feels charmed when just one or two pass by, giving off a gentle glow. Rainy nights, too, are delightful

The words were a thousand years old. And, I thought, what could a handful of random Americans repeat like that– perhaps other than the Pledge of Allegiance?

When I was a child, in addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, I memorized the multiplication tables up to twelve.  And it’s possible I memorized a few poems when I was young, but nothing I can recall now.

In Joshua Foerr’s surprising bestseller on memory, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, he also attempts to memorize a poem. A long poem. He does this by constructing a memory palace.

Also known as the Method of Location (or Ars Memoriae), a memory palace was a method used by the ancient Greeks and Romans to memorize texts. The basic idea was to associate each chunk of memory with something visual, or even a smell or sound. The ancients Greeks used architecture, harnessing the power of spacial memory, which is something the human brain is quite good at storing and recalling. Creating a multi-sensory memory is the “trick.”

In the case of a poem, you could place stanzas in particular rooms in the house where you grew up and in trying to recall the poem later, you would take an imaginary walk around the house. Moving from room to room, you would come up with the stanzas.

Foerr calls these rooms cubbyholes for his memories.

Reading and writing kanji is an activity that relies heavily on memory. Being partially pictorial helps, but the system also makes use of an organization system based around radicals, so that memories of the individual kanji hang together in groups—something not unlike a memory palace.

For example, the word  to speak, 言う (iu) is composed of a kanji 言 plus hiragana うfor the verb tense (present tense) . This becomes　言った (past tense)  言います (present tense polite form) 言いました (past tense polite form) etc.

The kanji 言 is also a radical, meaning it is part of more complex kanji roughly always on the idea of language… so that you see it forming the right side part of the kanji for other words such as story, word record.

話　語　話　記

This is a memory aid and gives clues to the kanji’s meaning. It is also the only way you can look words up in a dictionary if you don’t know how they’re pronounced, since kanji dictionaries are organized by radicals and stroke number, which is another reason why it is crucial to write the kanji in the correct way so the stroke number is always easy to figure out.

Getting back to Foerr’s project to memorize a long poem, he writes that having a trained memory for the ancients wasn’t just about gaining easy access to information, as it was about strengthening one’s personal ethics and becoming s more complete person.

“A trained memory was the key to cultivating judgement citizenship and piety.”

What one memorized shaped one’s character.

In Roger Ames’ introduction to Sun Tzu’s Art of War, he says:

In contrast with its classical Greek counterpart where “knowing” assumes a mirroring correspondence between an idea and an objective world, this Chinese “knowing” is resolutely participatory and creative– “tracing” in both the sense of etching a pattern and following it. To know is “to realize,” “to make real.” The path is not a “given,” but is made in the treading of it. Thus, one's own actions are always a significant factor in the shaping of one's world.

I like this idea a lot of treading on a path as a way of knowing since it gets closer to the internalizing of exemplary models I learned about in calligraphy class. An embodied know-how and attunement to the world.