Canons of Rhetoric: Memory

Everyone is born with the capacity to remember. Some people have prodigious memories without apparent effort, but everyone can improve his or her retention capacity.Excluding people with certain neurological or psychological disorders. If you are interested in such phenomena, check out Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars. Actually, read anything by Oliver Sacks regardless of your interests. He's one of the greatest expositionists of the previous century. Such is the traditional position on memory, at any rate. The sophist Hippias is said to have been one of the first to teach an art of memory. It is the poet Simonides, however, who is usually associated with the art of memory. It is said, in Rhetorica ad Herrenium, that one day he attended a banquet with a great many other guests. During dinner he was called outside, and while he stood there conversing with a messenger, the banquet hall collapsed, crushing everyone inside. Simonides was able to reconstruct from memory who was in attendance and where each person was sitting. He was able to do this, he explained, because he had a visual image of the banquet hall firmly placed in his head.

A standard sort of mnemonic device is to make a word out of the first letter of a list of words (or sentence out of the first word in a collection of phrases). To remember the five canons of rhetoric, for example, one can take the first letter of each and create a memorable word: M.A.I.D.S.

For more complex information, one can divide the matter into subject heads, print each on a card, and distribute the cards in a memorable pattern throughout a familiar room. By moving from place (card) to place throughout the room and practicing the part of the speech that each card represents as one stands before it, one can memorize a pattern that will be easily recalled and which will recall the information by association. During a public recitation, then, one simply returns to the room in one's head, and retraces the familiar path. Using techniques like these, people have been able to memorize information of, to us, unimaginable complexity and magnitude. The Illiad and the Odyssey were recited from memory. Another memory technique is iconographic. One creates an image, mental or physical, which has memorable features, pictures that would remind one of the necessary topics.

The figure of Rhetorica or Dame Rhetoric (top left of this screen) is a mnemonic device for the art of rhetoric. The fold of sheep at the bottom right signifies rhetoric's ability to lead even beasts; the fiery pot and the spurs at bottom left signify rhetoric's ability to move the passions and control the will. The caduceus in the right hand represents rhetoric's ability to unify opposing points of view (or hold both simultaneously); it might also remind one that Plato likened rhetoric to quackery. The three chains extending from Dame Rhetoric's mouth signify the three styles: low, middle, and high. The open left hand indicates rhetoric's ingratiating gift of words. The open hand might also remind one that Zeno is said to have contrasted rhetoric with dialectic by saying that if rhetoric was an open hand,  dialectic was a closed fist. The crown is to remind one that rhetoric was (for roughly fifteen-hundred years) considered the crown or pinnacle of education.

A somewhat less complex application of the same method is to create separate icons for individual concepts. Thus Zeno's idea image of rhetoric as an open hand and dialectic as a closed fist.

Stained glass windows are often mnemonic devices for scripture, particularly useful for illiterate parishioners, but handy also for the clergy if they are struggling for something to say. The main concept here is that in the past at least, pictures really did tell stories. One common example is the "Stations of the Cross", which is a representation of the passion of Christ as told in sequence of 14 images.

In addition to organic and trained memory, today we also have digital memory as well as digitially enhanced memories. One of the early complaints about literacy was that people's memory would atrophy if they could just consult their notes whenever they needed to. Both Plato and Alcidamas made this argument. Others too, I imagine. Lao Tzu said "When the people know writing, their virtue deteriorates." Now that anything you might want to know is on your phone, do you need to remember anything? Or do we use our phones as the greatest memory palace ever devised? Many of us document our days via Instagram and other such programs. And even if you just like photographing the mundane, your image tools create slideshows and remind you of where you were when.

The commonplace book, which I talk about in the section on Topics under Invention, was for centuries the primary memory tool of public speakers. Today we have Evernote and Onenote and Keep and the like for such purposes. You probably should be using one of those. But I would like to encourage you to imagine what your own personal digital memory palace might be like, how it would work, and I challenge you to design and then build it.

See:
Rhetorica ad Herennium, Book 3
Quintilian Book 11, Chapter 2
Carruthers, Mary. The book of memory: a study of memory in medieval culture Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Carruthers, Mary. The craft of thought: meditation, rhetoric, and the making of images, 400-1200. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Johnson, George. In the palaces of memory: how we build the worlds inside our heads. George Johnson. New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1991.
Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace Books. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

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