Been a while – I’ve been away in the land of minimal internet access. I have also been somewhat lazy about my memorization.
I have memorized all the Tarot cards to a certain degree. For all of the 56 suit cards I have PAO images that derive from the relatively stock imagery in the Rider-Waite Tarot. Each suit has its own room in which the 14 card images appear in sequence. There is also a great hall with all the 22 Trumps in sequence, though these I have memorized in a deliberately limited fashion, for later, more sophisticated use. The hall has 27 images, 9 per side of the three sides used, each set of three clustered in an archway. Thus on the left, I-IX; on the far side X-XVIII; on the right XIX-XXII, then Swords, Coins, Rods, Cups, and then a blank door at the near-right corner which I may find useful later on.
I practice with these images largely by memorizing decks of cards, using the translation Swords=Spades, Coins=Diamonds, Rods=Clubs, Cups=Hearts. (This has reasonable historical foundations.) I use the Pages for Jacks, and ignore the Knights. I am getting faster, but as I say I haven’t been very diligent – it takes me about 10-12 minutes to memorize a complete shuffled deck.
I have been using a section of my parents’ house to memorize these cards, and have not been quite satisfied with this. I think I will try to find a space that will hold little more than 35 images (sufficient for two shuffled decks in clusters of three), and use that. I have found that it is best to dedicate a specific space for such memorization, because of the importance of wiping out the images every day to put in new images. This is different from what I am trying otherwise to do with my memory, and it’s helpful to know in advance that this space is special in the sense that the images are short-term. (I am planning eventually to work on an old Renaissance trick of creating a sort of character who assists with this, in the form of some kind of janitor, the idea being that when I’m preparing to memorize a deck and when I finish, I imagine sending the janitor into that area, cuing my mind to wipe the image-spaces clean.)
I have begun using this system to memorize phone numbers and contact information. My system is somewhat different from what I’ve seen described in modern memory discussion. In essence, my suits are sequenced numbers – Swords:Coins:Rods:Cups. Thus a phone number consists of digits in the form (Sw:Co:Ro) Sw:Co:Ro - Sw:Co:Ro:Cu. Each of these clusters thus becomes an image using the PAO cards. For example, the 312 area code (Chicago) becomes 3Sw:1Co:2Ro, i.e. the Person from 3Sw doing the Action from 1Co to the Object from 2Ro. For me, that’s Marvel’s Mighty Thor joggling a globe in his outstretched palm. Because these cards are always used in these clustered sequences, adding the Cup card to the 4-digit conclusion of the number is easy enough: just add the Person, Action, or Object of the appropriate Cup card in some part of the image where it seems to fit. Since the Cup image could never appear anywhere in the sequence except as the last digit, there is no confusion. I have just begun working on this, and we’ll see how it goes.
My plan, as the academic year begins again (back to the salt mines!) is to use memory-training as an adjunct to working out at the gym. I find that the great problem with riding a stationary bike or whatever is intellectual boredom. Fortunately, the gym here is very large and nobody pays any attention to anyone else – especially not to middle-aged faculty members. What’s more, lots of students try to read or do language flash-cards while working out, so my behavior shouldn’t seem that peculiar. My plan is to begin with a quick run-through of the Great Hall and the suit rooms, then pull out a deck (or eventually two decks) and memorize it. Then I’ll set to work memorizing phone numbers or whatever. If this goes well, I’m planning to start developing things in a more sophisticated direction.
The idea ultimately is to go right back where all this mnemotechnics really began: rhetoric. Rhetoric of lectures, rhetoric of papers, rhetoric of books, etc. I want to start laying out lectures – or papers, book chapters, or whatever I need to compose – in the form of imaginary suites of what Bruno would have called atria. Introductions like this, core data like that, conclusions like the other, and so on. Then I start building images.
Here I can use not only the suited cards – for everything from dates to difficult terms to sequential guideposts – but also the unsuited Trump cards, which have broad conceptual meanings. That way I can categorize things with Trumps, file data under Trump categories, insert certain kinds of abstractions by using Trumps, whatever. It’s all just a sort of amplification of PAO – and I’ve got people like Bruno to explain how to do it. (Consider II: High Priestess. Make her Isis, let’s say, and attach a web of conceptual information about Isis to the image. Isis becomes the key to a series of hyperlinks, you might say, and within controlled limits all of those links begin to stand behind the image – Isis is pregnant with meaning.)
Nearly 2000 years of European intellectual history tells me that something will happen from this: I will begin to see logic and argumentation, and because I see them I will begin to evaluate pieces of arguments (and whole arguments) aesthetically – instead of purely logically. An argument is considered effective when it is not only sound but also pretty. And once I am satisfied that some paper or whatever is complete, fully developed with all the pieces in place, elegant as well as rigorous, it becomes largely a matter of writing it out, converting the already extremely thorough outline into effective prose. I’ve been doing that part for 20 years, so I’m not worried.
If this all comes together, I’ll be doing something a lot like what Bruno and his predecessors were doing. My writing will be faster and more elegant, my lectures will be note-free, and I will spend far less time looking things up than I used to.
If it all really works well, I expect that in 1-2 years I will also write some articles – or maybe a book – about how Bruno’s memory-magic really worked.
Wish me luck!