The Craft of Thought, Reviewed

I just finished Mary Carruthers' book The Craft of Thought. It is a fascinating account of medieval monastic "memory" techniques, and how these techniques actually were much more about "invention" and creativity than a mere regurgitating another culture (which is usually the story from historians, scientists who don't like the fact monks preserved European culture, and a host of other people with axes to grind).

There are a number of extremely interesting things in the book, from the use of the "planned cities and buildings" of the Bible (the Tabernacle of Moses, Solomon's temple, Ezekial's temple, and John's temple) as forms of "locational" memory, to the use of illuminated texts for reading. Yet what struck me the most was the central metaphor for "memory" and thinking in monastic culture, the machina memorialis.

The notion of a "machine" in ancient and medieval culture is what Isidore of Seville identified as a hoist that architects or masons (masiones) would use to lift up the "fabric" of a building, setting this superstructure on a foundation. Extending this metaphor (using 1 Corinthians 8), monastic culture thought of a "memory machine" as constructing a building on the "foundation" of the Bible. Thus, memory was not a "faculty" that we have, allowing us to regurgitate information (although, it is true, the foundation must be able to be regurgitated - this is why all monks learned the Psalms by heart), but rather to creatively play with the foundation.

The best analogy would be a jazz musician: s/he learns "turns", phrases, scales, and other melodic and harmonic devices, and finally "standards", practicing hours and hours so that when they "improvise" they have something to say, and they don't need to think about it. Jazz is very formulaic in this sense, but it is free precisely because "memory" functions not as a mere iteration of previous learned material, but instead a building, an erecting of architectures of harmony and melody that out-strip, but do not overcome, the foundation in scales and basic harmony.

There were many devices monks (and the ancients) would use in order to use memory in this way. E.g., they would make "fables" in order to remember the stars. One of the most short-sighted and narrow-viewed modern people think is the Greeks and Romans thought that stories of Orion and other constellations were meant to "explain" what we now know "scientifically." Yet the entire point of these stories was to enable a sailor to remember that in the autumn Orion and his dogs 'chase' Pleiades, thus enabling him to locate the stars quickly. Fables, etymologies (which philologists really hate), actual buildings, and art, all help in the memory work.

Another aspect of the "machine" of memory is an ethical point. John Cassian (one of the founders, along with Augustine, of western monasticism) used the metaphor of machine in connection with a "mill". One has the grain one wishes to produce flour with, so you put the grain in the hopper, it goes down onto the stones, and is crushed and refined so as to produce flour. However, in order to produce usable flour, you must have good grain to begin with. Analogously, with memory, it depends on the ethical intentions of the person "remembering". We have a phrase for this: 'garbage in, garbage out.'

So what's the point of all this? For monks, it was so you could have meditative experiences, and ultimately to arrive at the beatific vision that is God. There are many examples of texts where this is attempted. E.g., Hugh of St. Victor describes the Ark using an "allegorical" method. This method - which means much more than a mere "non-literal" reading of the Bible - is almost a meditative performance, where he's taken his entire memorial foundation, and then, interlacing seemingly incongruous texts and images, he sets out to explain a very boring (to our minds) part of the Bible as one of the most glorious and spiritually expansive parts. Hugh and others were trying to "hoist" themselves beyond where they were.

Carruthers does a fantastic job of bringing this world into ours, of showing how the monastic view of memory was much more expansive and interesting than ours. Of course, I think most people would recognize that, in many ways, human memory does not function like a computer. Even if our brain maybe more "powerful" than a computer, it is not a computer; our memories are all flawed. We fill in lots of lacunae in order to have a coherent narrative of our life, fill-ins that are most likely "wrong" and "un-factual." Seriously though, who would want to read a memoir that was just a re-counting of every detail of our life, accurate to the T? That would be beyond boring, because it would not tell us anything beyond mere details. While this may be "real," in a very restricted, lab-induced, narrow sense, it isn't imaginatively real.

Just like monks, we remember our life in order to get somewhere, somewhere beyond where we are now.