A spark from the anvil of academe

I was reading ‘Beyond the Archive’ by one Jens Brockmeier this morning, finding the going a bit heavy, when I stumbled across the word palace, in a context of memory and metaphor. At which I sparked up and drifted off into a world of fancy. A fanciful world of memory.

Many people have thought of memory in terms of the memory palace, a large and complicated place with lots of rooms, all sorts of shapes and sizes, lots of doors, corridors and stairs. A palace which is really a fancy warehouse for memories, us humans not caring to have something as crude and effective as the computerised & roboterised warehouse which might be run by the likes of Amazon or the database which might be run by the likes of the Oracle Corporation. One aspect of the palace being its size, but another being its luxury and yet another being the fact that a palace is usually built for a king. There is someone in charge, there is someone for whom the palace was built.

A palace with lots of space, but also a palace in which things, that is to say memories, can get lost, can be hard to find, even when one has a map. Perhaps I have lost the keys to some of the rooms. Perhaps some of the rooms are closed for maintenance. Perhaps the lighting is poor, or at least patchy. The cellars are dark & dank while the state rooms, with their large windows, are quite light – even if rather cold – thinking here of some of the large rooms in some of the large houses operated by the National Trust.

But then, taking a leaf out of the Brockmeier book, what about memories which have a life their own? That wander about the palace, perhaps play dressing up or hide and seek. Perhaps play games with the palace-master. A personage who might or might not be the same as the king, the owner of the memories, that is to say you. Might be some alter. Memories which are more like people of flesh & blood in their own right than the inert & inanimate tablets of stone we sometimes talk about when thinking of a very permanent record. See reference 1 for a discussion of the Biblical origin of the phrase.

A memory palace which is also like an elaborate dolls’ house sitting on a table in my study and into which I post my memories, completed with a luggage label, hoping that I will be able to get them back if I talk nicely to the concierge. Or send in my drone (from Maplin) to look for them.

More or less a self-contained community, perhaps something like a monastery. Maybe a modern monastery, with its own broadband connection to the internet. Enclosed, but throbbing with a life of its own, operating at some different level from that of the owner. This last being the chap who pays the gas bill for the gas fire which keeps the study at a reasonable temperature during the long winters. But who doesn’t really understand what is going on inside the dolls’ house.

PS 1: we also have the memory palaces of Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary to China who played for his supper, as it were, by doing prodigious tricks of memory for the emperor and his court.

PS 2: I associate now to the animated and sometimes malevolent files conjured up by the narrator of the book noticed at reference 2.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablets_of_Stone.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-paperkeepers-tale.html.