Age is dreaded for the supposedly inevitable loss of memory. We lose the past and dwell in a timeless, featureless present as blank as a movieless movie screen in a theater. Contemporaries grow tedious when they forget who recorded “One Toke Over the Line” in 1970 and interpret their forgetfulness as a symptom of impending idiocy. (How interesting that memory is associated with and perhaps identical to the essential self.) I don’t recall my parents or their friends ever fretting about such things, and suspect it is yet another era-specific indication of narcissism.
Clara Claiborne Park (1923-2010)
was a marvelous writer, a long-time teacher at Williams College who wrote
movingly about her autistic daughter. She was also an essayist and reviewer,
and I remember reading “The Mother of the Muses: In Praise of Memory” in the
Winter 1981 issue of The American Scholar. Park reminds us:
“To call on the Muses is a
way of talking about what are, if not actual presences, still realities which
poets take utterly seriously--as must any of us who have found words taking
shape in our heads, and wondered where on earth (on earth?) they were coming
from.”
In modern parlance, the
Muses represent Inspiration or Creativity – that mysterious human capacity
familiar to every honest writer and other artists. Where did that good idea come
from? Park also reminds us of the Muses’ pedigree:
“And the Muses are the
daughters of Mnemosyne, Memory. It is my antique conviction that the Greeks
knew what they were talking about--that to make the Muses the daughters of
Memory is to express a fundamental perception of the way in which Creativity
operates.”
Park asks a good question
and supplies us with a homely answer (Park is nothing if not pragmatic and
matter-of-fact):
“Well, what can they do
for us, on the rare occasions when we ask their assistance? How do we remember
the number of days in the months? ‘Thirty days hath September, / April, June,
and November,’ the rhymes and strong fourfold beat combining to give us instant
recall of needed facts we otherwise would have to figure out on our knuckles?”
And this:
“Schliemann went where he
went and dug where he dug because the Muses told him to, and but for their
testimony the gold of Mycenae, and the shaft graves, and the burned city of
Troy VII would still be underground.”
Some of my sentences come
automatically, and I sense they’re drawn from a higher brain function. Call it
rationalism, not unlike solving a differential equation. But others, often the
more interesting ones (to me, if not the reader) are mysterious. They seem to
appear ab nihilo, from nowhere, like a magician pulling a coin from my ear. I
recommend reading all of Park’s essay. After more than forty years I remembered
how good it was and how much it moved me. Here is the conclusion to Park’s essay,
a marvelous coda to her thinking:
“The mind is the greatest
of computers, and it works its marvels best when well stored- with facts: names,
dates, places, events, sequences--and also with language: words, phrases,
sentences, the tongues of men and of angels. Perhaps language is the most
important of all. We all notice the contraction in the range of reference of
the young. But facts can be looked up, that's true, and if we get a grant, our
servants can do that for us. What’s harder to acquire—in adulthood hard indeed--is
that intimacy with language, that sense for different ways of using it, which
grows naturally when we carry Shakespeare and the Bible, Jefferson and Lincoln,
Eliot and Yeats, Edward Lear and P. G. Wodehouse in our heads. In our heads or,
better, in another part of the body, there where we ‘learn by heart’--there in
the unconscious, where the Muses sing to us darkling, and all the richness of what
we know and value can come together in unexpected, unheard-of combinations.
Memory is not the enemy of Inspiration, or of thought either. Today, as always,
it is the essential prerequisite of both.”
[See this cover version of
“One Toke Over the Line.”]
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