Memory
I had been looking through a famous classical book on rhetoric, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, because at the moment I am fascinated by memory, and there’s lots on memory in here.
The page below is on developing your articifial memory, a system for memorising things one wishes to store. I love this page because of the places it suggests: ‘a house, an intercolumnar space, a recess, an arch…’ I have taught this a lot for work and it never stops giving me the shivers. I was thinking about the capaciousness of the mind and its architecture.
The backgrounds or places in which the images are to be situated are quite specific. The book says that ‘for example, if in the fifth [background] we should set a golden hand, and in the tenth some acquaintance whose first name is Decimus, it will then be easy to station like marks in each successive fifth background.’
I was looking through different online copies of this text and was delighted to find, on the first page of one Google Books copy, this hand. This copy was digitized in 2010.
I love it because it is a surprise, but also because it is a perfect scrambled misreading of the instructions above. Five fingers-ish (one of them a strange grey blur) against a blue background, slipped between two identical copies of the same blank page numbered ‘70’. Two fingers covered in pink glove, the other two showing traces of pink shimmery nail varnish. And two little wounds at the base of the little finger, too. I hope this person in 2010 was ok. I remember I was ok that year, then suddenly I wasn’t.
See, it’s working.