I am older, maybe six, and we are outside. It is night again, stars over the apartment houses of the Bronx, paler because of the lights...I am looking up at the buildings, and the sky and I am very sad. Knowing this is the last time I’ll see this street, my grandparents are moving. It is the first time I know that “this is the last time” for something and I can hardly bear it...I have somehow some paper with me is how I remember it, but maybe I make it up then and write it down later. For years I had the copy in my first-grade Catholic-school hand: the poem I made to comfort myself that night, to “remember forever” the stars over those tall white apartment houses. My first poem and it worked, still works, I still remember that sky. Poem as the gift of memory. Mnemosyne. Mother.

--Diane di Prima, Recollections of my Life as a Woman: The New York Years

Poet Jake Berry asked several poets questions about their work. These are my responses.

1

Question:

Myth and Memory—  
How does memory work in myth?  
What function does memory serve in your poetry?  
To what extent is your poetry a mythologizing?  
Does poetry have to be descriptive or narrative in order to be mythic?

Response:

I

[The term] “false memory syndrome” usually refers to a pattern of memories of events in one’s own past that never took place. It is not that the events are remembered inaccurately (for most events are). It is rather that nothing remotely like those events occurred.

--Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory

The Muses are fabled to be the daughters of Memory (“Mnemosyne”)--a fiction which suggests that each Muse was created as a specific individual emphasis of the general activity of remembering. Clio is specifically the muse of history--Memory in the field of history.

In The Art of Memory, Frances A. Yates re-tells (remembers) Cicero’s story from De Oratore of the invention of “the art of memory”:

At a banquet given by a nobleman of Thessaly named Scopas, the poet Simonides of Ceos chanted a lyric poem in honour of his host but including a passage in praise of Castor and Pollux. Scopas meanly told the poet that he would only pay him half the sum agreed upon for the panegyric and that he must obtain the balance from the twin gods to whom he had devoted half the poem. A little later, a message was brought in to Simonides that two young men were waiting outside who wished to see him. He rose from the banquet and went out but could find no one. During his absence the roof of the banqueting hall fell in, crushing Scopas and all the guests to death beneath the ruins; the corpses were so mangled that the relatives who came to take them away for burial were unable to identify them. But Simonides remembered the places at which they had been sitting at the table and was therefore able to indicate to the relatives which were their dead. The invisible callers, Castor and Pollux, had handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing Simonides away from the banquet just before the crash. And the experience suggested to the poet the principles of the art of memory of which he is said to have been the inventor.

Cicero comments that Simonides    

inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.

This account of the origin of the “art of memory” is not itself a memory but a fiction--a story, a myth, perhaps a “false memory.” Yet it is sufficiently vivid to be unforgettable. The story connects memory to poetry, place, transformation, the divine, and, finally, to writing: “we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.”

If there is a center to my work, it is the notion of self-knowledge. Yet it seems to me that the supreme moment of self-knowledge--the moment in which we know ourselves most intensely--is also the moment of fictionalizing, the moment in which we tell a story. Self-knowledge is thus permeated with fiction--with what might be thought of as a kind of “lying”; it stands as close to falsehood as it does to truth.

Yet this is not to say that self-knowledge doesn’t exist. It is only to say that it is never anything other than problematical: it is constantly (and only) at the point of its own revelation, in a state of struggle and disclosure. Hans-Georg Gadamer remarked in Philosophical Hermeneutics that Martin Heidegger’s work “pursued the intrinsic and indissoluable interinvolvement of authenticity and inauthenticity, of truth and error, and the concealment that is essential to and accompanies every disclosure....” I wrote something similar about the poet Delmore Schwartz: “Few poets have been so committed to art as self-consciousness; few poets have understood so clearly that self-consciousness is necessarily shot through with fantasy and fiction.”

Poetry as “a supreme fiction”--to use Wallace Stevens’s phrase--is poetry as the instigator of the “mythic moment,” the moment in which myth (or self-knowledge) “happens.” The Simonides story is such a mythic moment. It functions as an originating impulse which generates a number of assumptions about the world--a gathering space for various issues. It asserts (falsely) that it is about the past, but it is actually far more about the future. It does not refer to something previously existing so much as it  founds something; it is the basis for seeing the world in a certain way. It raises moral issues (don’t welch on people; respect the gods, who are stronger than earthly potentates) but it also goes much further. It speaks to our fears of being in the world (the house you’re in may be suddenly smashed to pieces) and it simultaneously allays such fears (propitiate the gods and you’ll survive); it raises issues of power, ego, and of the power of words.

At the same time, it is “just a story”: we don’t have to believe it. Or we can interpret it in ways which seem far-fetched, “inappropriate,” as people often do with stories. Though it presents itself as “history”--these events  happened to these particular people who lived at such and such a time in such and such a place--it is in fact nothing but meaning, material for interpretation.

It’s possible that Scopas of Thessaly and Simonides of Ceos were people who “actually existed”--so to that extent the story is an example of history or “memory.” The existence of Castor and Pollux, on the other hand, is considerably more in doubt, though they “exist” in the story on a more or less equal basis with Scopas and Simonides.  (We can also ask whether Scopas has failed to “remember” the gods.)

Like the Greeks, we are familiar with disasters in which “the corpses [are] so mangled that the relatives who came to take them away for burial were unable to identify them.” To me, that detail seems extremely “real”--a genuine example of “memory.” Reading about that incident, I found myself thinking of the horrifying photographs of Auschwitz, a fact the inventors of the story could hardly have known about. Yet my “memory” of Auschwitz adds to the emotional resonance of the story. My knowledge of the London blitz is relevant as well. Couldn’t we move easily from that detail to “A Refusal To Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London,” Dylan Thomas’s poem memorializing a child killed in a London air-raid--a poem which I once memorized?

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

The Simonides story is nothing but meaning, and meaning cuts across time and cultures into a realm which makes use of times and cultures but which is not limited to any of them. The realm of “meaning” is the realm of myth, of story--the luminous intersection point of fact and fiction, of truth and longing: “mixing / Memory and desire,” as T.S. Eliot put it in “The Waste Land.” Rabbi Michael Lerner rightly speaks of “the hunger for meaning”--the hunger for myth, for story.

There are only a few books that made me want to become a writer. One of these was Thomas Wolfe’s novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Another was Thomas Gray’s 18th‑century poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” I read both works when I was quite young. Wolfe called his book “a novel of the buried life”; “the buried life” is also a theme—a very literal one—of Gray’s “Elegy.” (I came upon Matthew Arnold’s poem, “The Buried Life,” only much later, in college.) I believe I was being taught two things by these works: the first was the notion that there was such a thing as a “buried life”--which was news to me; the second was that the “buried life” had a special language. “Poetry” was for me the language of the “buried life”--and so it remains. But by the “buried life” I do not mean the realm of the “unconscious.” I mean rather the moment in which meaning or self-consciousness erupts into language--the moment of myth. That such a moment somehow involves “memory” has long been recognized. Ezra Pound translated--and enjoyed quoting--“Canzone” by the medieval Italian poet, Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300). In Cavalcanti’s poem the moment of revelation or myth is called “Love,” but its place, its “locus” is memory--“dove sta memoria”:

Because a lady asks me, I would tell
Of an affect that comes often and is fell
And is so overweening: Love by name...

In memory’s locus (dove sta memoria) taketh he his state....

Pound adds in commentary, “These are no [poems] for an idle hour. It is only when the emotions illumine the perceptive powers that we see the reality. It is in the light born of this double current that we look upon the face of the mystery unveiled.” “Memoria” here is not the assertion of “what actually happened” but the intersection point of actuality and fantasy— “truth” and “falsehood.”

(Continued)

Jack Foley