What makes a man’s face glow like fireflies in the retelling of a visit? Or hum his journeys and whistle of times spent? There are memorable cities and the rhythms of place twirling in this marble-blue-green. Places too have rhythm, poetry even, not merely lines, but lines and we must learn to read them. So, what causes a place to flash before that inward eye with the sweet delight of ocular recitation?
Just take a look at cities vibrant and notice the benches, and the thoughtful placement of trees. These are no accidents, or the chance operations of Cage. These are the lines poetic from the ink of urbanists, protestors with hearts that knew no rest or sleep’s harbor. For public space matters to the life of a city.
I recall how sidewalks were fought after in collective voice in the days of Jane Jacobs against city planners with a vision car-centric, relentless to run expressways through communities. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” Jacobs stated,
“The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eying the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist…most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all.”
“I began asking directions of people just for the fun of getting in on some talk” - Jane Jacobs
The Repetition of Sidewalk Contacts: Walkable Cities
You may be asking, “What has walking or sidewalks to do with memory?” I believe there are some interesting parallels between urban planning and mnemonics. It is through repetition of contact that familiarity of place begins to bud. Behold the schoolchild repeat the alphabet, the pianist repeat his scales, the monk repeat the Psalter, the polyglot repeat his conjugations, the ballerina repeat her pose, and the actor repeat his lines. These are the feet of recalling, the slow rhythms of the non-trivial. As the feet in walking, there is the “to and fro” of tongue, heart, and hand.
I am reminded of the Italian word for “review”, ripassare, which is comprised of two words: ri - “again” and passare - “to pass” or “to cross.” It conveys the idea of passing through or crossing paths again. So, when I hear the word “review” in the context of mnemonics, I tend to think of movement, a type of walking. Similarly, the mnemonist walks “to and fro” his constructed memory palace and becomes familiar with the treasures stored inside. It is through these many, many contacts with mental-place that a long-term memory is formed.
We need more walkable cities built for people and not for the automobile. In the age of GPS, self-driving cars, contactless delivery, AI chatbots, fast-food pickup, streaming, Amazon Prime shopping, self-checkouts, dispersed and sprawling communities, we are experiencing less and less human contact. Are we aware of our interactions and how technologies shape our experience of place and memory of it? I began to ask myself, do I know the dear names of those around me at stores or stoop? Do I know my neighbors, the shapes of shadows local, or the sounds of birds Floridan? If not, why and how can I be more intentional with counter-liturgies?
Lively Cities, Space, and the Proper Use of Images
Mnemnonists according to the classical tradition believed that one could write on their memory. As Lina Bolzini, a historian of the memory arts once observed,
“With the introduction of writing memory comes down from Olympus and enters the world of the city and its human professions; it becomes an art, something that can be taught and practiced. Writing, moreover, removes from the unrepeatable temporal flux of oral communication and transforms them into objects positioned in space, into things that can be seen and analyzed. Writing influences even the way in which the mind is perceived: thought takes on a spatial dimension, and thus intellectual processes are described in terms of movement.”
Memory began to be viewed in terms of spatial dimension by which space could be divided into places. Consequently, memory was often compared to wax tablets that one could write on like scribes through the use of images. However, according to Cicero and subsequent rhetoricians, in order for these images to impress upon one’s “mental-place,” they had to be lively and to engage the mental eye. Thomas Bradwardine (1300-1349) in his treatise, “On Acquiring a Trained Memory” stated,
“But their nature [images] should be wondrous and intense, because such things are impressed in memory more deeply and are obtained…the whole imagery should also have some other quality such as movement, that thus it may be commended to memory more effectively than through tranquility or repose.”
As studying the history of urbanism, I found striking similarities. As the mnemonist considers the proper use of memoryspace, the city planner considers the proper use of public space and the characteristics that renders a city lively. Isn’t it interesting that we often describe cities as dead or alive? According to Jan Gehl, author of Cities for People, a lively city must not merely provide sufficient space for movement. It must be alive, enjoyable, variegated, and welcoming with opportunities for recreational activity, and social interaction with different groups of people.
The Use of Variety and the Dissimilitude of Places
In the memory arts, we also see an emphasis on the importance of variation and dissimilitude of mental places for strengthening recollection. Contemporary mnemonists such as Simon Reinhard and Guillaume Petit-Jean advises one to consider the variety of height in the selection of loci. Andrea Muzii instructs his students to not use the same object twice in a room as to avoid confusion. In the fifteenth century, Jacobus Publicius, in his highly circulated manual on rhetoric Ars memoriae stated,
“Similarity among the locations should be avoided more than death. For the one destroys good arrangements, just as the other dissolves connections...For these reasons, we should be able to avoid this by [adding] color to the structure and height to the figure, and by [using] diverse material. Or if we do not do so by means of places chosen and arranged with art, at least our places should be fashioned with variety, using stones, streets, mounds, alters, monuments, bireme boats, inclined bridges, stars, and islands.”
Although throughout the history of mnemonics there have been disagreements on how one should exactly use and structure loci in memory palaces, one may nevertheless observe this recurring theme of variation. Similarly, some urbanists have pointed out the increasing blandness and monotony of some American architecture with their lack of variety and use of good materials.
City Planners and the Mnemonics of Place
Mnemonists not only studied the art of memory, but considered how to make their works memorable.
(1552-1625), an English Renaissance humanist, was a serious student of mnemonics, and sought to make his texts memorable through the use of rhyme and the musicality of language. Marianna Iannaccona, a Florio scholar, mentioned to me in an interview that he also used special markings in his works such as “Giardino di Ricreatione” (1591) in order to instruct readers to which lines should be remembered and placed in one’s memory palace.It is believed that Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) who mastered the ars memoria also understood the nature of memoryspace and how to contribute to the memorability of La Divina Commedia, one of the greatest poems in the Western canon. Should we not also seek the understanding of urban space and how to develop cities conducive for human flourishing? City planners are the mnemonists of place who must learn the art of keeping and of keeping heart. For the winds of modern engineering howl and seek to break what’s dear apart. Let us build human-scaled-cities for chests and not engines, for songs to belt from lung and not for tired squeaks or the honks sopranoed. What does your city sing?
Personal Updates
Currently Memorizing: The Vacation by Wendell Berry
Recently Completed: “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by Williams Wordsworth, and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats.
Poem to Memorize Next: “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Upcoming Newsletter: I am working on an essay called, “C.S Lewis, Dante, and the Art of Memory.”
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Thanks for reading!
Books on Urban Planning
Here are some books on urban planning for further exploration. I am currently reading: “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.” by William H. Whyte.
Cities for People - Jan Gehl, The Architecture of Community - Leon Krier, Walkable City - Jeff Speck, Finding Lost Space - Roger Trancik, Livable Streets - Bruce Appleyard, The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer - Charles Marohn , The Image of the City - Kevin Lynch, Arbitrary Lines - M. Nolan Gray, The High Price of Free Parking - Donald Shoup,
Hey Chloe, glad you enjoyed it and were inspired to memorize poetry! Good question. I’d say start with something small (12 lines or less) and something that you love. A poem that makes your heart warm. Poetry foundation is a good website to explore and to find poems. Once you have a poem in your heart, they are much like birds. They will sing to your soul with a bright voice and sweet tune even in the rain or when the clouds of life darken.
Great article and much to say about it.
One thing that leaps to mind is more on how cities promote forgetting.
For example, I've lived in both East and West Berlin. The East is filled with Plattenbau, which translates to something like "record buildings."
They don't exactly look like a stack of records on a record player, but they do have this strange uniformity to them, and can be difficult to navigate externally and internally.
There are incredibly long streets where they all look similar on the outside. Inside, they have strange staircases that are difficult to describe and naturally remember.
I'm not sure the German band Einstürzende Neubauten had these buildings in mind when they chose that name for their group, but it essentially translates to "new buildings falling down."
To writing and memory, it's still possible to purchase ruled paper, the lines serving as roads for our hands to follow, perhaps to produce the first drafts of what we now sometimes call "walls of text" in Online Speak.
When I think of Dante and roads and memory, I imagine humans always needing to choose either to embrace whatever we evolve or turn away. As he writes early on in Inferno:
"On it came, so bothering my tread
I’d half a mind at every turn to turn."
If nothing else, the art of memory provides a shot of full-mindedness. Thanks as ever for providing the goods that help us make the best possible turns in the mazes of modernity!