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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Memory and Scholarship10/13/2006 01:59:02As things get going this first quarter of graduate school, I am feeling the strain of memory! Memory has never been a real strong suit for me. It is particularly bad for music; though I play often, I can't remember all the words to a single song, even those that I have written. Often it feels like so much of the work I do, the writing, the recording, the journaling, the note-taking, all this creating, it is all a reaction to the fear I have of my own memory, that it will wipe every moment out of existence. Of course it will, so far as I can tell. I am pretty convinced that memory is entirely material, a thing of our brains, and when we come before God at the end we'll have no use for it anymore, though I'm not sure what exactly will replace it. A lot of my coursework these days is rereading books I read first as an undergraduate, the foundational classics of religious studies, as well as the basic texts on secularization theory. And it is amazing how much I have forgotten, how many times in a row I have forgotten the arguments of this or that book and have to go back to my notes. Today I spent all day reading these things, taking break to memorize German words that I'll someday forget, and also to buy vegetables at the farmers' market. All of it was wonderful and exciting, with neat ideas flying every which way, and I felt so thankful to be able to do this work. But where has it gone? Where will it go? I have learned from the historian of memory Frances Yates and my other gurus that memory is a principle of organization. So my response to forgetting has been to become very organized. Whatever computer knowledge I have goes into developing systems of recollection. Databases of my notes to books I read. This blog itself. Lists and lists of ideas. I design every arrangement of things to be consciously mnemonic. The idea of scholarship itself, as a vocation, the cylces of writing and publishing and reading, seem to me as much a process of remembering as of discovering. We are trying to hold on to our moments. Finally it is a desparation that can only be resolved, finally, by a kind of detachment. There is only one memory in the universe that is true and unassailable, and that is the universe itself, history itself. It remembers us completely, for everything we have done registers in it and is preserved forever in its effects. Not the way we might like, of course, but in this way humility is written into the nature of things, a combination of perfect retention (of ourselves as we were) and perfect forgetfulness (of ourselves as we thought we were). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
re:Memory and Scholarship - 10/15/2006 01:44:15
...Databases of my notes to books I read.... What type of system do you use? I've been trying off-and-on to come up with a useful way to do this! - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
re:Memory and Scholarship - 10/17/2006 00:53:36
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re:Memory and Scholarship - 10/17/2006 00:59:31
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