Memories do not comply with the dictums of time's arrow.
Those among us who have experienced apparently unrelated
flashes of recollections passing through our minds will
surely vouch for that, and it is often said that people
on the verge of death witness packets of memory from
their early childhood. Hence, as our discussion centres
round the key concept of 'memory', we may be a bit
lenient with the temporal sequence of our progress. Our
story (if it may be termed as one) begins with an 'Epilogue'
- it begins at the very end of the sequential and linear
chain of thoughts. This device has been used to come to
terms with the present concerns that are linked with the
topic and why we bother to give more than a passing
thought to it. The 'Prologue' follows the 'Epilogue' - as
we move back to pre-Romantic times only to find out how
much of 'Romantic memory' was not essentially 'Romantic'.
Finally we have our story - the 'substance'. The entire
process may prove to be a haphazard voyage on our time
machine. The focus of the effort will be on establishing
a sense of order in this non-linear descriptive chaos.
Epilogue: Plasticity
It was the Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing who
initiated the great AI (artificial intelligence) debate.
The well-known creator of modern computers devised the 'Turing
Test' in 1950. The Turing Test actually posed the
question that when a person is in communication with an
unknown communicator in an adjoining room via a teletype
then how does the person know that the fellow communicant
was a human or a machine? It is obvious that if the
fellow communicant was a machine then to pass as a human,
the machine has to be clever enough to imitate human
creativity. This is the nub of the Turing Test, and
Turing believed that within fifty years a computer could
be programmed to pass the test.
One may wonder about the possible connection between this
singular piece of logical prestidigitation and the
Wordsworthian 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'.
The connection becomes evident when we comprehend the
magnitude of the crisis that was stimulated by Turing's
prophetic 'fifty years' prediction. The scientific world
wrestled incessantly to create the first robotic
automation that would pass the Turing Test. The concept
of consciousness as a non-mechanistic vital phenomenon
was severely challenged. The Reductionist and
Connectionist models of mind came to the forefront.
Cognitive processes came to be recognised either as
complex logical circuitry or in accordance with multi-layered
parallel distributive processing (PDP) principles. Can a
cerebral parallel computer imitate consciousness? All the
wonders of memory, creativity, imagination, emotions seem
to have been reduced to mundane mechanistic processes,
devoid of the inherent magic. Funded by government
agencies (such as the US military aided DARPA) and
multinationals, cybernetics is presently in vogue. MIT
research labs, and the likes of Marvin Minsky, Seymour
Papert and Daniel Dennett are assuring us that 'AI is
reality'. Memories are no longer exclusive possessions of
vital existence - even the latest Intel Pentium IV PC
also has a bank full of it.
The Romantics could have easily understood our present
predicament. Although they had not heard about the Turing
Problem, or for that matter, about the future fantastic
visions penned by Asimov, they would surely have
identified with our crisis. For when Wordsworth was
penning Tintern Abbey or when Coleridge was
composing Frost at Midnight, they were
themselves reacting against a similar mechanistic
philosophy, which had dominated the European scenario
after the rise of empirical science, having been given
birth to by the likes of Galileo, Newton and Descartes.
For them, the entire universe was like clockwork, with
its systems of gears, cogs and wheels. Thus cosmology was
soon interpreted in the forms of pure mechanics. This led
to the question that if cosmology can be explained as
mechanics then why not biology?
The theory of cognition took shape in the guise of the 'Cartesian
Rupture'. Descartes asserted that internal processes
powered by a complex system of hydraulics, tubes and
valves, carried out the regular functions of organisms.
Humans were, however, the exclusive possessors of a soul
which interacted with the body through the pineal gland,
deep-seated in the brain.
But the soul affected only human thought, while other
life activities were nothing but automatic responses to
the environment. Although the existence of soul was
asserted, by cutting it off from bodily perceptions
Descartes hinted towards a mechanical theory of conscious
perceptions. Memory, as a trace of earlier conscious
perceptions also became a deterministic phenomenon. John
Locke, in his 1642 treatise, An Essay On Human
Understanding, further championed the reductionist
cause. A general feeling of crisis descended among the
intelligentsia, which gave rise to the counter-enlightenment
movement, which first struck roots in Germany and later
spread to England, France and the whole of Europe.
Romanticism, as an ideological and temperamental tendency,
was a part of the greater movement.
When Wordsworth was developing his poetic theory or when
Coleridge was searching for an ideal form, they were
trying to repair the Cartesian rupture between the body
and the mind. Coleridge detested the Cartesian dualism,
which to him 'replaced a providential, vital, and
companionable world by a world of particles in
purposeless movement'. The Romantics also argued against
the Lockean idea that all wholes are a combination of
discrete parts. Coleridge asserted that the fault of the
experimentalists is that 'they contemplate nothing but
parts - and all parts to them are necessarily little -
and the Universe to them is a mass of little things'. The
Romantics protested against the subject/object divide
which a Cartesian world inherently possesses. Wordsworth
proclaimed that 'solitary objects...beheld/ In
disconnection' are 'dead and spiritless', and division is
opposed to man's proper spiritual disposition. The poet's
mind - 'The perceiver', and nature 'The perceived',
belonged to a distinct whole and hence could not be
separated. As Wordsworth said 'all things live in us and
we shall live/ In all things surrounding us'. Dualism
according to Coleridge was a 'philosophy of death, and
only in a dead nature can it hold good.'
An important focus of Romantic creativity was the
reconciliation between the natural and the spiritual. In
most of the great Romantic lyrics, the poets have tried
consciously to bridge the gap between the perceiver and
the perceived. The poetic device used in most cases was
essentially a recollection of a chain of images from the
poet's memory. The images 'recollected in tranquillity'
were actually analogies, which helped the reader to
establish an emotional connection between natural and
spiritual reality. We can see poems such as Aeolian
Harp, The Prelude or Ode to a Skylark
as using memory-generated images to bridge the Cartesian
gap. Memory, in the Romantic tradition was the crucial
link between the part and the whole, between the
perceiver and the perceived, between the specific and the
universal.
In modern neuro-scientific lexicon, 'experience' or 'memory
of events' is termed 'plasticity'. Memory is mind's
connection to the external environment or the 'not-so-external'
nature of the Romantics. This relationship is defined as
a dynamic equilibrium between internal and external
factors. The variations that occur in the brain or in the
cerebral mechanisms due to changes in the environment are
termed 'plasticity'. This device that was used by the
Romantic men of letters to bring about phenomenal unity
is now the subject of intense research in the fields of
Neuropsychology, Neuroanatomy and Neurochemistry.
Plasticity has become the elusive enigma, which the
reductionists have yet to solve.
Prologue: Mnemosyne
Hesiod, the ancient Greek bard, sings the story of
Genesis. His story begins with the Muses dancing beside a
violet-watered spring - a mystic congregation of
seductive goddesses. They are the patronesses of art and
literature, their abode being the fountain Hippocrene on
Mt. Helicon in Boetia.
The muses were water spirits and were the offspring of
Zeus and the Titaness Mnemosyne i.e. memory. The muses
Calliope, Eutrepe, Erato, Melpomene, Thalia, Terpsicore,
Polyhymia, Clio and Urania presided over distinct fields
of creativity comprising choral dancing, love poetry,
lyre playing and comedy. The classical men of letters
such as Homer and Hesiod invoked them for deriving divine
inspiration at the commencement of a creative endeavour.
This practice continued and later even Dante and Milton
also invoked their own Muses for receiving the epic
inspiration. In classical perception, the muses
represented inspiration for creativity. Memory, with
divine help, produced inspiration. If the hidden allegory
in this classical myth can be ascertained then one can
surely comprehend the Greek philosophy of creativity.
In classical myths, a poet who boasted of his superiority
over the Muses was afflicted by the unique punishment of
loss of memory. If Mnemosyne was cut off, the Muses
refused to usher in poetic inspiration. In our
computerised information-rich age, when memory is thought
to be an obsolete mode of acquiring knowledge, this
Grecian tradition surprises us. Memorising, which to us
is a difficult endeavour, was to the Greeks the source of
all creative stimuli. The questions demanding explanatory
answers are: how did this shift of creative focus take
place, and how did this alteration affect the way in
which the Romantics perceived this creative shift?
Plato in his Phaedrus offers us a clue. The
narrator Socrates tells his young friend Phaedrus an
Egyptian myth. At Naukratis in Egypt resided Theut the
god who invented calculation, numbers, geometry,
astronomy, checkers, dice and letters. He went to the god
Thamus and announced: 'This will make the Egyptians wiser
and give them better memories, for it is specific for
both memory and intelligence.' Thamus disagreed and
argued: 'This discovery will create forgetfulness in the
learners' souls, because they will not use their memory,
they would rather trust external characters and not
remember of themselves. You give your disciples not the
truth but the appearance of wisdom.' Plato actually
focuses on the transition from an oral tradition to
written culture, and zeroes in on the problems of
creative cognition.
'Among the Greeks', says Moses Hadas, literature was, 'something
to be listened to in public rather than scanned in
private.' The Sophists and rhetoriticians devoted
themselves to the extensive study of the process of
memory formation. There are discussions on mnemotechnics
in Ad Herenium, Cicero's De Oratore and
in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria. The use of
loci and images was stressed for the retention of memory.
Nowadays, psychologists have termed memory derived from
images as eidetic memory. The classical framework of
Memory Theatre did not consider words as mere written
fragments, but as essentially phonetic and sensual units,
which were uttered verbally. The classical world did not
differentiate the word from its sound to the ear and its
taste in the mouth. Hence the individual's mind was
occupied with completely different fragments of memory
compared to those which exist now. Socrates asked, 'Is
not there another kind of word . . . far better and more
powerful than this one? . . . one which is written . . .
in the soul of the learner?' And Phaedrus replied, 'You
mean the living world of knowledge which has a soul, and
of which the written word is properly only an image.' The
Platonic prophesy of an absolute split between the
written word and its visual, phonetic and sensuous
components has turned into a reality.
The Enlightenment not only gave us Lockean determinism
and Cartesian automation, it also supplied us with the
Gutenberg Press. The mass printing of books and written
documents undermined the importance of Mnemosyne as the
mother of the Muses, to replace it with the rather inane
standard device for retention. The Romantics grew up in
an age where words were fast losing their inherent
vivacity, in other words the 'soul' that Plato was
talking about. This loss affected the poetic brilliance
and creativity and the Romantics in their own ways were
trying to bring back the lustre to words. Protesting
against a predominant written tradition (of piled up
books) the Romantic bards were urging their readers to
return to the realm of nature. It is only there that one
can hear the preaching of the 'throstle' and the 'woodland
linnet', singing the 'sweet' music of wisdom. Wordsworth,
in his The Tables Turned, pleads to the readers
to 'close up these barren leaves' - 'Up, up, my friend,
and quit your books, or surely you'll grow double!'
Wordsworth is striving to restore the lost sensibilities
of the readers, which have been lost due to a
predominantly written tradition. The deep creative crisis
is rooted in the transition from oral to written culture.
Wordsworth asks for a 'heart that watches and receives'
nature's image. In other words, he is trying to reinvent
the classical process of memory-formation which was
crucial for creative inspiration, but was blunted by the
advent and spread of the written word.
Substance: Emotion recollected in tranquillity
Carl Gustav Jung, the famous analytical psychologist,
tried to find out the hidden source of creativity. He was
not satisfied with Freud's description of vital energy,
as a mere sexual energy. Jung, in his analysis argued
that 'the divine gift of the creative fire' has its
origin in the 'collective unconscious'. He made a clear
distinction between personal and collective unconscious.
The personal is concerned with an individual's own life
while the collective unconscious embraces the political
and social psychic tendencies of a group. Microbiologists
such as Rene Dubos have discovered the presence of
genetic memory of the human race. The true nature of the
collective unconscious still remains uncertain but it is
clear that a large social group shares it and hence it is
a universal pool of memories from which the members can
produce images and visions. Jung in his article, Psychology
and Literature, emphasises that all 'visionary'
writings are 'manifestations of the collective
unconscious'. Jung mentions William Blake's creations in
this context. The collective unconscious comprises the
Jungian 'archetypes' or images, which are the social
concepts such as religion, mythology, politics, freedom,
and happiness, developed over thousands of years. The art
of the literary creator is to transcend the barriers of
active will and achieve reconciliation between the
individual and collective unconscious.
The Jungian concept of archetype is of extreme importance
for our present discussion, as it describes the urge to
achieve universality as a cardinal human urge which has
fuelled most of man's sublime achievements. However, the
process of attaining universality has not been agreed
upon unanimously. Reductionist and Empiricist
philosophies try to achieve universality through the
practice of objectivity. Classical science has always
praised objective observation and has mocked subjective
perception as mere fancy of the crazy poet. For Newtonian
science, truth is objective and can only be perceived
objectively. The Cartesian enthusiasts viewed existence
as a unidimensional reality, and argued that subjective
cognition could not ascertain the universal truth.
The Empiricist tradition met opposition from a school of
German philosophers whose thoughts ultimately gave birth
to the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and later to
the German Transcendental Idealism of Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel. Johann George Hamman, known as the 'Wizard of
the North' was the first to reject the tyranny of
discursive reason. Johann Herder followed suit and drew a
distinction between poetic and philosophical language.
Herder was the initiator of the 'Sturm and Drang'
literary movement against intellect and refinement. The
stress was laid on poetic language being the language of
spontaneity. Friedrich Jacobi, the philosopher, expressed
a conviction that the inner life and experiences of an
individual are forced on him by a universal power.
This observation serves as a pivotal point to our entire
discussion. German Romanticism, propagated by the
Schlegel brothers and Novalis, had as its central tenet a
belief in the subjectivity of the creative artist. It
tells us that when a creative artist senses reality his
subjective experiences are influenced by universal power.
Hence, the feelings, which are evoked, are not limited
specific contingent feelings, but are universal
sensations. German idealists did not conceive 'infinite'
as something set against the 'finite'. Both the Romantics
and the Idealists believed that infinite totality was
conceived as infinite life, which manifested itself in
and through finite things but not by annihilating them or
reducing them to mere mechanical instruments. In short,
while the reductionists viewed objectivity as the door to
universality, the Romantics believed that intuitive
subjective perception of the finite could reach out
towards the infinite universal.
The typical characteristic of Romantic literature is the
derivation of sublime truths from the trivialities of day-to-day
existence. The Romantic poet realises that his own
subjective perception can exist on two distinct levels.
On the confined personal level, his subjectivity is but a
hindrance and bars him from being one with the totality.
On his intuitive 'collective' level, however, subjective
perception leads to universality. As Wordsworth says in The
Friend, 'the ground-work, therefore, of all
philosophy is the full apprehension of the difference
between . . . that intuition of things which arises when
we possess ourselves, as one with the whole . . . and
that which presents itself when . . . we think of
ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in
antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to
thought, death to life.' The endeavour of a Romantic
artist is the achievement of higher intuitive
subjectivity.
Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'emotion recollected
in tranquillity' is well known. It is to be noted that
for this recollection to occur, emotions must be
imprinted in memory. Now, it can be seen why Wordsworth
wanted his readers to throw away their books and to
return to nature. For, he wanted each of them to
subjectively discern phenomenal reality, the 'sun above
the mountain head', 'the long green' fields, the 'vernal
woods', 'the beauteous forms of things'. All these images
would form imprints in their consciousness and would make
up their memories. Memories, as fragments of crystallised
subjective perceptions, would enable them to invoke their
Muses and experience the ecstasy of creative universality.
For Wordsworth, as for the other Romantics, it was the
uniqueness of intuitive subjective perceptions which
essentially made them universal.
We can distinguish two discrete processes of collective
memory formation: (1) The subjective or the active
process; as for it to operate direct experience is
essential. (2) The objective process or the passive
process; as it depends on factual knowledge supplied by a
source, such as a book, CD ROM, TV News show. The passive
process of memory formation has recently broken into a
new and a potentially dangerous sphere. The audio-visual
medium supplies us with packets of memory about
documented events, which we receive with collective
passivity. Over a span of population, this large-scale
formation of passive memory decreases the variation of
memory fragments. Think about the Napoleonic wars and the
recent Afghan crisis. Although most of us have not been
direct witness to either of the events; the nature of the
images formed by these two historical events differ
immensely. The images of the Napoleonic wars vary from
person to person; they also change over a period of time,
due to changing interpretations by historians and
researchers. In contrast, the images of operation 'Enduring
Freedom' fall into a stereotypical generality. The audio-visual
medium has captured frozen images, which does not leave
much room for variable interpretations over time and
space.
The transition from a verbal to written to an audio-visual
culture is a gradual progression towards generalisation
of collective memory formation. Social and political
forces influence and exploit this process. It moulds
archetypes into abstractions, to ensure their dominance
over the 'vox populi'. This produces social amnesia, and
the effect of such endeavours has become evident from the
consequences of the Soviet Stalinist era.
Creativity thrives only when the variation of memories
persists, as it is this very factor that lends uniqueness
to an individual creation. The loss of identity in post-modern
societies and the creative crisis in the age of Minsky's
automatons are rooted in the objective formation of
memories. Globalisation of objective memories leads to a
sense of fake universality, and it destroys the magic of
creativity. Romantics were conscious of this fatal crisis.
Their call for intuitive subjectivity still reverberates
in our ears as the warning bell for the final apocalypse.
Bibliography
ABRAMS, M. H. The Mirror and The Lamp
ABRAMS, M. H. English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in
Criticism
PLATO. Phaedrus
JOHN LOCKE. Essays on Human understandings
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH & SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. The
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
JOHN JONES. The Egotistical Sublime
CARL GUSTAV JUNG. Memories, Dreams, Reflections
DUNCAN WU. The Romantic Anthology
ROBERT GRAVES. The Greek Myths
© March 2003, Aritro Ganguly and
Rangeet Sengupta
email Aritro Ganguly
email Rangeet Sengupta
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