'The art of memory' by Frances A. Yates (as an opening into the mental)

(What I was thinking about today...)

In classical rhetoric, images and text were mapped onto virtual places to aid the memory of orators. Memory was enormously important to orators because they were expected to deliver long speeches with total accuracy. In fact, memory was of such value that there developed an "art of memory" designed to strengthen the natural memory. Frances Yates explains that this artificial memory depended upon the recollection of images:

The artificial memory is established from places and images . . . A locus (loci) is a place easily grasped by the memory, such as a house, an intercolumnar space, a corner, an arch, or the like. Images are forms, marks or simulacra of what we wish to remember. For instance if we wish to recall the genus of a horse, of a lion, of an eagle, we must place their images on definite loci.

Artificial memory was a kind of "inner writing" the orator reviewed while presenting a speech, observing the places and their contents, the images, and recovering the memories for things (the subject matter) that those images represented. The orator used a series of places (the topoi of classical rhetoric in which one "found" arguments, known as inventio) in which he placed one of many sets of images, depending upon the speech he was to remember." . . . the loci remain in the memory and can be used again by placing another set of images for another set of material" . These images were to be easily memorized. The anonymous author of the Ad Herennium, a classical rhetoric, discusses which types of images the orator should use in order to best remember them.

As a method for remembering information, the artificial memory of classical rhetoric pre-figures a method of writing in virtual worlds. (In a simulated environment, we have the capacity to externalize our memory in a machine; striking images which guide the reader through a web of interconnected spaces may produce spoken or written text. )

More information about The art of memory.