The house of memory

Ho Tzu Nyen is an artist and filmmaker. His works have been shown at the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale, the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale and the 1st Singapore Biennale. His films have competed at international film festivals such as the 53rd and 54th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and the 30th Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival. In 2008, he conceptualized a theatrical experiment, The King Lear Project, which premiered at the KunstenFestivaldesArts in Brussels and the Singapore Arts Festival.

I must have been two or three years old. I remember the coldness of the marble floor on which I had fallen asleep, antidote to the dense, lazy, humid afternoon air that permeated the house in which I was born.  
I remember waking up to sounds emitting from the television, though I can no longer recall what the images were.  
This image, like the rest of the memories from the early part of my life, are all rooted in a grave-like apartment, where I was born. But this apartment, where I was born, is not there anymore.
Like so many things in Singapore, it has been obliterated. A hole remains in the place where it used to stand.
I often wonder what remains... what remains of my childhood — my past — now that there is no longer any physical proof of the house in which it all took place.
If the child is indeed the father of man, then does it mean that I am fatherless, because I have lost all traces of the child that I was?

A few years ago, I attempted to retrace my own past, and I began upon a journey, a form of traveling without moving. Yet like any journey, there is always the possibility of getting distracted, of wandering from one’s proper destination. In this case, I drifted into the history of a lost art — the Greek art of memory.

It is said that there are two kinds of memory: one natural, the other artificial.

Natural memory is that which anyone receives when he is created and which varies according to the matter from which he is generated; hence some men have better memories than others. Some men have poor memory owing to disease or age, just as though a seal were impressed on flowing water. For this reason the very young and the old have poor memories, because they are in a state of flux: the young due to their growth, the old due to their decay.

The other kind of memory is artificial memory, which can be improved in two ways. The first kind uses medicines. However, this is considered to be extremely dangerous since occasionally such medicines are given to men with the wrong disposition, and in unnecessary high dosages, so that the brain becomes weakened.
The second way of enhancing artificial memory is by training.

This art of enhancing memory is said to be founded by one of the most admired lyric poets of ancient Greece — Simonides was his name, but he was also called “The Honey-Tongued.” Simonides is said to have lived between 556 and 468 BC, and he was said to have been the first to demand to be paid for his poetry. In fact, the founding story of his invention of the art of memory hinges on one such paid job — a contract for an ode to praise a man called Scopas, the winner of a boxing contest, at a banquet held in his honor.

However, Simonides angered Scopas severely when he devoted half the length of the commissioned ode to praises of Castor and Pollux — a pair of divine twins famed for their own boxing skills. In anger, Scopas paid Simonides only half the agreed sum and told him to get the rest from the two gods. A little while later, in the middle of the victory banquet, Simonides was summoned outside by two young men — the twin gods in disguise.

In his absence, the roof of the hall where Scopias was giving the banquet collapsed — killing everybody.
The friends of those who died came, but they were highly distressed at being unable to tell the dead bodies apart — so badly were they crushed, so badly were they mangled.

However, Simonides found out that he could in fact identify each of the bodies because he could recall a precise visual image of the ill-fated banquet, allowing him to recall each and every one of their positions around the banquet table.  
And thus, with a funeral, was born the art of memory.

It is not difficult to grasp the general principles of this art of memory.

First and foremost, places — which we will call memory places — must be selected.

Second, the things to be imprinted into memory must be transformed into objects — and we will call these memory objects.
Third, these memory objects must be inserted into the mind by being mentally located in those memory places.
Fourth, the exact order of the places must be branded into the mind, for this would ensure that the order of things can be remembered and be preserved in its correct spatial sequence.

The most common type of memory place used is the building.

It is recommended that the memory artist select a building that is spacious, has variety but is not overly chaotic. And thus, with this technique, began the alliance between the invisible art of memory and architecture, the most visible of art forms.

However, the deathblow to this ancient art of memory was to be delivered emphatically with the coming of a new technology.

  Its death is recounted quite succinctly in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, where a scholar, deep in meditation in his study high up in the cathedral, gazes at the first printed book which has come to disturb his collection of manuscripts.  Then, opening the window, he gazes at the vast cathedral, silhouetted against the starry sky, crouching like an enormous sphinx in the middle of the town. And he says: “The printed book will destroy the building… The printed book will make such huge, built-up memories, crowded with images, unnecessary.”