Reviving the ancient memory arts as an act of resistance

Because the world we imagine will grow from memory

Rose-Marie Caldecott, “More Than a Gap”

It’s the thirteenth century. The dead of night; a cool black stillness. Stone walls; star-frosted sky beyond. We’re sleeping outside the chamber of Thomas Aquinas, the priest and prominent scholar of his age. I imagine our bed is lumpy and smells of sweat and hay and horse-hair, though I can’t say for sure. No matter. Because now, into the night, comes a mumbling. It stirs us from sleep. As we surface from the depths to waking, we tune in to the cadence of what seems to be a conversation, though we can’t make out the words. We lie frozen, unbreathing. Who is speaking? There is only one man in the next room, and though we are his scribe and companion, not his bodyguard, his safety—the safety of his incomparable mind—weighs on us. Has someone slipped past us while we slept? Is the great man in danger? But even as we dither over what to do, Thomas calls out to us: “Reginald, my son, get up and bring a light and the commentary on Isaiah; I want you to write for me.”

We light a candle on the embers of the fire—smell of hot wax, flash of first light—and go to him. He is alone. Before we can ask any questions, he begins to dictate “so clearly that it was as if [he] were reading aloud from a book under his eyes”.

Later, when he’s finished dictating, we ask him whom he’d been speaking to before he called out to us, and he tells us that the apostles Peter and Paul had appeared to him. That the conversation that unfolded between them had shown him the way forward in the manuscript he’d been stuck on.

So what really happened in that room? This question brings us face-to-face with another, this one surprisingly huge and rich and important: What is memory? And from here, more questions still: How does memory relate to imagination? What are the implications of all this in an age in which we’re outsourcing our memories to ChatGPT, or Google, or even just the written word itself?

And then for the fun part: What can we do about it?

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Thomas Aquinas lived from around 1225 until 1274 and wrote some 8 million words. For reference, that’s the same as writing Middlemarch twenty-five times over. There’s been all sorts of theological point-scoring about his legacy over the years, but I don’t want to focus on that here. What I’m interested in is the precise nature of his brilliance, as assessed by his contemporaries. These assessments are interesting because they reveal some pre-modern ideas about intelligence and originality that are very different to our own, and so, by contrast, shine a rare and fascinating light on this thing we call modernity.

In her fantastic book The Book of Memory (from which I drew the seed of the vignette above), the scholar of medieval thought Mary Carruthers shows that accounts of Thomas’s brilliance focused, to a degree that’s surprising to the modern mind, on his memory. It’s said that if he read something once, he remembered it forever, and that having committed a work to memory, he could recite it backwards or forwards, from any point in the text. This great facility with memory was known to allow him to dictate (his customary mode of composition) to up to four scribes at once, on four different topics, skipping between trains of thought with ease.

Carruthers compares this medieval genius with a modern one, Einstein. Or rather, she compares what each of their contemporaries said about the nature of their genius. Where Thomas was praised for his memory, applause for Einstein is shot through with awe for his imagination and intuition. Where Thomas’s method of composition entailed a deep inner consultation with scripture and the other great works he had memorized, Einstein is invariably described as venturing outward into uncharted territories of ideas, boldly pressing on through the darkness, fuelled by his ferocious and very individual intuition.

Here’s what’s most surprising to the modern mind: though it was known to derive from memory rather than what we might call creative intuition, Thomas’s work was hailed for its originality. He wasn’t just regurgitating old work; he was swallowing it, making it part of his flesh, so that it took root inside him and came to new life.

Take the example of the midnight visit from Peter and Paul. What was really going on there? Was he just hallucinating? Had he eaten too much cheese before bed? Carruthers—a serious scholar, mind you—suggests that no: Peter and Paul really did appear to Thomas, in a manner of speaking. Because Thomas knew his scripture, knew his Peter and Paul so intimately, she says, that their voices and their beings may well have animated in his imagination—or rather, in his memory.

Memory. Imagination. I’m increasingly convinced that you can’t have one without the other—or perhaps I should say, convinced that they might not be separate things at all. Because even Einstein on his wild flights of creative imagination was passing every novel thought through (if not sourcing it in—but that’s another conversation) a mind, a soul, and a body shaped on every level, from the cellular to the neural to the intellectual to the linguistic, by his experience and prior knowledge.

There’s so much more I want to say here, about how we got from there to here in our understanding of genius and originality; about the rise of the cult of the individual in creative work; about the fascinating ways in which memory practices require and enhance imagination; about the different varieties of memory, and more. But they’ll come in future essays (see below for an idea of what I’ve got planned). Because right now, I want to talk about what all these ideas about memory might tell us about our present moment, and then suggest a route of resistance.

As we’ve seen, the medieval memory functioned by bringing great thinking and great compositions not just into a person’s mind, but somehow into their whole being, in a deep and permanent way. Medieval thinkers made themselves the soil for whole root systems of earlier thought, which in turn enriched their inner soil, so that these venerable roots of earlier works could send up fresh shoots of life.

I’m not saying that this was a perfect model of creation. The medieval insistence on tradition certainly kept society stuck in some ways I wouldn’t want to go back to. But increasingly, these ideas seem to me like a critical counterbalance to the conceptions of thought, imagination, and originality that have given rise to AI.

Let’s consider what a large language model (LLM) is. I’m no technologist, but my understanding is that ChatGPT and the like—the kind of AI that’s powered by LLMs—function by feeding as much existing text into the system’s memory as possible, then recombining it in new ways.

In other words, it mechanizes the process that the medieval world recognized as the very source of genius and originality. In our world—living as we do under the Einstein model of genius—we don’t conceive of recall as part of genius or imagination. It’s all about individual creative intuition; about striking out for uncharted territory. This means that even those of us who wouldn’t dream of having AI actually write our work or generate our ideas might think it’s fine to outsource our research to it. To have it do the heavy lifting of reading and processing the sources we want to draw from.

But I can hardly imagine the horror Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries would have felt on learning of an LLM. Because for them, memory was not just (!) the source of all original thought, but also the ground of morality and ethics. A person’s bearing, behaviour, and being, just as much as their creative thought, were animated by the texts and thinking they had swallowed and made flesh. The richer your memory of great works, the greater your character.

I also want to bring all these ideas squarely into the remit of this Substack. I often talk, here, about imagination as a capacity to access and source ideas from an expanded realm of reality itself, and thus expand the possibilities of our material world. That might seem to be a very outward-facing conception of imagination and original thinking. But as the hermetics would tell us, as above so below. The imaginal possibilities we’re able to pick up depend on the kind of landscape we’ve nurtured within.

In short, if imagination really is steeped in memory—and I don’t see how it could be anything else—then the very dimensions of the future are determined by what we’ve taken the trouble to internalize and make flesh.

What a terror, then, to have developed technologies that allow us never to remember anything at all.

All of which delivers me to an invitation. I plan to spend the coming winter nourishing the deep soil of my memory, and I would like to invite you to join me.

Introducing The Word Swallowers’ Winter Memory Club

This winter, between the autumn equinox and the spring equinox (around 21st September to 21st March), I invite you to join me in nourishing the deep soil of your memory, with a dive into the memory arts.

[Please note: this offer is for paying subscribers (see below for rates), but if you can’t afford it and you want to participate, just send me an email and I’ll comp your subscription, no questions asked.]

Here’s what we’ll do:

• You’ll be invited to set a pledge: an oath to memorize a passage of literature of your choosing, before the spring equinox. (This isn’t compulsory, but I think it will be very FUN.)

• Around the spring equinox, we’ll have an in-person event in London, and an online event for those who can’t make it. The shape of these events will be determined by numbers. But bottom line: this will be an opportunity for you to prove completion of your pledge and memorization of your chosen passage, as well as hang out with fellow word swallowers and imaginauts.

• The goal of the pledge isn’t simply to learn one passage by heart. It’s to learn to practise the memory arts, for the enrichment of all our future learning and imagining. Whether you pledge or not, we will learn how (and why) to nourish our memories, together. (I’m very much a co-learner here.) We’ll do that through:

• Monthly book club: discussing the classics of memory literature (a genre that contains some absolute belters). If this sounds daunting, don’t let it be: wherever possible, I’ll suggest crucial chapters. (Sunday evenings GMT, on Zoom, not recorded, to allow intimate conversation and confident participation.)

• Monthly talk from/discussion with an expert in an aspect of memory. This might include practical tips from a memory athlete, philosophers on the meaning of memory, and more. (A weekday evening GMT, on Zoom; will be recorded and sent to all members.)

• I’ll open the chat on this Substack for members, so you can discuss progress and tips/tricks on your pledges.

All of the above will be available to paying members of this Substack. Membership is £8/month, or £80/year. (To my current paying subscribers: if you didn’t catch it, I sent you an email about all this yesterday.)

This season is an experiment—I’m making this up as I go along, really—but the goal is to keep offering similar cycles on different themes, after this six-month journey is up.

If you want to join but can’t afford membership, please just email me and I’ll comp you, no questions asked.

Meanwhile, I have more essays in the pipeline about imagination and memory, and these will be available to all readers, for free.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ll know that I’ve been struggling to find a way to keep showing up here consistently. I miss talking to you all, but I can’t write the kind of essay I want to on a publishing schedule. My hope is that this experiment gives me a way to stay really engaged without requiring me to write to a schedule, and at the same time allows me to make enough money to cut down on other work and devote more time to you and this space. Fingers crossed.

Phew! That’s it for the logistics. I am so excited to embark on this journey with you.

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Edited later to add: not quite it for the logistics! I’ve now confirmed dates and many of the talks for memory club, and am including here for anyone who’s thinking of joining up. All dates are for the winter of 2025 into 2026.

You don’t have to come to every session! Just come to whatever you can make.

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 21st September, 6–8pm: introduction to Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. (Please read the introduction, not the preface. It’s about 15 pages in my edition. Available online at the link above.)

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Wednesday 1st October, 6.30–8pm: My teacher Valentin Gerlier with a talk on Mnemosyne, memory, and the archaeology of consciousness

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 19th October, 6–8pm: Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Chapter One: “The Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art of Memory”. (This is only about 20 pages of an absolutely belting book. If you can’t get hold of a copy, email me and I’ll send you a scan.)

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Wednesday 29th October, 6.30–8pm: Memory athlete Sam Drew on memory sports techniques and memorising literature using memory sports. Get your tips and tricks here to help with your pledge!

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 16th November, 6–8pm: A.R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist.

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Wednesday 26th November, 6.30–8pm, I’ll be in discussion with actor Alexandra (Ali) Dowling, who has fascinating insights on how actors memorise lines and the role of emotion in memory.

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Date and speaker tbc, but I’m aiming for Wednesday 7th January, 6.30–8pm.

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 18th January, 6–8pm: Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting.

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Date and speaker tbc, but aiming for Wednesday 4th February, 6.30-8pm

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 15th February, 6–8pm. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I Scene II. (No need to read in advance! I’ll give an introduction, then we’ll read together in the session, using a slow-reading practice a little like lectio divina.)

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Date and speaker tbc, but aiming for Wednesday 4th March, 6.30–8pm. We might also decide to use this for a final book club doing lectio divina on Dante, or a “gathering threads” session.

• PLEDGE EVENT: Sunday 22nd March, 6–8pm. Pledgers, get ready to prove up! (Let’s keep the pledge-proving online, so we don’t split the pledgers and nobody’s left out. But I might also suggest a more casual meetup in London around this time, for anyone who can make it.)

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What’s in the soil of this piece?

As we’ve learned from Thomas Aquinas, ideas don’t come out of nowhere. I owe these ideas and this incipient investigation to several people. First, I want to thank Alice Oswald for comments she made about memory’s relationship to imagination, earlier this year, which set me off on this investigation in the first place. I’m also indebted to Valentin Gerlier and his teachings about the Ancient Greeks, memory, and the muses. A lot of the ideas in this piece were sparked by Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory—if you enjoyed reading this, consider checking it out. I also want to heartily recommend that you subscribe to Adam Robbert’s Substack The Base Camp. He’s also been on a journey through Carruthers and other medieval and early-modern ideas about memory, and he’s now continuing to explore memory through other avenues. His writing and thinking are so deep and revealing. Definitely worth your time.

And finally, huge thanks to my dear friend Rose-Marie Caldecott for allowing me to use her painting “More Than a Gap” (inspired by the felling of the Sycamore Gap) as the header image for this post. Do check out Rosie’s art; it is profoundly soulful and beautiful.