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ГЛАВА 27
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Знаменитые люди

Существует множество людей, которые проявили себя в искусстве памяти и которые ранжированы от Симонида 6-го столетия до н. э. до Лесли Уэлша в 50-х годах XX века. Некоторые были професиональными мнемониками, проведшими жизнь в использовании своего мастерства; другие просто жили как могли. В этой главе я описываю двенадцать наиболее известных людей в области памяти. Многие тренировали свое искусство всю жизнь, другие просто родились такими.

МЕТРОДОР СКЕПСИЙСКИЙ

Метродор, грек по национальности, был человек легенда, который отошел от философии в сторону политической жизни и преподавания риторики. Он жил в первом столетии до н. э. и был наиболее успешным последователем Симонида, которого называют изобретателем искусства памяти. (Подробнее о Симониде в 26 главе)
Один из известных трюков Метродора было запоминание беседы. Позже он мог повторить все сказанное. Мы думаем он делал это превращая слова и группы слов в образы. (Печально, что все работы Метродора утеряны)
Вместо использования путешествий, Метродор располагал образы на Зодиаке. Он поделил все знаки (Козерог, Близнецы, Рак...) на 36 декан, что давало по 360 loci, позволяя создавать очень длинные упорядоченные истории.

ПИТЕР РАВЕННА

Питер Равенна, предприниматель из XV столетия, нашедший возможность продавать мнемонику. Обученный на юриста в Падуе, он опубликовал в 1491 году книгу о памяти, которая по современным меркам может быть названа международным бестселлером. Феникс (Phoenix) была переведена на многие языки, прошла через многичисленные переиздания и стала своего рода библией для любого, кто хотел улучшить свою память.
Питер повернул память от религиозного контекста который ей припысывали Томас Аквинский и схоласты тринадцатого столетия, и превратил ее в мнемонику принадлежащую массам. Он предоставил на обозрение людей свои конкретные путешествия во время паломничества и рекомендовал использовать сексуальные образы. Практический справочник рассказывал о его собственных достижениях в памяти: он хранил в памяти 20,000 конкретных мест, 200 речей Цицерона, и целые сборники канонических законов. (Дайте мне Тривиал Пирсьют каждый день.)

ДЖУЛИО КАМИЛЛО

Камилло был одним из наиболее известных людей шестнадцатого столетия. Сейчас почти забытый, он был известен в свое время как "божественный Камилло". Известность о нем прошла от Италии до Франции, в основном благодаря созданого им "театра памяти". Первоначально профинансированный королем Франции, Камилло занялся строительством деревянной модели театра, достаточно большого для вмещения двух людей. Он объявил что там содержится все, что может создать человеческий мозг.
Мы знаем, что Камилло был нео-платонистом и верил в архетипы, но к сожалению он ни как не смог собраться, чтобы описать все детали теории описывающей его театр памяти. Кроме того, он сильно заикался и его объяснения не были так качественны, как они моглы быть.
Знаменитый деревянный театр вызывал сенсацию, куда бы Камилло его не привозил. Однажды в Париже, его грозная репутация получила развитие во время путешествия для наблюдения за дикими животными. Лев выбрался из клетки, заставив зритлей убегать во всех направлениях. Камилло стоял спокойно, пока животно медленно кружилось вокруг, и даже ласкалось к нему, пока сторожа не вернули его в клетку.
Сам по себе театр базировался на некоторых классических принципах памяти. Его цель была помогать людям запоминать целую вселенную; информация и идеи были преобразованы в образы, и "размещены" в определенном порядке (loci) вокруг аудитории.
Посетитель стоял на сцене и смотрел на образы. Наиболее важная информация (планеты) была "усажена", достаточно близко в партере; Более дешевые места были заняты менее важными данными, расположенными согласно месту в порядке создания.

ДЖОРДАНО БРУНО

Бруно начал жизнь как Доминиканский монах, а закончил сожжением на костре в 1600. (Таков риск нашей работы.) В промежутке между двумя этими событиями он был итальянским философом. Среди поклонников его работ в двадцатом столетии был Джеймс Джойс, который сделал несколько ссылок на "Ноланца", что сбило с толку друзей. (Бруно родился в Ноле.)
Бруно присоединился к ордену Доминиканцев когда ему было пятнадцать, и познакомился с классическим искусством памяти по работам Томаса Аквинского. Он быстро прославился своими успехами в памятии и выступлением перед папой, как и многим другиим, предже чем оставил орден.
As Camillo had done before him, he went to France, where he promised to reveal his memory secrets to the king (Henri III). To show willing, he dedicated his first book on memory to the king. De Umbris idearum is another attempt to order the entire universe, thereby making it more memorable and understandable. It consists of a series of imaginary rotating 'memory wheels' and is mind-bogglingly complicated.
Frances Yates, an expert on the Renaissance magical tradition, has bravely pieced together this extraordinary concept (The Art of Memory, Chapter 9). She suggests that there was a central wheel containing the signs of the Zodiac, which worked the other wheels, each of which was divided up into 150 images! As far as I can gather, there were five wheels in total; they rotated like a kaleidoscope, generating any number of images.

MATTEO RICCI

Ricci was a sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit missionary who dedicated his life to converting the Chinese to Catholicism. Using principles that he attributed to Simonides, he trained his mind to create vast memory palaces. Concepts, people, objects could al! be stored in these mental buildings if they were translated into images and placed inside.
Ever the ingenious missionary, he performed endless feats of memory, hoping that the Chinese would want to discover more about the religion of such a gifted man. He could recite a list of 500 Chinese ideograms and repeat them in reverse order. If he were given a volume from a Chinese classic, he could repeat it after one brief reading. (Ricci probably studied under Franc-esco Fanigarola in Rome, who was able to 'walk' around over 100,000 placed images.)
More craftily, he encouraged his Chinese students to remember the tenth position of a journey by including the ideograph for 'ten' in their image, which happened to be in the shape of a crucifix.
In 1596, twelve years after he had settled in China, he wrote a short book on memory in Chinese, and donated it to Lu Wangai, the Governor of Jiangxi. Lu's three sons were studying for government exams. They had to pass them if they were to make a success of their lives. Ricci's book was a timely introduction to mnemonics, which they could use while studying.

S

One of the most analysed memories this century belonged to a Russian called Shereshevsky, otherwise known as S. He aspired to be a violinist, became a journalist and ended up earning his living as a professional ninemonist. According to the famous neu-ropsychoiogist Professor Luria, who studied S over a period of thirty years, there were no distinct limits to his memory.
Luria presented him with 70-digit matrices, complex scientific formulae, even poems in foreign languages, all of which he could memorize in a matter of minutes. He was even able to recall the information perfectly fifteen years later.
S's experience of the world around him was quite different from ours. He was born with a condition known as synaesthesia: the stimulation of one sense produces a reaction in another. (Alexander Scriabin the composer was also synaesthetic. The condition is often induced by hallucinogenic drugs.)
In S's case, he automatically translated the world around him into vivid mental images that lasted for years. He couldn't help but have a good memory. If he was asked to memorize a word, he would not only hear it, but he would also see a colour. On some occasions, he would also experience a taste in his mouth and a feeling on his skin. Later on, when he was asked to repeat the word, he had a number of triggers to remind him. He also used to remember numbers:
'Take the number 1. This is a proud, well-built man; 2 is a high-spirited woman; 3 a gloomy person (why, I don't know); 6 a man with a swollen foot; 7 a man with a moustache; 8 a very stout woman - a sack within a sack. As for the number 87, what I see is a fat woman and a man twirling his moustache.'
Synaesthesia created problems in other areas of his life. The sound of a word would often generate an image quite different from the word's meaning:
'One time I went to buy some ice cream ... I walked over to the vender and asked her what kind of ice cream she had. 'Fruit ice cream' she said. But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn't bring myself to buy any ice cream after she had answered in that way... Another thing: if I read when I eat, I have a hard time understanding what I am reading - the taste of the food drowns out the sense.'
Metaphors, idioms, poetry (particularly Boris Pasternak), anything that wasn't literal in meaning was hard for him to grasp. If he had spoken English, for example, and you had accused him of 'driving a hard bargain', he would have been overwhelmed with images, not all of them very helpful. Driving a car... something hard like a rock... a scene in a market.
If he couldn't visualize something, he was stumped. His wife had to explain what 'nothing' meant. And reading was a problem, because of all the images that the words generated. 'Other people, think as they read, but I see it all. The things I see when I read aren't real, they don't fit the context.'
Needless to say, S had a phenomenal imagination. Luria believed that he spent a large part of his life living in the world of his images. As a child, he would visualize the hands on his clock staying at 7.30 so he could stay in bed. He could increase his pulse from 70 beats a minute to 100, simply by imagining he was running for a train. In one experiment, he raised the temperature of his left hand and lowered the temperature of the other (both by two degrees) just by imagining he had one hand on a stove while the other was holding a block of ice. He could even get his pupils to contract by imagining a bright light!
For a while, the only way he could forget images was by writing them down and burning the paper, but he could still see the Setters in the embers. Towards the end of his life he realized he could forget things only if he had a conscious desire to erase them.
Ironically, people's faces were a constant source of trouble.
'They're, so changeable. A person's expression depends on his mood and on the circumstances under which you happen to meet him. People's faces are constantly changing; it's the different shades of expression that confuse me and make it so hard to remember faces.'
Finally, a brief word about his use of random location. When he first became a mnemonist, and had to memorize a list of words, he would 'visit' a place that was associated with each word. He appeared to have no control over his mental movements, toing and froing everywhere.
'I had just started out from Mayakovsky Square when they gave me the word 'Kremlin', so I had to get myself off to the Kremlin. Okay, 1 can throw a rope across to it ... But right after that they gave me the word 'poetry' and once again I found myself on Pushkin Square. If I had been given 'American Indian', I'd have had to get to America. I could, of course, throw a rope across the ocean, but it's so exhausting travelling...'
Later, he began to use regular journeys and placed each image at a particular point. Just as the Greeks had recommended over two thousand years earlier, he appreciated the need for well-lit scenes and would often erect street lamps above images if they were on a dark stretch of his journey.
(For anyone who wants to know more about the fascinating life of S, I recommend Professor Luria's absorbing book The Mind of a Mnemonist.)

IRENO FUNES

The sole documentor of the unusual life of Ireno Funes was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, which will set the alarm bells ringing in anyone who is concerned solely with historical truths. Borges enjoyed mixing fact with fiction in his writing, developing a style that came to be known as magical realism. His account of Funes is found in Ficciones, a collection of short stories that, as the title suggests, owed more than a little to Borges' imagination.
However, it is more than likely that Funes was based on someone Borges knew, or had heard about. We know that other characters in Borges' work were modelled on people drawn from real life. Having said that, there are some patent absurdities in his account, which I will come to later.
Borges is not sure who Funes's parents were, but his father might have been an Englishman called O'Con-nor. He lived in Fray Bentos (of corned beef fame) and was known for his ability to tell the time without consulting a watch. Borges visited him twice. On the second occasion he learnt that when Funes was nineteen years old, had fallen off his horse, crippling him for life. The near fatal accident, however, had a plus side: he woke up with a perfect memory!
Funes could suddenly recall every day of his life, and even claimed to remember the cloud formation on a particular day five years earlier. (This is something that I find a little hard to believe; his ability to compare the formation with water spray before the 'battle of Quebracho' smacks of pure literary invention.) He learnt English, French, Portuguese, and Latin with ease, and dismissed his physical disabilities as unimportant in the light of his exceptional memory.
On close examination of the text, it would appear that Borges is presenting us with an accurate case study of someone who had synaesthesia, coupled with a heightened sense of visual imagery - just like S, in fact. 'We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table,' writes Borges; 'Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine.' Borges describes a man whose senses picked up the minutest details about the world (which were then stored in his memory), but who was 'incapable of general, platonic ideas'.
In a passage uncannily similar to Luria's account of S, Borges describes Funes's perception of 'the many faces of a dead man during a protracted wake'. He was even surprised by the sight of himself in a mirror. Remembering faces wasn't easy for someone who could detect the minutest changes in expression, colour and feeling. It's this sort of psychological detail that makes me think Borges based his account on a real person.
Funes had also developed his own system for memorizing numbers. It conies as no surprise to learn that he translated them into people and other memorable symbols. For example, 7017 became 'Maximo Perez'; the year 1714 became 'the train'; Napoleon meant another number (Borges doesn't specify which - he was clearly mystified by the system); Agustin de Vedia another.
On discovering his exceptional talent, Funes set about cataloguing every memory image from his life: 70.000 of them by his calculation. In its breadth of ambition, the project is reminiscent of Renaissance attempts (Bruno and Camillo) to catalogue all human knowledge. Sadly, Funes died of a pulmonary

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