I’m about to begin reading Francis Yates’ The Art of Memory. From what I can gather, it’s about the various techniques and heuristics used by scholars, nystics and others to create trained memory. Memory systems and the character of memory- the reasons for remembering- are going to come up. Ironically, I cannot remember enough about Douwe Draaisma’s Metaphors of Memory to apply it directly here, and in any case, he is as concerned with metaphor as with memory, leading him to computer memory. I think my reading of Yates is going to support the metaphorical strand, but fill in a lot of the cultural reasons for creating memory systems in the first place.

That leads me to the reason i want to read it in the first place. I’m interested in how books support practice, how they allow creativity. My take on that is to view the medium as a metaphorising tool, a physical heuristic that allows particular creativity. I think it will be fruitful to compare this to the ideational constructions of memory. How does thinking-as-architecture compare to making-as-book? How does the metaphorisation of the memory theatre compare to the metaphorisation of the artists’ book?

Those are the questions I want to keep in mind as I read. No doubt all hell will break loose as I go through the book, but it always does anyway.

Interestingly, I think this is going to lead on quite nicely to my next read. James Elkins’ What Painting is. The hermetic tradition seems quite strongly supported in Yates’ book, and Elkins too seems to be interested in this. Can I slide a communicating bit of argument between the tradition of transformation evinced in alchemy, and the transforming power of metaphor, on materials, practice, and the practitioner.