Category Archives: Memorising

Memory loss and retrieval

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memory

Any visitor to an aged-care home knows that chronic forgetfulness, in its extreme form, is severely disabling. Few things are sadder than the bewilderment of a person no longer able to make connected sense of a series of events, no longer able to bring past knowledge to bear on present situations. Losing the capacity to remember can eventually betoken dementia and the dissolution of individual identity.

Ironically, total recall is also disabling; and this phenomenon, though much less common, sheds light on the nature of memory. It’s the theme of ‘Funes the Memorious,’ a short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Because of a brain injury the character called Funes cannot forget any detail of what he perceives. He is cursed to carry all of it vividly in his head forever – an intolerable burden because he is entirely immersed in the accumulated particulars, unable to generalise or be selective, and therefore unable to interpret his world. So his prodigious aptitude is significantly different from memory, which sorts, arranges and weaves, creating a narrative structure through which experience acquires meaning.

What is true of individual identity is also true of social identity. Researchers working across disciplines have shown how personal and group memory become intertwined in a psychological process fundamental to history and culture. If a civilisation loses its memory, forgetting or repressing fundamental experiences that have collectively shaped it in the past, it will tend to fall apart; and if on the other hand it becomes submerged in a cumulative mass of information without being able to discern meaningful narrative patterns in it, that too will cause its collapse.

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Mnemosyne, Greco-Roman mosaic,    2nd c. AD, Antakya Museum

Memory has a more central importance in culture and in learning than we sometimes recognise. Ancient Greek mythology provides an insight into this matter. Our word mnemonic comes from the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, who had a pre-eminent cultural status: she was mother of the nine muses, including lyric and epic poetry, dance and music, tragedy and history. Seen as the inventor of language, Mnemosyne presided not only over writing but also over the practice of memorisation required to preserve stories in oral tradition.

With Mnemosyne in mind, I find myself at a point in life (probably not quite the end, perhaps not even the beginning of the end, but well past the end of the beginning) where I often look back over roads I have travelled along and forking paths that have made me hesitate. Occasionally this remembering may be regretful or nostalgic, but for the most part it draws me into inquisitive reflection. I think about the functioning of memory, about how it informs narrative linkages between personal or professional trajectories and the larger meandering history of fields of study – particularly about continuity and change in the subject called English. I recall pivotal moments in my working life, ponder conscious and unconscious decisions I made, trace the foreseen and unforeseen consequences of choosing this option rather than that. Back there in the past I see crooked lines of stepping stones (some seemed at the time to be obstacles) across which I made my stumbling way as a student, teacher, curriculum reformer, author. I glance over my shoulder at the different genres of the things I have written, trying to reconstruct a chain of circumstances that motivated me to produce those various books and articles and other items. Retrospection leads me to ask how I happened to wander into English teaching; why so much of my energy, over the decades, has been invested in language, literacy and literature; why I never confined my activities to one sector of education but kept engaging with schools as well as with universities; why I turned my productive efforts from poetry to polemics, from literary theory and cultural history to the writing of novels…

[The musings reproduced above are the opening paragraphs of an essay I was invited to contribute to the just-published issue (23.2) of the British educational journal Changing English.]

Knowing by heart

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Recently I read Dennis Haskell’s fine new poetry collection, Ahead of Us (to be launched tonight), a memorable book that has left a gritty residue in my mind.

Most of the poems, as they encircle the poet’s loss of his dead wife, evoke suffering and bereavement. Yet this pain-racked process is also a source of continual self-confirmation as he remembers and revaluates past times and places.

Going back as a widower to a Norwegian village that he first visited four decades earlier with her, he finds

there’s nothing here

beyond memories

that make me

what I am.

Bleak though they are, those simple lines resonate for me. I’ve been thinking lately about the extent to to which we shape our personal identity by making sense of our past and linking it to our present and future selves. I’ve also thought about the particular importance of this for writers.

Knowing ourselves is inseparable from the habit of conscious, intensive remembering, a valuable habit that featured strongly in my own childhood because it was reinforced by the practice (normal in those days) of requiring or encouraging children to learn poems and many other things verbatim.

In an earlier post I argued that although ‘rote learning’ is out of favour in schools it would be a mistake to neglect this way of fostering memory. Structured memorisation is not only an elementary basis for developing knowledge but also a potentially rich resource for advanced stages of reading and writing. Comments from writers and educators on my earlier post indicate that I’m not alone in this conviction.

Learning as a child to remember a patterned sequence of words and recite them in a group can be like a rudimentary form of choral singing – a source of delight rather than drudgery. And with maturity there may then come an internalised individual practice of memorisation, as we recognise the value in becoming so familiar with certain passages of verse or prose that we know them by heart. Knowing by heart is a mode of cognition to be cherished, not disparaged – especially in relation to the reading and writing of literature. Committing to memory what we read, far from being in conflict with creativity, can contribute substantially to it.

9781408859629Recently I came across supportive evidence for this point in a book called The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser (2015). Fraser brings together the reminiscences of numerous writers about what they read in childhood and how they read it. Many emphasise the value of early habits of memorising and reciting passages of poetry and prose. Here are just a few examples.

‘At home and at school there had been much learning by rote, both compulsory and by choice’, says the brilliant travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor – and he lists many literary works and excerpts, committed to memory as a boy, which he was able to recite to himself at length as he hiked alone across Europe at the age of 18. Melvyn Bragg comments on the formative importance of group chants, remarking that literary influences may have ‘more to do with rhythm than subject, with sound rather than sense, especially at the start, which is when influences most matter.’ Candia McWilliam remembers obsessively repeating patterns of strange phrases as she jumped over her skipping rope, progressing to nursery rhymes and then going on to learn many poems verbatim.

For Jeanette Winterson, being ‘brought up to memorise very long biblical passages’ as a child equipped her to learn and recite difficult poetry in her school years. When very young, Emily Berry came across a volume of grown-up verse; ‘many of the poems in it’, she says, ‘were over my head, but I discovered the calming practice of incantation and there were some I read aloud many times.’ ‘Verse speaking’, recalls Roger McGough, ‘played an important part in fashioning my reading…. Eventually, as I became unselfconscious about hearing my own voice, I learned to listen to the poet’s.’ Jan Morris mentions many books whose ‘words and tales and cadences’ became, she says, ‘irrevocably a part of me’, including one whose ‘stupendous style’ continues to ‘ring so permanently through my mind that to this day I sometimes sing its opening lines aloud in the bath.’

For these writers and many others, early practices of rote learning, chanting memorised passages, provided a store of rhythmic language from which they could later draw in shaping their own artful compositions. I’m glad to have learnt things in this way, and sad that countless young children today are deprived by neglectful teachers and parents of the pleasure that rote learning can bring.

In praise of rote learning

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Hardly anyone has a good word to say for rote learning – except me. I regard it not only as an elementary basis for developing knowledge but also as a potential resource for advanced levels of reading and writing.

Learning things by rote is commonly associated with metaphors of imposing quasi-military discipline (like ‘drilling’) or inculcating subhuman responses (like ‘parroting’ or ‘repeating mechanically’). Countless people will tell you that rote learning is inimical to conceptual understanding and critical thinking. Some critics of NAPLAN tests in our schools, for instance, fulminate at the thought that rote learning could have any positive role in the acquisition of basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Perhaps there are still a few classrooms where grim teachers oppress hapless students with dreary rituals of robotic recitation, though it’s unlikely you could find many disciplinarians nowadays as harsh as those Dickensian ogres Thomas Gradgrind and Wackford Squeers. At any rate it seems there’s a widespread worry that repetitive memorisation will make monkeys out of children, and that teachers who resort to spoonfeeding – supposedly akin to instruction by rote – must be simian throwbacks. I’m reminded of the following pair of illustrations (reproduced here on the ‘fair use’ principle) in an antique Australian anthology for kids, Coles Funny Picture Book:

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But setting those caricatures aside, we should ask whether it’s always harmful to memorise information systematically and rehearse it routinely until its retrieval becomes automatic.

Surely not! On the contrary, rote learning is a necessary first step in several areas of learning. It’s the simplest and most effective way for most youngsters to become confidently familiar with the alphabet, phonics, multiplication tables… And indeed repetitive utterances – rhymes, songs, chanted mnemonics – are a time-tested foundation of  first-language learning in general.

What makes rote learning seem objectionable to many people, I suppose, is the sad spectre of mere repetition without an ounce of understanding. It’s often said there’s no value in reciting anything until you’ve grasped the concept behind it. Perhaps that’s sometimes true, but does it necessarily apply to getting an infant class to learn a poem in chorus even when it contains phrases that are utterly strange to them? I don’t think so. If sing-song repetition allows young children to carry in their heads a fantastic rhyming story about The Owl and the Pussycat, it’s unimportant that they couldn’t explain what a ‘runcible spoon’ or a ‘bong tree’ looks like. I’ve heard primary school kids chant Blake’s poem ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’ without fretting about its ‘fearful symmetry’: the concept may reveal itself to them eventually, and in the meantime the words are like a dormant magic charm.

Rote memorisation establishes mental habits that equip us to go far beyond the foundational practices of early learning. Remembering a patterned sequence of words by reciting them in a group can be like a rudimentary form of choral singing. And with maturity there may come an internalised individual practice of memorisation, as we recognise the value in becoming so familiar with certain passages of verse or prose that we know them by heart. Knowing by heart is a mode of cognition that should be cherished, not disparaged – especially in relation to the reading of literature.

If we memorise passages and keep running them through the mind, we are re-reading them, and in the process we’re allowing ourselves to pay more attention to their texture and structure. ‘A good reader,’ wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Literature, ‘an active and creative reader, is a re-reader.’

In an article for English in Australia some years back, I wrote about an example from my own reading experience in secondary school: while studying The Tempest, I’d committed to memory a long passage from that play – a speech in Act 5 where Prospero evokes his power over nature only to renounce it. We weren’t required to learn these lines but I liked the sound of them enough to do so of my own accord. It’s the passage that begins:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves / And ye that on the sands with printless foot / Do chase the ebbing Neptune…

Many years later those words rose up from some murky cerebral recess as I was reading The Prelude, Wordsworth’s huge autobiographical poem (I think of it as his monsterpiece), and came across these lines:

Ye powers of earth, ye genii of the springs, / And ye that have your voices in the clouds, / And ye that are familiars of the lakes / And standing pools…

It dawned on me that what the little verbal echoes hint at is a fundamental relationship between the two texts. Wordsworth conducts parts of his account of ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ (that’s The Prelude‘s subtitle) in the form of an oblique conversation with the Shakespearean play, just as other parts of the poem rework imagery from Milton’s Paradise Lost. His allusions to Prospero’s world – which I’d never have noticed if I hadn’t memorised that passage long before – have much more than a decorative function in The Prelude. They serve as a metaphorical framework that allows Wordsworth to draw out some latent implications of The Tempest, and restate them in relation to his own cultural situation. I’ve written in detail about this intertextual linkage in a chapter of my book Narrative Exchanges, so I won’t go on about it any further here. But for me that moment of recognition when I saw Shakespeare’s lines hovering behind Wordsworth’s was a satisfying reminder of the potential value of learning by heart – underpinned by early rote habits.

Recently I’ve come across a couple of essays by readers who share my view that rote learning can be beneficial. One is an article by Justin Snider in The Huffington Post; the other is a blog post by Erica Meltzer. If you’re not convinced by what I’ve said on this topic, perhaps you’ll find their observations more cogent.

Anyway, I’d be interested to know whether any of you who read my blog attach as much value as I do to learning things by heart.