In the beginning, memory was a dimension of place. In other words, places were (at least an asepct of) the basis of memory. Like the place in a book where a certain paragraph is found, there is a place in the world where a certain moment and set of circumstances are and were found(ed).

The first abstraction of this was the Theater of Memory; a ‘technique’ employed by ancients and some few moderns whereby a vast structure of many rooms was elaborated piecemeal within, until it became real to the inner eye. This was, effectively, a sort of museum, where whole texts could be recorded or retrieved. It was a powerful and astonishingly sophisticated set of techniques.

Then, of course, came writing, which largely but incompletely laid waste to the arts of memory. Then, as if that were insufficient insult, the internet arose.

But in the beginning, and mark this for its proper value: memory was built directly upon the experience of living in and with living places. The forest, the prairie, the river, the tundra, the desert — these were ‘the library’, and it was always alive. It would literally ‘come forth to meet you’ as an aspect of your relationship.

When we abstracted memory, first to a structure within, then to books, then to the internet… we distorted its function and flattened its necessary character. Without place… or where we are displaced into an abstracted relationship with place… it is as if our souls have been circumcised. A cruel kind of cognitive surgery has removed the most vital basis of living memory herself, and left us not only thus bereft, but even without the capacity to notice our predicament.

By living and learning in such a way that we retrieve our awareness of the value of relation with place to the capacities of memory we may retrieve the art into our lives and futures, and recover it from the relentless modern abstraction of its function.