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Learning Not to Forget
| Article
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20657 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
2,843 Words |
| Author
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Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner is professor of English at Johns Hopkins Univesity
and the author of many celebrated books, particularly on Ezra
Pound. |
You could write the history of the human race as a long quest after ways of not forgetting. Memory fades; how to find a new what we know has been known? One way was to entrust it to specialists: tribal remembers. Early in Homer's Iliad, a long catalog of the crews that sailed against Troy has been shaped into metrical form so rhythm can guide the bard's memory as he recites and sings. A story is easy to and sings. A story is easy to remember, a list is not; and it's where the Iliad shifts from story to list that rhythm becomes essential.
That's one way to retrieve a list from memory; we still use it whenever we recite the most influential poem in the English language,
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November….
But for many lists rhythm won't work, and it may have been uncompliant lists that spurred the invention of writing. More than once scholars have dreamed that an undeciphered script--the most recent example was the early Greek Linear B--might conceal something worthy of our noble forefathers: for instance, an epic poem. But all those Linear B inscriptions eventually proved to be lists, mere storehouse inventories, prepared, doubtless, for some Minoan IRS.
Writing embraced, and continues to embrace, every available technology (by now, computer technology, as we'll see). For ponder its beginnings. Think of the ironwork that made the knives to slice thin sheets from the stem of the papyrus plant. Think of the carpentry, the metallurgy, the mathematics, that built a ship and brought its papyrus cargo to Athens from Egypt…On and on, until by the nineteenth century the interchangeable parts of assembly-line technology were making typewriters possible.
But as more gets written, and printed, and typed, finding any item gets harder. The alphabetical list and the numbered page--that pretty much sums up retrieval technology prior to the computer age. Yet another thread of our story begins in the 1880s, when Edison saw how to record not just silent signs but the way speech or music had actually sounded.
How to do that? While the music plays, or the actor speak, arrange for sound waves (air in motion) to inscribe their pattern along a wax groove; then a needle following the pattern can make a metal sheet vibrate, and that sheet's vibration can--albeit squawkily--make air move as sound. (And the
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