Antiquitopia

I just discovered the lamentable firing of Anthony LeDonne from Lincoln Christian University here .  I met Anthony my first year at Illinois Wesleyan University when his co-biblicist at LCU Chris Keith came to IWU to talk about the demise of the criteria of authenticity through research employing memory studies (see a recent discussion of one of Keith's books here ).  Anthony's firing appears to be due to pressure by donors and others because of his quite good popular book on the Historical Jesus .  Ironically, there is to be a conference concerning this research at LCU next fall, though it appears that the organizers are likely to move it in response to LeDonne's unexpected firing ( here ). I am quite angry about this.  LeDonne's research is good, responsible, and creative.  He should be rewarded for his work rather than endure mistreatment.  I join with others who offer their hopes that LeDonne will quickly find an institutional home that values his im...

I know a lot of other bloggers have spoken about this, and I am not going to say much, except READ Judy Redman's article on memory in psychological research as it bears upon the gospels. It is quite thought-provoking and, frankly, a breath of fresh air on what seem to become rather stale debates. Just one completely unimportant note: Her discussion of schema reminded me of Albert Lord's definition of "theme" as something of a standard outline to fill in with detail (with each new remembering for Redman; with each new performance for Parry/Lord). She does speak of Lord briefly to discuss the memory of trained tradents, although I think I read Lord a little differently. Whereas she indicates the oral tradents' usage of verbatim speech--what Lord would call the Formulae--my reading of Lord (which is something he highly emphasizes in his introduction to the Singer of Tales) is that the moment of performance is itself the moment of composition. The entire narrativ...

Ô souvenir, Tes arbres sont en fleur devant le ciel, On peut croire qu'il neige, Mais la foudre s'éloigne sur le chemin, Le vent du soir répand son trop de graines. (Yves Bonnefoy, "Une Pierre," Les Planches Courbes ) Memory. It is something that fascinates so many ancient and modern thinkers. It is the basis of epistemology for Socrates/Plato: all knowledge is remembrance. It is the basis of the Self and where one finds God in Book 10 of Augustine's Confessions . The Bible constantly enjoins one to remember: zakhor , as the famous book by that name by Yosef Yerushalmi examines. It is the recollection of God's actions with Israel. Augustine depicts memory as a vast cavern with nooks and crannies in which some memories are easily accessed and others are hidden and only elicited with great difficulty. Bonnefoy's image, however, is not of the space of stone that can be filled, but organic. It is not empty space to be filled, but the spring flowering...

I just completed Swann's Way , the first part of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time . It is an absolutely beautiful book. It captures the always escaping evanescence of our memories, but fully sensually. It is the luxurious perfume that triggers something within us and sets out minds into places in our past, places that can never be the same again because we have changed. Lost places are the other dimension of lost time that slip on by, wafting and then dissipating in the air. The last line of the book captures the temporality of place beautifully: The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years. (Marcel Proust, Swann's Way , In Search of Lost Time ; ...

All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between them--between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired more recently by a taste or "perfume," and finally those which were actually the memories of another person from whom I had acquired them at second hand--if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation. (Marcel Proust, Swann's Way , In Search of Lost Time ; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright)

Memorization is something that is quickly flying out the window. Growing up, we were encouraged to memorize swaths of the Bible, something I should probably do more of (but now in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). If that's not your ticket, how about modern poetry? An article in the NYTimes talks about reasons for and gives tips how to memorize some Auden, Yeats, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc., in tiny increments each day. With just a few lines each day, over time you'll have a vast collection of poems at your memory's disposal. There have been a few times I have pulled a few lines out of Shakespeare when relevant for my class (and not just when I was teaching Shakespeare). And I've actually been wanting to read some W.H. Auden, but haven't had the chance. The best reason beyond any cultural literacy, etc., is just for your own pleasure. Why not give a short poem a shot? Here is a poem by W.H. Auden : The Fall of Rome The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonel...

I was reading Borges' short story, "Funes the Memorious." It is the tale of a Uruguayan boy who, one day, falls off a horse and, when he awakens, sees the world anew. In fact, he has perfect perception--he can see clearly all the most minute details. He can feel the most subtle changes in temperature, etc. At the same time, he awakens to a perfect memory. He remembers everything, absolutely everything. Every detail, every sight, every sensation. He can recall a day, but to do so takes an entire day. By comparison, our perception and memory are a dreamlike haze: For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything. When he fell, he became unconscious; when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories. Somewhat later he learned that he was paralyzed. The fact scarcely interested him. He reasone...

I just read Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens ," and I thought I would give some choice morsels for your eyes' delight: No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. One might...speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, taht predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance. Translation...ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic form or intensive form.

April Deconick over at Forbidden Gospels is causing some ripples in the blogospheric space-time in her discussions on memory. You can see her postings here and more fully elaborated here . She sees this as the future, at least in part, of biblical studies. In fact, she has promised to send me some references on memory reconstruction for my own work on the persistence and transformation of mythic patterns of, well, let's just say holy/heavenly space-time in ancient Jewish and Christian literature. She is receiving a response from the blogosphere. The infamously pseudonymous NTWrong has responded quite warmly to her contagious enthusiasm for memory studies, comparing the modernity / antiquity transference difficulty with the "middle range theory" of how artifacts relate to culture in modernity and antiquity, a theory with unsure results, but perhaps with a more robust method than individual idiosyncrasies that tend to dominate the field. "Wrong" gives the sl...