Is Memorization Knowledge?

I don't often go on college campuses anymore to see what people actually do there. Why? Because I already know. For so many years I was there, with office and secretary and students and societies and journals and professional identity and politics and many (often) vain attempts to identify and create my own knowledge life. But yesterday I was on the U of Oregon campus, and I ended up talking to some academics and students while taking in the unexpected warmth (60 degrees) of a cloudy Oregon day. Everyone was busy, naturally, occupied with phone calls, texting (the major occupation), meetings, selling books, completing assignments of all kinds. I realized that what I would bring to such a place in 2010 is small indeed: I just bring precise knowledge of a few lines here or there, of epic, of Bible, of poetry, of history, of stories told and works described. I would bring memory and ability to recite. And that is what I would like to reflect on here.

Is the ability to memorize and recite an expression of knowledge? And, if so, is this knowledge that "counts" anywhere? My major (pre)occupation these days is in the mastery and memorization of epic lines, mostly now from Paradise Lost. I try, believe me I try, to spend time reading others' works and keeping up with today's news and trying to help others write and express themselves more clearly. But the kind of joy I derive from the simple (or is it simple?) exercise of sitting down and committing five or ten lines of Milton's poetry to memory, and then reciting them, and feeding on them in my mind, and rolling them over and coming back to them, and using the phrases in my conversation, and using the guidance provided by his poetic vision and language to pare my own words and make them beautiful, this is what I want to do. Certainly the task finds its outworking in thought and commentary, in probing the heart of the poet as well as the heart of the poem, and letting these two things penetrate my own cold essence. But the major task is memorizing and then incorporating the words into my very marrow.

But who cares about that? How can that be "tested?" Who is hiring someone who memorizes? How does it solve anything in life? Which clients does it serve? Yet, I find and receive my life there. Take two lines from the beginning of Book III of PL, where, as one critic says, Milton gives us "as revealing an account of the poetic experience as Milton ever wrote," ("Introduction," to Paradise Lost, ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes, sec. 56). There Milton talks about the dual sources of his poetic inspiration--(1) the Greek and Latin classics and (2) the Scriptures. The latter are "chief" (lines 29-30), and about these he says "Nightly I visit" (line 32). Just those three words tell us much about Milton and open up a question and challenge to us in our creativity. Milton "created" by night, and recited by day. Ever since age 12 he worked until midnight, reading, studying, internalizing, mastering. Now, after that lifetime of mastery, he, in his late 50s and blind, visited the texts which had been laid up in his heart. Text plays with text, and a vision emerges. The world is quiet, and men are pursuing their ways in love, drink, despair or hope, but Milton slakes his thirst at Mount Zion and the "flowery streams beneath" that wash the hallowed feet of the mountain. What a vision and an inspiration. He is blind; he lives in darkness; but in the night he visits that illuminating source of inspiration. More pleasant is that source than anything else in life.

A few lines later, after stating his burning and astonishing ambition to be an equal in renown to Homer and Thamyris, to Tiresias and Phineus, he returns to his creative method. "Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move/ Harmonious numbers..." (lines 37-38). Those few words create a picture for us of one who nourishes himself from the stored-up knowledge of the Scriptures, especially, and the classics. When you feed on the Scriptures, each phrase is a feast. You caress the original languages and the text, and coax meaning out of them that you didn't even know existed before you picked up the text. Beauties of life unfold. You can become lost in the minutiae of the text or, like Milton, you can take these texts as part of a larger framework you are developing. In particular, the texts function as ornament or as scaffolding to burnish the beautiful building he was erecting. But when you truly believe that God has breathed Himself into the text, you take care to caress it and let its very rhythms and words enter into you. No finer pleasure can life offer than to provide this occasion for feeding on the text.

But this feeding leads to a voluntary movement, a movement of the mind to produce "harmonious numbers" or verses that "fit" the poetic scheme he has adopted. Thoughts seep out of the treasure book, but then they become the living soul of the thoughts that you create in your own words. Milton had to do this through memorization, since his light was dark and he had to wait until the morning for the visit of his amanuensis, to whom he would gush forth with the wisdom of the night. This wisdom was that which flowed from beautiful text to his own harmonious numbers, numbers which were committed to memory so that they could be spoken to a scribe. If the greatest poet of our language found that he needed to do this patient nightly visitation of Scripture, and then put the words carefully in memorized lines of burnished beauty, how can we, lesser sorts, hope to make our eternal contribution in life without doing the same?

Conclusion

But then I return to the original question of this essay? Does memorization "count?" It counts for my life; it seemed to count for Milton and others. And so I will do it. Farewell to the life of meetings and attempted advance in the human sphere. Drink deeply from the springs of the flowery brooks beneath Sinai, and a new kind of knowledge, maybe not really recognized or appreciated in the bustling world of the academy, will result.

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