Remembering the Odyssey – or the Odyssey of Remembering

I think I have many gifts. Good memory is not one of them. Photographic is not the word I would use. Sketchy at best. Aged about 8 or 9 (if memory serves me right) I woefully humiliated myself in a failed attempt to publicly recite a four-line poem at school (can’t even remember which poem), despite what I felt had been a long and painstaking effort to commit to memory. The “winged words” just flew. The prompts (from my equally embarrassed teacher) failed to prompt. I drew a complete agonising blank. The teacher happened to have been my father. Now, he was truly blessed with photographic memory, as is my daughter. Genetics can be funny or cruel this way.

It was a painful lesson to me that some gifts are natural and that not all are passed down, or they may skip a generation. It was not in my dad’s gift to bless his gift upon me. You either have or you don’t. And I didn’t. I never suffered from agoraphobia; it wasn’t the eyes of the crowd upon me that caused the words to fly away. It was simply that I could not remember. Though the poem I forgot, the humiliation I never did. I knew then that in life I would have to make up for this shortcoming in other ways. And so, I tried. With moderate success. Despite the mnemonic handicap, I was able to demonstrate critical and analytical thinking, which sufficiently impressed a sufficient number of teachers and evaluators over the years, allowing me some academic progress.

Yet, I suffered subsequent humiliations, forgetting people’s names or faces, but I developed coping mechanisms, or simply made a greater effort, and learned to somehow reduce at least the frequency of such humiliations. But I never attempted to memorise anything else ever since; not a single line either of prose or of poetry. I had convinced myself that this was beneath me, as I very well knew it was above me. A critical mind, I always told myself, was far preferable. Who wants to be a stupid parrot! I was lucky that my school seemed to take the same view, and we were never encouraged or taught how to cultivate our memory. Recitation was frowned upon; too much effort for too little return! A complete waste of time and an obsolete approach. Analysis and critical thinking, not parrot fashion, was all, and if the opposite were occasionally the case, it was derided as an educational anachronism, a failure that needed eradicating.

Fast forward a few decades. Some three months ago, I watched Jodie Comer giving a breath-taking solo performance as Tessa in Suzie Miller’s award-winning play, Prima Facie. I can’t say how many thousands of words she recited in high-speed in this incredibly convincing “natural” performance all on her own on that stage. I do recall how stupefied I felt at the end. Not the slightest error or hesitation. How, I wondered, can any human being do this? What sort of super-human brain can have such mnemonic capacity? It seemed unreal. And how can two brains, mine and Comer’s be so different? Do we belong to different species?

Having recently come across theories in books about the brain’s plasticity, I began to wonder if this might be something that can be cultivated. Maybe Comer is not super-human after all. Maybe she just worked harder at it, perhaps aided by a natural talent. What if, I could work harder, despite the absent talent? Might I see a better mnemonic outcome, than that of my painful childhood recollection?

And so, I applied myself to what I intended purely as a scientific experiment. An attempt to test memorising poetry. Not for poetry’s sake, but on account of this curiosity. I knew I had to choose something that stirs me. So, I went straight to basics: Homer’s Odyssey in the original ancient Greek. I gave myself the task of memorising the opening 4 lines from the first rhapsody. I was generous to myself. I set no deadline. I joined the Poet in supplication to the Muse, to aid me in the task.

At first it was extremely hard. I would read the lines repeatedly. At best I could retain them for a few minutes. Then with my attention turned elsewhere, the words would fly. My short-term memory was evidently untrained, atrophied. But I kept at it and started to keep some of it. I saw improvement. And after a few days I noticed that the words were finally tamed. They gave up the flight and came to nest. I felt a transition had taken place. The words had finally been baked into my long-term memory. They finally stuck and came flowing when invited. I picked up a few more lines. Went through the same process. Huge effort in the beginning. Eventually, they too were baked. And curiously the first ones had not flown but kept flowing. I was able to herd the growing flock. My short-term memory did not improve much in the process. Or perhaps very little. But I found a method of overcoming the shortcomings of the lame short-term memory by long-enough application committing things instead (eventually at least) onto the long-term memory. This “baking” process took time and effort. But it was simple enough and it appeared reliable. Curiously, I found it enjoyable.

Soon I reached 10 lines, and I could hardly believe my own success. My fear that new words in would push old words out did not materialise. Instead, I found I could just keep going, adding new lines on top of the old, and still retain the lot. I have not yet reached a saturation point having (by the time of writing) reached 190 lines. It is slow going yet growing steadily. But the experiment opened up a completely new and wonderful sensation. Committing the ancient text to memory made it come alive in a way that merely reading it never could. The ancient and distant felt contemporary and proximate. I developed an intimate relationship with individual words or expressions. Incredible Homeric gems creating almost hedonistic sensations as I was reciting in my head. I was able to comprehend meaning far better on account of memorising the text and learning and retaining the individual words always in context. And the more interesting of all was this blissful engrossment, serving as the most supreme exercise in meditation, crowding out any other thought or worry. I would recite on my walk to the office and on the way back home, while taking a lunch break, or making coffee. It acted upon me as a form of mental therapy, cleansing my inside, purifying my brain, making it ready for the next challenge. It compared to physical exercise, which rather than exhaust the body, it invigorates.

I felt the love for the text itself grow in me exponentially, in a way I cannot quite explain, other than to say that growing familiarity made a family member of each word and sentence. And I experienced an almost mystical connection with those mythical progenitors, who first composed and recited these same words, some three thousand years ago, which still echo in eternity. And I began to realise what compelled them to learn them off by heart round the hearth, to preserve or to pray, long before they could write, and to propagate, to share and to relish as sacred. Because I guess learning something off by heart, has to be a matter from the heart. Holding the words in my head felt as if I was partaking communion of the undying nourishment, the ambrosia of the immortalised souls of these distant forefathers, that the act of recitation, of remembrance was like a prayer to the Gods, a luminous thread underpinning our common humanity, connecting my transient mortality to their un-wilting glory. The Gods themselves would come alive!

Thus, my pithy prose experiment of the brain, brought about a totally unexpected epic experience for the heart. My humanist curiosity ushered a startling quasi-religious cure of the soul. And in this process of harnessing and herding the Poet’s colourful, exotic winged words, I also gained a deeper appreciation for poor dear parrots.