Writing and Deep Memory
In The Art of Memory, Frances Yates looks at the famous story Socrates tells in the Phaedrus about the god Theuth’s invention of writing, which the god-king Thamus disparages as “an elixir not of memory, but of reminding.” Thamus declares that with writing the Egyptians will come to “read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part 
ignorant.” As Yates points out, the story is often taken as an endorsement of pure orality, “a survival of the traditions of oral memory.” But Yates argues that Socrates is talking not about memory in general, nor especially the art of mnemonics practiced by masters of memory. In Socrates’s reckoning the ancient Egyptians possessed memory of the deepest kind: memory of the Ideas, the living universal realities of which all things, passions, sensations, and sundry states of affairs are but passing shadows. Memory in this view is no apparatus for the collation and curation of trivia, but the imperishable recollection of the knowledge we possess of reality before we are born—the foundation of knowledge itself. “A Platonic memory,” Yates concludes, “would have to be organised, not in the trivial manner of … mnemotechnics, but in relation to the realities.” Memory in the Platonic definition is not about memorizing, but remembering. It’s not about storage, but revelation.
In light of such a theory of mind, writing is thrown into an odd light; it becomes not the great disrupter of the oral lifeworld, but a mere servant or species of sophistry. The battle is not between the oral and the written, but between contemplation of the Ideas and the allure of false wisdom. When one practices “artificial memory” by organizing thoughts by arbitrary associations—the alphabet, or rhyme, or superficial similarities of form and function—one is not recollecting primordial Ideas that are the foundation of reality; one is imprinting on the brain those passing fancies and pretty pictures with which to beguile and amuse. One is already writing. The actual making of language-encoding marks is a mere idolatry of the Forms, setting up zombie-like letters in place of the imperishable Ideas.
