I Am Completely Serious

I mentioned before that I've been using Remembering the Kanji, a mnemonic-device based method of learning kanji. (I was lazy and didn't do it every day for a couple months, but I'm being good now! I hit the 3/4 point yesterday.) RtK's technique is pretty straightforward: the book provides names for each of the primitive elements of the kanji - names not always related to the primitive's original meaning! - and a mnemonic device connecting the elements with each other and the meaning of the kanji.

For instance, 曹, meaning "cadet," contains the primitives 日, 曲, and 一, meaning (for the purposes of the book) sun, bend, and one. You can remember that by thinking of Darkover character Regis Hastur, a cadet in the Comyn Guard, letting his mind get bent while by staring into one tiny sun, his matrix! You should never stare directly into your matrix, Regis Hastur!

(Uh, except that that is not an idea that the book provided, that one's mine.)

Because "cadet" is itself an element in several other kanji, like encounter (遭), vat (槽) and rowing (漕), I now associate a wide variety of things with Regis Hastur. I have also crafted a small set of Excel Saga-related mnemonics. ("excel" = 秀) For those curious, Excel is holding up a fistful (乃) of wheat (for which there's no unicode character, sorry), because this episode she's been transplanted into Yakitate!! Japan, and is trying to get into the spirit of the whole "bread" thing.

When you make up enough of these devices, you end up creating whole geographies of associations. There's a chapter devoted to kanji using the primitive Heisig refers to as "pinnacle" (⻖). I'd been reading Clockwork Heart when I got to this chapter, so it was convenient to start placing all the other elements in those kanji on the pinnacle of the mountain city in the book. According to my internal atlas, the city of Ondinium now has regiments of armored boars ("regiment" = 隊) who, lacking thumbs, sometimes crash skylift cars into the ground ("crash" = 墜), like in the book. The "boar" primitive doesn't show up in "camp" - 陣 - but since "pinnacle" does, and since I've decided that there are those armored boar regiments up there, I can safely assume that they are the ones who've left these humvees ("car" = 車) around their empty campsite.

From this sort of thing, I assume, comes the Memory Palace/method of loci idea, wherein you build a place in your head and anchor data you need to remember to certain locations and objects within it. When you're trying to remember something, you walk yourself through it to the information you need, in the same way that I have to kind of get past the idea of the regiment of armored boars in order to reach the idea of their boarless-but-humvee-infested campsite. Fortunately, I used to play World of Warcraft, and so am accustomed to getting past armored boars.

So the idea sounds cutesy, but it does work in some circumstances. Sometimes, though, the sci-fi and fantasy authors get hold of it! More because it is poetically useful than because they want to describe its psychological underpinnings.

Books I've read in which the concept shows up include Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars series and John Crowley's Little, Big, in which wizards have memory palaces, and Chris Moriarty's Spin State, in which an AI has one. In all of these examples, as one might expect, walking through the memory palace means more than just remembering stuff.

In Crown of Stars, Liath does it to comfort herself and detach herself from reality while undergoing terrible things, and in Little, Big, Hawksquill uses landmarks made from things she knows to get to things she doesn't know. In both of these cases, it represents a kind of trance state, in which the characters are able to do things they ordinarily couldn't. In Spin State, when the heroine ends up in the AI Cohen's memory palace, it acts as a metaphor for intimacy and revelation. The way the palace is described in the fantasy books is similar to the way that people often describe lucid dreaming, while in the sci-fi book, it's more like the Holodeck. In all three it's treated as a physical location with sensory value, malleable only within limits.

As a reality check, this isn't very accurate - I sadly do not go into Darkover-related lucid dreams while doing my flashcards - except for the part where it's not easy to change things! It's hard to change your mnemonics after the fact if you find you've formed them poorly. Like, if I've incorporated an image of an enraged ballerina into the mnemonic for the kanji for "pastry," and later on get to an actual primitive that Heisig decides to dub "enraged ballerina," I will be forever trying to wrongly impose Heisig's enraged ballerina onto that poor pastry. The pastry will be totally defenseless against the ballerina. My only choice will be to visualize two separate and visually distinct enraged ballerinas, one of whom exists only in pastry-related contexts. Maybe that one can be Fakir.

(This isn't a real example, so please do not go looking for this excellent primitive.)

The other issue with these conceptions is that they treat the memory palace as a kind of structure into which one organizes one's entire memory - like, the names of people in your Japanese class, and the history of the Axumite Empire, and where you put all your hats. You just walk to a different area to get to the different conceptual space. I don't think anyone really does that, except maybe as kind of an aesthetic thing, because you don't really need to "walk" anywhere to know that you want kanji rather than digits of pi - they're entirely different types of information. "Oh, and over there past the French verb conjugation statuary garden, engulfed in eternal darkness, is Kinkakuji, which contains Pokemon 1-251. 252 on up are in a bleak, crumbling tower in the center of the ancient cedar grove representing the quadratic equation. Ironically, I cannot for the life of me remember why!" But I guess it is cooler to have it all in one place, because then it can represent the soul and suchlike.