How does the memory-creativity link show itself? In a world with no pervasive forms of recording, for example, the quality of language is paramount as a mnemonic device. You simply don’t remember unimpressive prose.
Shakespeare not only wrote beautifully but also memorably. His characters are larger than life – which is a reasonable definition of any good traditional drama. Many memorials are made exactly like that: larger than life, so they will be remembered. Memorability is both a criterion of quality and a characteristic of art.
Creativity, traditionally, took us beyond ourselves in these exaggerated ways, painting life in caricatures in order that we remember the characters and their relationships. The sculpture of Winston Churchill outside the Houses of Parliament in London is hardly realistic. It is huge. But then art is never realistic because its purpose, like Churchill’s statue, used to be remembrance in all its forms.
And finally knowledge. It should go without saying that in those days when recording was piecemeal and when we relied largely on oral mnemonics – remembering by what we say – when language and the purpose of creative activity was deeply ambiguous and difficult to arrest in time, we had a tenuous grip on knowledge, as we define it now.
The corollary of this is that in a world of allusion it is ok to know things intuitively. And since there are few records it is ok to change your mind on matters of apparent fact.
These are important differences with the formal life of modern society. We tend to believe we know facts and in so far as there are public records then there is a documentary base for what we know. Nonetheless the solidity of knowledge is over-rated. Even written records are open to interpretation.
Unless you have written records knowledge is somewhat in the mix, a fact that Law Courts are often faced with. Even in the presence of written records, what we know is not as safe as we would like to believe.
The significant change is not that we are more certain now but that we are more concerned about certainty.
We should say that the past hundred years have been marked by a degree of certainty that we wouldn’t previously have been bothered with.
So what’s changing?
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