Inspiration and the role of memory


Alma Tetto
Personal research (2020)



“Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches, sings the unknown. It calls to me. But the unknown is familiar and therefore we do know, with a knowledge of memory, where the poetic voice comes from and where it goes. I was here before.”
—Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre


“What I am trying to convey to you is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the impalpable source of sensations.”
—J. Gasquet, Cézanne

“…the visible is pregnant with the invisible,…to comprehend fully the visible relations one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

In his Theogeny, Hesiod proclaims Mnemosyne, Memory, was born of the sky and earth, the gods Ouranus and Gaia. Mnemosyne was the daughter of a first generation of gods—Memory born of primordial form.  She birthed the nine Muses—inspiration born of Memory. The Greeks dedicated springs and fountains in Mnemosyne’s name and believed that those who drank of her waters experienced a remembering. Memory holds all knowledge: what was, what is, and what will be. Memory gives birth to inspiration: to poetry, music, the sciences, and history, to dance, love, tragedy, and comedy.

But what is Memory’s role in inspiration? How does Memory give birth to inspiration at times when her spark seems to spring forth from an abyss? How might we understand the artist or creator as the midwife of Memory?

Memory evolved out of Latin memoria, memory or remembrance, and memor, meaning mindful or remembering. Mnemonic, the study of techniques for remembering, comes from Greek mnemonikos, which means “pertaining to memory", and memne, meaning “memory, record, or epitaph”. Mnemonic also stems from mnasthai, “to remember.” 

While memory seems to be something impressed within, inspiration, on the other hand, seems to be infused from without. Inspiration comes from Late Latin inspirare and inspiratio, which means to "blow into, breathe upon.” Inspiration, until the 19th century, was seen to be something magical, an act of divine influence.

Socrates portrayed the inspired poet as “a winged being, light and sacred, incapable of producing unless enthusiasm draws him and makes him come out of himself…It is not the poets who say such marvelous things, but rather they are the organs of divinity that speak to us through their mouth” (Paz, 1956, p. 143). We might, then, think of the Muses as the organs of Mnemosyne, or rather, the instruments of memory.

Still, the question remains—how might inspiration arise from memory? C.G. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious may provide a helpful background for understanding how the the instruments of memory might be birthed. Jung describes the collective unconscious as holding within it the “whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual” (1931/1968, CW 8, par. 342). The collective unconscious is thought to be a secondary part of the psyche which lies beyond the personal unconscious. Jung called it a deeper layer of the psyche (1968/1954, CW 9, par. 3). While the personal unconscious contains conscious material which may or may not be remembered—some contents may have been forgotten or repressed—the collective unconscious is made up of entirely of contents that “have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired” (Jung, 1968/1936, CW 9, par. 88).

Building on Jung’s collective unconscious, Rupert Sheldrake, the controversial English biochemist and plant physiologist, developed a theory of collective memory that extends beyond humanity to include the universe at whole. Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance suggests that entire cosmos, making up all of nature, may be repository of memory. Morphic resonance suggests that all self-organizing systems, from crystals to humans and societies at large, inherit a collective memory that influences form and behavior. Sheldrake’s theory staunchly opposes the mechanistic worldview that still pervades biological sciences—if the cosmos is truly evolutionary as the new physics shows, the universe must be viewed as an animate living whole, as organism rather than machine. On this, Sheldrake wrote:

The Big Bang recalls the mythic stories of the hatching of the cosmic egg: it grows, and as it grows it undergoes an internal differentiation that is more like a gigantic cosmic embryo than the huge eternal machine of mechanistic theory. With this organic alternative, it might make sense to think of the laws of nature as more like habits; perhaps the laws of nature are habits of the universe, and perhaps the universe has an in-built memory. (Sheldrake, 1987)

The concept of truly evolutionary nature throws into question the changeless laws of physics, but Sheldrake was not the first to pose it. The American philosopher C.S. Peirce, psychologist William James, and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were among thinkers at the turn of the 20th century who pointed out such inconsistencies between evolution and the fixed, changeless laws of nature (Sheldrake, 2001/1988, p. 33). Peirce concluded that the laws of nature are more akin to tendencies or habits. On nature’s inclinations, Peirce wrote, “Its first germs arose from pure chance. There were slight tendencies to obey rules that had been followed, and these tendencies which were more and more obeyed by their own action.” Peirce’s belief was that habit is the “law of the mind” (Potters, 1967, p. 190).

Biologists, too, widely explored habit with the theory that memory is inherent in all living organisms.  Sheldrake cited the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler who wrote in his book Life and Habit (1878): “Life is that property of matter whereby it can remember—matter which can remember is living. Matter which cannot remember is dead.” By the 1920s, the field of genetics was growing, finding that inanimate matter also embodied Butler’s idea of “unconscious organic memory” in the form of DNA. Biologists began to see the production of complex molecules that make up the genes of DNA as mechanistic productions, and their earlier notion of inherited habit was  all but abandoned (Sheldrake, 2001/1988, p. 34).

Still, the question of form in the development of plants and animals remains a mystery. How does an embryo develop out of a fertilized egg? How does a seed sprout into a full-fledged plant, an acorn into oak? It’s widely agreed that organisms are not preformed as materialism might suggest. Development, instead, is seen to be epigenetic, which Sheldrake explains as involving “the appearance of material structures that weren’t present before” (2001/1988, p. 83). Morphogenesis is the process of the coming into being of form, from Greek morphe, form, and genesis, coming into being (2001/1988, p. 81).

Morphogenesis is rooted in ancestral history, Sheldrake claims. The conventional explanation of morphogenesis is a simple inheritance of genes. Sheldrake takes a broader and controversial view here. His hypothesis is of formative causation which sees organic form as existing within and inheriting their form within organizing fields which have an in-built memory. In his essay “Mind, Memory, and Archetype,” published in the Jungian journal Psychological Perspectives (1987), Sheldrake wrote:

…growing organisms are shaped by fields which are both within and around them, fields which contain, as it were, the form of the organism…As an oak tree develops, the acorn is associated with an oak tree field, an invisible organizing structure which organizes the oak tree's development; it is like an oak tree mold, within which the developing organism grows.

Here we find a return to the tradition of Plato and Aristotle. For Plato, form arises from a Platonic archetype—the oak emerges out of the archetypal form of the oak. The American psychologist James Hillman drew his concept of the daimon in his popular book, The Soul’s Code (1996), from this idea. Hillman pulls from Plato’s telling of the myth of Er in his Republic, a story that demonstrates that each soul is given a daimon before it is born. The daimon contains within it a particular image or pattern that the soul then lives out on earth. In the process of our being born, we forget. The daimon serves as a guide, as a memory that we might recall, throughout life (Hillman, 1996, pg. 13).

Morphic resonance echoes this early idea. Sheldrake (1987) expanded on the theory of morphic resonance by proposing that these fields may contain a built-in memory sourced from pre-existing forms of the like. “The oak tree field [is shaped] by the forms and organization of previous oak trees.” Memory is cumulative within the structure of the field and influences the formation of future forms and behaviors within the field. Sheldrake uses the term morphic field to include fields of both form and behavior.

Let’s consider the formation of new crystals as morphic fields in action. When scientists are working to crystalize a new compound for the first time, it can be a slow and difficult process—there isn’t yet a morphic field for that compound. After that first crystallization, however,  the second compound will crystalize more easily, even if it occurs elsewhere in the world—there will be an influence from the first time. This influence will cumulate so that all subsequent formations build upon earlier experience, and it becomes easier to crystalize a particular compound over time. Morphic resonance allows for the inheritance of learned behavior as well as developing form in an organism. Inheritance is sourced from other like organisms, even when there is not a direct descent (Sheldrake, 1987).

Now let’s return to memory. Sheldrake considers the accessing of memory a kind of tuning process—memories are stored in fields and the body a tuning instrument. We might imagine morphic resonance as a tuning in to various frequencies, like channels on a radio or television, frequencies that influence our form and behavior. Tuning in to certain frequencies or fields can be thought of as memory banks that extend beyond the immediate personal. Sheldrake suggests we tune not only to our own memories but a collective memory. This collective memory, he says, “forms a background against which our own experience develops and against which our own individual memories develop.” He compares this concept to Jung’s collective unconscious:

Jung thought of the collective unconscious as a collective memory, the collective memory of humanity. He thought that people would be more tuned into members of their own family and race and social and cultural group, but that nevertheless there would be a background resonance from all humanity: a pooled or averaged experience of basic things that all people experience…It would not be a memory from particular persons in the past so much as an average of the basic forms of memory structures; these are the archetypes. (Sheldrake, 1987)

Memory, then, might be imagined as extending past ourselves, through the mind-body and out to the multitudes, to the cosmos at large.

The theory that the mind exists not in the brain, as many assume, but rather encompasses the entire body has been explored in the fields of neuroscience, neuropsychology, and cognitive psychology. In phenomenology, the concept of memory stored in the body was first identified by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Riva, 2018). Merleau-Ponty shifted the focus of awareness from the mind to the “lived body” claiming the body as the conscious subject of experience (Abrams, 1988). In his Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1962), Merleau-Ponty states:

Our body comprises as it were two distinct layers, that of the habit-body [body memory] and that of the body at this moment [body representations]… Correspondingly, my body must be apprehended not only in an experience which is instantaneous, peculiar to itself and complete in itself but also in some general aspect and in the light of an impersonal being.” (p. 95)

Building on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Milan-based neuroscience researcher Giuseppe Riva (2018) wrote that body memory is the result of direct bodily experience, including our experiences of how others perceive and represent our bodies. The phenomenon of reversibility between perceiver and perceived, seer and the seen, is prominent in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of Being. In Merleeau-Ponty’s philosophy, our memories, both implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious), extend beyond ourselves to include the perceptions or impressions (memories) of others. In a poetic analysis of painting as a form of vision entitled “Eye and Mind,” the philosopher demonstrated his concept of reversibility by quoting the painter André Marchand who described a feeling that perhaps it is not the artist who looks, but who is being looked at:

In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me… I was there, listening… I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it… I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I break out to paint it. (Berndston, 2010)

The roles of painter and his subject are here reversed and in reciprocal exchange. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of Being, as described in The Visible and the Invisible (1968), is of “Being speaking within us.” Here, the philosopher alludes to that which animates the artist: “the speech that possesses the signification less than it is possessed by it, that does not speak of it, but speaks it, or speaks according to it, or lets it speak and be spoken with me, breaks through my present” (as quoted in Berndston, 2010).

The duty of the artist, then, is to learn to listen to “Being speaking within us.” Paying attention becomes the key to receiving inspiration, those impressions which speak to us, speak through us. For the philosopher and poet Gaston Bachelard, the inspired must be “plunged into a breathing world,” so much that he ceases to do the breathing and “the world comes to breathe within him… the world breathes him.” Inspiration, the literal “breathing into,” was literal for Merleau-Ponty, too. In “Eye and Mind”, he wrote:

We speak of “inspiration,” and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration in Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between who sees and who is seen, who paints and what is painted. (as quoted in Berndston, 2010)

There is a constant exchange in the breathing in and breathing out, between the living body and the air that passes through us. Just as we take sustenance from the air we inhale, we give part of of ourselves in exhalation. The contemporary poet and author Diane Ackerman described the breath as a vehicle for our engagement with the world. Of breath, she wrote in A Natural History of the Senses (1990):

…it’s cooked air; we live in a constant simmering. There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.” (p. 6)

The life of the body, then, cannot be wholly separated from the earthly world of which we are a part, and with which we are in constant communion. In his later writings, Merleau-Ponty shifted his language around the “lived body” to “the Flesh”—which refers both to “my flesh” and “the Flesh of the world.” The Flesh is the underlying matrix that connects both the seer and the seen as interdependent parts of a whole. The contemporary philosopher David Abram called it “the reciprocal presence of the sentient in the sensible, and of the sensible in the sentient, a mystery of which we have always, at least tacitly, been aware…” (Abram, 2017, p. 72). We exist within the sphere of existence, not outside of it, although our human intellect might convince us otherwise. Because we can “reason” the sensuous, corporeal world which surrounds us, we feel somehow outside of its depths. With poetic voice, Abram poses a question to the contrary. He asks, rather, “is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that surround us?” (p. 57).

Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, also gave us forgetfulness. Through her daughters, the poets describe forgetting their cares and sorrows. The river Lethe—lethe meaning forgetfulness—is part of the Underworld, its spring residing parallel to the spring of Mnemosyne (Kerényi, 2010, p. 103). Remembrance runs alongside forgetting—we might only re-member that which we have lost or forgotten. We may, then, in our next invocation of the Muses, remember that our very being is a remembering. Memory holds all being: the past, present, and future. To birth inspiration is a passive role; it is to simply pay attention—to breathe with the world and let the world breathe through us.

∞

References

Abram, D. (1988). Merleau-Ponty and the voice of the earth. Environmental Ethics 10 (2): 101-120. DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics19881027.

Abram, D. (2017). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Retrieved from Apple Books. __ (Original work published 1996)

Ackerman, D. (1990). A natural history of the senses. New York, NY: Vintage.

Hillman, J. (1996). The soul’s code: In search of character and calling. New York, NY: Ballantine. Retrieved from Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-souls-code/id593311396

Inspiration. (n.d.) In Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved from: https://www.etymonline.com/inspiration.

Jung, C. G. (1968). The concept of the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 9 pt. 1, 2nd ed.). Retrieved from http://www.proquest.com. (Original work published 1936/37)

Jung, C. G. (1968). Archetypes of the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 9 pt. 1, 2nd ed.). Retrieved from http://www.proquest.com. (Original work published 1954)

Jung, C. G. (1969). The structure of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8, 2nd ed.). Retrieved from http://www.proquest.com. (Original work published 1931)

Kerényi, C. (2010). Zeus, Mnemosyne and the muses. In The gods of the Greeks (pp. 103-105). London, UK: Thames & Hudson. (Original work published 1951)

Memory. (n.d.). In Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved from: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=memory.

Merleau-Ponty, P. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London, UK: Routledge. (Original work published 1945)

Merleau-Ponty, M., Lingis, A., & In Lefort, C. (1968). The visible and the invisible: Followed by working notes.

Mnemonic. (n.d.), In Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/mnemonic.

Paz, O. (1987). Inspiration. In The bow and the lyre (pp. 140-163). Austin, TX: UT Press. (Original work published 1973)

Potters, V. G. (1967). C. S. Peirce on Norms and Ideals. Worcester: University of Massachusetts Press.

Riva, G. (2018). The neuroscience of body memory: From the self through the space to the others. Cortex 104, 241-260. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.07.013.

Sheldrake, R. (1987). Mind, memory, and archetype. Psychological Perspectives, Spring 1987. Los Angeles, CA: C. G. Jung Institute. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/00332928708408747.

Sheldrake, R. (2011). The presence of the past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature. London, UK: Icon Books. Retrieved from Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-presence-of-the-past/id511333321. (Original work published 1988)