In my recent post CONNECTIONS, I was amazed that whilst reading a book on Freemasonry I came across a link to Giordano Bruno who is a key character in my book, Fire and Earth. Giordano Bruno was known as the memory man, able to perform unbelievable feats of memory. Developing the memory is an important part of Freemasonry.
Claire and I had coffee this morning in The Singing Kettle in Dartmouth. I gazed at the nautical flag bunting that decorated the shop, trying to remember what each of the flags were. I had learnt them all once, and Morse code, for the Fleet Board Exam, of the Royal Navy, when I was a reservist. That was thirty years ago, and I haven’t paid them much attention since, but most of them came back to me. I’ll just cite a few to demonstrate. BRAVO (B) is a red flag. I learnt it as B for Bomb, dangerous, red spells danger. CHARLIE is a set of horizontal bands, blue top and bottom, then white, and a red band between the white. I think of a cake with a band of strawberry jam between layers of cream in a blue sponge, C for cake. GOLF is three vertical yellow bands alternating with blue bands. They look like the rank insignia for a Royal Naval commander. Commander James Bond played golf. I hope you get the idea. It worked for me.
The Morse code was a bit different. I’m sure everyone knows what S and O are, from SOS …- – – … E is the most commonly used letter so needs to be the shortest, its . dit. There were a few letters that I just had to memorise. A is .- dit dah. N is -. Dah dit. For many letters I made up words so for P I think of PAN. P=AN so P is .- -. Dit dah dah dit. I drove down to Portsmouth for the Fleet Board Exam with one of my fellow junior officers. We got chatting about it and he had created visual clues for all the letters. The only one I remember now is he used pissoir as his trigger and had a birds eye view of two heads and their members before them.
Memory is about creating connections, and the more senses you can involve in the connection the better. Using P as an example you can imagine the smell of urine to help unite P, or Pee, with that view of the pissoir. Flags and letters have meanings. For example Y for Yankee means I am dragging my anchor. It’s a red flag with yellow diagonal lines. I imagine I’m on a ship in the Red Sea. The yellow diagonal lines are ridges in the sand of the sea bed. I can feel the jerk as the anchor bites, then drags again. Yikes! (Y)
I found a useful resource on the internet called Magnetic Memory Method. I don’t remember using these techniques other than for things like nautical flags and Morse code. In school I think the sheer repetition of knowledge and its application, building up piece by piece, is what embeds it in the memory. I couldn’t tell you much about calculus these days, but I was very good at it in school and university. It’s gone now. I could probably pick it up again if I wanted too, but it hasn’t stuck like those flags. Connections, memorable and invoking multiple senses if possible, that’s the key.