Are thinking memorable thoughts and creating memorable thoughts the same thing? You can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, the ephemeral to be mythological--and therefore memorable--by writing it down and immortalizing it throught the tactile and erotic arts of painting or writing or whatever. But how do you make a memorable thought through the art of memory? A thought that is, from its origin, naturally memorable and not made artificially memorable by contractualizing it, further removing it from the ideal? A thought that is memorable as soon as you think it, like an epiphany. A thought that is, perhaps, spontaneous. For this, let's go to the Romantics.
Though absent long/These forms of beauty have nott been to me/As is a landscape to a blind man's eye/But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din/Of towns and cities, I have owed to them/In hours of weariness, sensations sweet/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart/And passing even into my purer mind/With tranquil restoration...Nor less, I trust,/To them I may have owed another gift/Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood/In which the burthen of the mystery/In which the heavy and the weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world/...Therefore let the moon/Shine on thy solityar walk/And let the misty mountain winds be free/To blow agains thee: and in after years,/When these wild ecstasies shall be matured/Into a sober pleasure, when they mind/Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms/Thy memory be as a dwelling -place/For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh!
I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd/A host of golden daffodils/Beside the lake, beneath the trees/Fluttering and dancing in the breeze...For oft when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude/And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the daffodils.
The first poem is part of William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbery. In this poem, where he actually goes to an unfrequented church, he recalls, among other things, how, though it has been 5 years since he has been here, he remembers its natural beauty of Tintern Abbey when he is feeling blue in the city in order to make him feel restored and fresh again. The second poem is from I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Picture a guy walking around the English Country side (as Wordsworth was reported to have walked many thousands of miles in his life) and he sees a sea of dancing daffodils. So he remembers the scene that later, when he is alone, recollecting emotion through tranquility, the image of the daffodils flashes on his inward eye. I notice how these poems both consider memory to be ignited. as in certain flashes, or "fluxes and refluxes of the mind". Well, two years ago in Classical Literature Dr. Sexson asked a philosophical, rhetorical question, "What is the lightning bolt that pilots all things?" I would say, Dr. Sexson, that the lightning bolt that pilots all things is memory. The flashing of the sea of daffodils upon the inner eye allows Wordsworth to have a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, or...a memorable thought.
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