Art Requires Memory
One cannot know or even think about what one does not "have in mind."
Ibid. (bold emphasis mine)
God, said the Psalmist, made his works for remembering: "memoranda sunt ista." This is a statement obvious in memory cultures, such as those of the Psalmist and of Hugo of Rouen and his contemporaries: as obvious as a statement that "God made his works to be measured" would be to us now. Yet many scholars now seem to me to have overlooked the implications of believing such a thing about fictions, human and divine. All crafted things are made in the first instance for human remembering—both directly, to attract attention and thus to be remembered (what we ordinarily mean when we now say that a thing is "memorable"); and then through the work of memory for knowing, for cognition. At the very least this conception of artistic product requires that all art, at some basic level, must engage the procedures of human memory, for one cannot know or even think about what one does not "have in mind," that is, has remembered.
