My Swiss Cheese Brain

As a youth, I could memorize poetry with great ease.  Nowadays, with a toe into the water of my eighth decade, what was once a snap has become a frustration.  But inasmuch as the authorities continually remind us geezers that we need to keep the intelligence well-lubricated, I persist.  Yet it now takes two or three hard weeks to memorize a speech in one of Shakespeare's plays that, fifty years ago, I might have learned in less than an hour.

I've been trying to commit to the old brain Othello's magnificent speech about wooing Desdemona -- the one with "antres vast and deserts idle" -- about which I reported last week.   Instead of memorizing fluently and quickly, my swiss cheese brain continually generates gaps, fissures and holes.  For example, take this passage.   

This to hear would Desdemona seriously incline

But still the house affairs would draw her thence

Which ever as she could with haste dispatch

She'd come again, and with a greedy ear

Devour up my discourse.

There's no reason why this sentence shouldn't be easy enough.  I read and study it, but when I shut the book and try to recite, it comes up this way:

She'd come again and with a  greedy [empty space] 

Devour up my discourse. 

The word "ear" has evaporated, or rather fallen into the black hole of memory, or gotten stuck in the synaptic link between two nerve cells.

I peer into the book once again and take a second crack.  

She'd come again and with a greedy ear

Devour up my [empty space].    

Ear appears, discourse disappears.  And so on through the thirty-two line passages.  Nouns sink beneath the waves and then bob to the surface.  And these lacunae occur again and again. And again.

It is fascinating to me that I retain the rhythm of the pentameter line and that I always know that I am missing a two-syllable noun.  Nevertheless, the precise word will not emerge -- at least at the moment that I need it.  But it's there, coated with polysaccharides, lurking in an obscure empty space behind a neuron.  It's astonishing that the words that disappear are almost always nouns.  I have very little trouble with other parts of speech.  But then noun-loss is a recognized characteristic of your "mature" brain. 

Because it has taken so long to memorize, I have become extremely well-acquainted with the speech.  Slow motion has its advantages.  Othello tells us that Desdemona would come "with greedy ear [to] devour up [his] discourse."  It wasn't until I had gone over that sentence a hundred times that I realized that Shakespeare used "devour" to connect with the "cannibals that do each other eat" in the earlier part of the speech.  It's a purposeful comparison: while wandering and errant Othello encountered anthropophagi, domestic Desdemona, confined to house affairs, was only able to eat words.   

Clever fellow, that Will S. 

Comments

[Spike D]

Welcome to my world, Doc.

[Otis Jefferson Brown]

As Alexander Pope wrote: “Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain,
our thoughts are linked by many a dum-de-dum...”

[Herm]

I remember how a certain Shakespeare prof. of mine had us memorize this exact speech, Doc.

As to the process of memorization, you describe this one aspect of it well, with those memory-logged nouns sinking out of reach. That, for me, is a very common occurrence with poetry long-memorized and once rock-solid, but which I haven't brushed up on recently. The rhythm remains if and where nothing else does. And where those holes appear, one knows precisely the metrical qualities of the missing word or words, and the grammatical requirement it fills. . .but not the word itself.

And the errant lexical item gnaws at the underside of one's memory arch.