Mnemonics at Work
"One should try to laugh at the office," wrote Kafka, "because there is nothing better to be accomplished there." I agree but wish to add that, in addition to laughter, it is possible to enjoy a kind of covert intellectual recreation through the use of mnemonic systems. What I mean is best explained by illustration.
Let me be sitting across from my supervisor at the start of a meeting on Tuesday afternoon. He has, he says, handing us a sheet of paper, seven things he would like us to remember. What he does not know is I have 223, and directing my blind gaze at the page, I tune out his voice and return to my mental list. I recall that while walking to work I had reached the twentieth peg of The Book of Imaginary Beings. This concerns a certain passage in the Pharsalia enumerating the real or imaginary snakes Cato's soldiers saw in the deserts of North Africa. I see the guillotine (the mnemonic image for that number) and the incongruous legionaries behind it. The men have their backs to me because their attention is concentrated upon something that is moving towards them across the torrid sand. "Okay," I chime in with my coworkers. It seems I have just agreed to something. I do not know what and it does not matter because I have just recalled that the parias walks upright like a walking stick. Now I am handed a second sheet of paper, a schedule, which I stare at with a frown suggesting thoughtful perusal but which is actually due to the fact that, thanks to this interruption, I am now fumbling for my twenty-first peg. I stroke my chin, knit my brow (with what rapturous concentration I appear to be studying that schedule) and there it is: the jaculus, or flying javelin snake… and so I move on, in secret, and with sedulous care, through the apocryphal menagerie. Judging by their expressions, everyone else at the table is by now in a private hell of boredom. But my secret game saves me from having to share in it. I almost feel as if I possessed magical powers. I am aware that my supervisor is still talking (the method has its limitations) but my mind is occupied with other matters; just now, the amphisbaena, with a head at both ends of its body—as though, comments Brunetto Latini in his Thesaurus, "one mouth were too little for the discharge of all its venom." It is as if, bored with the meeting, I had waggishly taken out a book and started to read. But no one notices. My deception is perfect. I cannot refrain from smiling. I glance at my supervisor, who returns the smile. Perhaps he has made a little joke, thinks it has amused me, and is pleased with himself. It makes no difference to me. I have already arrived at the bizarre angels who inhabit Swendenborg's mystical typography of heaven and hell. And even if I run through only two or three pegs a day, that day has not been entirely wasted. I have defended myself against the menticidal tedium of work; I have vouchsafed my mind a few moments all its own. The motivating impulse is that of prestidigitator who, handing over the contents of his wallet to a pair of thugs on the street, palms a few bills so that he at least walks away with something. |