When I was a freshman in college, I decided to memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was a weird year for me. I was living in a converted lounge, the best the formerly all-male college could do to accommodate its new female students. My dorm room had a beige linoleum floor, stark white walls, no windows, and two bunk beds placed randomly in the antiseptic space. Going to sleep on one of the top bunks, I felt like a patient in an operating theater.
After a week, one roommate had a breakdown and left, and I decided to bring a rooster into the mix. His name was Paul and he’d start up before sunrise with a magnificent aria and keep up the crowing until he was satisfied we were all awake. Soon someone down the hall complained, and I wasn’t surprised when the powers-that-were did not decide in Paul’s favor. He and I rode the train to Connecticut where I’d found a home for him on a farm with an uncle of mine who promised he would enjoy the company of hens even more than coeds.
Shortly after P
aul’s departure I began memorizing Prufrock, I can’t tell you why. Every morning I’d commit to memory another three lines. This went on for a month and a half until the entire poem lived inside my head. Memorizing poetry wasn’t new to me. In elementary school we memorized poems by Robert Frost, thought to be a nature poet, a poet of the countryside, an easy one to understand, when in fact he was complicated and his poems were filled with dark truths. Frost, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll. Their poems burrowed inside us and even if we didn’t understand what they were trying to tell us, the words were placed there for future understanding.
We m
emorized songs as well, and when the Beatles came along we committed their entire repertoire to memory. The language of song lands in a different part of the brain than the language of speech. Music excites memory in a way that ordinary speech cannot. In a memory care residence in Massachusetts, I recently watched a woman who sat in a wheelchair, head drooping like a sunflower heavy on its stalk. I’d never heard her speak, never seen her eyes shine, but it was an oldies afternoon and as the music started up her face came alive. Her mouth formed all the words to “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.” She rocked back and forth and sang out the chorus of “Que Sera Sera.” If the speechless can gain speech for the duration of an oldies sing-along, where does language hide when it’s not readily accessible to us? And what, besides music, can we employ to coax it out?
If you have seen dementia up close, it’s natural to fear the loss of language and memory. Language relies on memory. It’s built on a foundation of rules and rhythms and patterns. And perhaps to some extent memory relies on language. Written language is a form of image. After the early labor of sounding them out, words on the page become pictures committed to memory. When memory fails, the image no longer signifies a word, and what of reading then? Like looking at a rainforest and being unable to distinguish one green from another, unable to read the landscape.
For anyone who doesn’t remember the ending of the 1966 movie, Fahrenheit 451, let me remind you. One of the Book People, a man who has memorized Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston, lies on his deathbed reciting the novel to his successor, a young boy of nine or ten. The boy is concentrating hard on committing to memory the last chapters lest the man die before it is done and the ending lost. Ray Bradbury’s novel, and the movie based on it, explore a world in which technology replaces free thinking and book burning is in fashion. The only recourse for those who resist is to assign one book to each lover of literature who then memorizes itand becomes the means for the book’s salvation. The book is destroyed but its words are passed down from one book lover to the next. Because it no longer exists in physical form, it cannot be taken from the world.
In a recent novel called Time Shelter, the Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov writes that “writing arises when man realizes that memory is not enough.” Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, proposes that memory is our safety net when writing is not enough; when words on the page are outlawed. We are again in Bradbury times. Books are being banned (if not burned), and libraries and librarians are threatened with losing their funding. Autonomy has no virtue and those who refuse to toe the line may go to jail. The world predicted by Fahrenheit 451 is with us now, and will always return as history cycles around. When I memorized Prufrock our country had just emerged from the ‘60s. The residue of civil, racial, and cultural conflict was still with us, as was the Vietnam War. Flags and bras were fuel for new fires of protest. The books, this time, were kept out of the flames.
When I ask myself why I decided to memorize Prufrock in the middle of that weird, unsettled year, or why Prufrock, or why memorize at all, it only leads to more questions. Was it that I found in the poem an affirmation of my sense of alienation, and I wanted to carry with me the words to express it? Was it T.S. Eliot’s phrase “a patient etherised upon a table” that so accurately described me as I lay on the top bunk in a converted lounge? Was it the ethos of 1970, with its explosive uncertainty, that compelled me to reach for the language of a former time of upheaval, in order to find comfort there? Or was it all of the above, a return to elementary school days when we memorized good poems in order to let them speak the truths we were not yet mature enough to speak ourselves?
As word finding gets tougher for me, and it will get tougher still, how lucky I am to have this repository of songs and poems I’ve memorized, elegant icebergs adrift in a sea of everyday speech. It makes me feel linguistically agile again. It soothes my grief at the loss or limiting of expression. It’s momentarily frightening when words come unmoored from their meaning, when I can’t call up the image that matches “azalea,” or the name that goes with a face. But then up comes Prufrock, fussing about his hair and the state of his teeth and listening to the singing of the mermaids, and I feel solid again, misleadingly solid in an impermanent world.
