* Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York, 1986).

I picked up the topic of mental time in my last post, and I predicted a few thoughts about nature writing. This summer I read Arctic Dreams, because I was on holiday in Canada and that felt kind of near the Arctic. In reality I was not at all near, but I had wanted to read the book for a while anyway. The book is rich with thoughts about how Arctic peoples interact with the landscape and its other inhabitants in ways that don’t always make sense to visitors, but which are specially tuned to the needs of all concerned. This includes ideas about time, space, and thought. Lopez makes a comparison with the non-Arctic Hopi language, drawing on the work of the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Hopi has only limited tenses, makes no reference to time as an entity distinct from space, and, though relatively poor in nouns, is rich in verbs. It is a language that projects a world of movement and changing relationships, a continuous ‘fabric’ of time and space. It is better suited than the English language to describing quantum mechanics. English divides time into linear segments by making use of many tenses. It is a noun-rich, verb-poor tongue that contrasts fixed space, more suited, say, to architectural description. All else being equal, a Hopi child would have little difficulty comprehending the theory of relativity in his own language, while an American child could more easily master history. A Hopi would be confounded by the idea that time flowed from the past into the present.

Not everyone follows Lopez (or Whorf, in the background) as far as this; there is even a Wikipedia article on the ‘Hopi Time Controversy‘. But the point is that such languages, thought processes, and experiences of the world, are different from the expectations of outsiders. Lopez elaborates the idea with reference to the work of the Arctic expert Edmund Carpenter:

Carpenter discerns a correspondence between the Inuktikut language and Eskimo carving: the emphasis in both is on what is dynamic, and on observations made from a variety of viewpoints. In our language, says Carpenter, we lavish attention on concepts of time; Eskimos give their attention to varieties of space. We assume all human beings are oriented similarly in space and therefore regard objects from the same point of view — the top is the top, the bottom the bottom; that direction is north and this south. In describing a distant place, however, says Carpenter, an Eskimo will often make no reference to the mass of the land in between (which would impress us, and which we would describe in terms of distance), but only to geographical points, and not necessarily as seen from the points of one’s approach.

*

What Lopez gets across most of all is the transformative effect of spending time in the North on him. The thing I want to pick out in this post is a quality of his writing style that connects with these observations about the native mindset and language. Arctic Dreams combines anecdotes of the author’s own experience, descriptions of scientific findings about the land, sea, peoples, and animals, accounts of historical exploration, and other kinds of writing, and it does this in what I found a very even way. In a way it seems to enact the continuity and harmony of the land-mind interactions he describes, with the same way of describing the privations of early European travellers, the adaptive resourcefulness of the fox and loon, what it is like to cross ice in a Twin Otter. It’s not that the style is transformed into a strange prose-poetry or anything like that; it’s clear, methodical, and well-informed. It’s the continuity and interconnectedness of its various interests that seems striking, and a way of opening up an unfamiliar ecology of thinking.
      This made me think about another burst of holiday reading, a few years ago. I was going to Yosemite, so I dutifully read John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra on the flight over. My children can still remember me going on and on about how much I enjoyed it. After this I went on to read other Yosemite-related writings by Muir (The Mountains of California and The Yosemite I think) — I wasn’t so arrested. Part of the problem was repetition; I already knew he had a lot of respect for the sugar pine, and not much respect for the local peoples. But I think I also didn’t really respond to his version of the stylistic feature I’ve been describing in Lopez: a sort of even-ness whether the story is about him or the world around, a refusal to distinguish between the narratives of people, animals, and trees. I preferred the diary narrative of My First Summer, a simpler frame on which to hang things.
      In earlier posts about literature and mental time I’ve focused on smaller features, tenses and metaphors, but of course larger structures, narrative shapes and stylistics patterns, can also convey another way of organising the world.

Rose K. Hendricks and Lera Boroditsky, ‘Constructing Mental Time Without Visual Experience’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 429-30.

This article revisits a theme I’ve dealt with before, in one of the very first posts on this blog, here, and then in a chapter I referred to in another post, here. It made me think about some of the nature writing I’ve come across recently, and I’ll say something about that in a later post, but for now I’ll just outline some of the interesting things they discuss.
      It is well established that human being conceive time in spatial form, placing earlier and later things (for example) on an imaginary physical line. The shape and orientation of such lines depend a lot on cultural experience (such as, for example, the direction of writing). Hendricks and Boroditsky explore nuances arising from recent experiments, especially by R. Bottini et al. (see ‘Space and Time in the Sighted and Blind’, Cognition, 141 (2015), 67-72).

*

The point of testing blind and sighted participants was to compare their mental time-lines, and it emerged that reading using vision, and reading using touch, both resulted in left-to-right, earlier-to-later correspondences. Another point was to find out whether this timeline was ‘anchored on the body itself or on the space outside the body’; by getting participants to undertake a keyboard task with either crossed or uncrossed arms, the idea was, it would be possible to determine this. There was no significant difference in the results, so the conclusion was that the timeline is not tied to bodily disposition, but to the space outside instead. Time in this case does not run across from hand to hand, through arms and body, but through the air in front.
      In Italian subjects anyway; as usual some of the most arresting parts of a paper on this topic arose when the different spatial representations of time in other cultures were discussed. Researchers have found different axes, different orientations within the same axes, multiple spatial models in the same culture, multiple spatial models in the same person depending on circumstances: ‘people dynamically create different representations for different tasks’.
      This conjunction of space and time is alive in gesture and in language, and as I said in that earlier post, literary metaphors can evoke, and have evoked, familiar and unfamiliar configurations. No time now to say any more, though: I am off to give a lecture about the tradition of Tragedy in literature, in which I want to talk about how later works can influence earlier works, as well as the more predictable reverse. I have a feeling that I’ll be gesturing away even more self-consciously than usual, having been thinking about this topic.

My last post was about collective memory, how empirical studies are seeking to define its characteristics, and how literary examples might explore the problems and dynamics of collective memory as it changes over time. In this post I want to discuss a long passage from Henry VIII, a play by Shakespeare and Fletcher; the bit in question is generally considered to be by Shakespeare. It is mostly made up of a long speech by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, in which he prophesies about the glorious future of the King’s new-born daughter, later Elizabeth I. It is a special case for considering collective memory, because it made its first audience (c.1613) experience a shared act of remembering. They could think back to a queen’s long reign, which ended ten years before, to her birth and its aftermath eighty years before, and key points in between.
      If you hover your mouse over the highlighted phrases in the speech, then a running commentary will conveniently appear. If you’re reading this with a mouseless device, then I believe it should be possible to use your finger or parietal cortex to make it work. Of course you may be so at one with your Google Glasses that space and time, cause and effect, all and nothing, have become interchangeable, in which case, good luck.

Let me speak, sir,
For heaven now bids me; and the words I utter
Let none think flattery, for they’ll find ’em truth.
– heaven still move about her! –
Though in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time bring to ripeness: she shall be –
But few now living can behold that goodness –
A pattern to all princes living with her,
And all that shall succeed: was never
More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue
Than this pure soul shall be: all princely graces,
That mould up such a mighty piece as this is,
With all the virtues that attend the good,
Shall still be doubled on her: truth shall nurse her,
Holy and heavenly thoughts counsel her:
She shall be loved and fear’d: her own shall bless her;
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow: good grows with her:
,
Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:
; and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honour,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.
Nor shall this peace sleep with her: but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create ,
As great in admiration as herself;
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise, ,
And so stand fix’d: peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him:
Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and : he shall flourish,
And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches
To all the plains about him:
Shall see this, and bless heaven.

The king briefly interjects, ‘thou speakest wonders’, before Cranmer finishes his speech…

She shall be, to the happiness of England,
An ; many days shall see her,
And yet no day without a deed to crown it.
! but she must die,
She must, the saints must have her; yet a virgin,
A most unspotted lily shall she pass
To the ground, and .

* Henry L. Roediger III and Magdalena Abel, ‘Collective memory: A New Arena of Cognitive Study’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 359-61.
* Anne Barton, ‘Harking back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia’, English Literary History, 48 (1981), 706-31; a version of the article appears as chapter 14 of Barton’s Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984).

It’s nice to make a link between a brief new article in Trends and a longer one from the 1980s that I read when I was an undergraduate. Not in the 1980s. Quite. Roediger and Abel say that recent empirical studies are showing ways in which scientific thinking can give insights into a phenomenon that has already been of interest in the humanities. This is the kind of thing that seems promising to me.
      Collective memory is group-level recall, the things that ‘everyone knows’, but it’s also about how things are lost to the group consciousness. There is a nice graph showing how US presidents are forgotten over time. It is attributed some predictive value, so that (for example) it is hypothesized that by 2040 Harry Truman will be as forgotten as, say, Franklin Pierce is now. I find that a bit difficult to believe, what with the atomic bomb and the United Nations and all, but I dare say that there was a time when people would have said similar things about Pierce, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Ostend Manifesto.

Collective memory may have a characteristic structure, in that it ‘seems to be shaped by schematic narrative templates, or knowledge structures that serve to narrate the story of a people, often emphasizing heroic and even mythic elements while minimizing negative or inconsistent ones’. I suppose that is kind of what you’d expect; but there is enough in the experiments they cite, I think, to be quite promising. Perhaps there may be some more counter-intuitive characteristics of collective memory; perhaps literature already knows something about them.

Anne Barton’s article is about Ben Jonson’s late plays and the ways in which characters recall the time of Elizabeth I. She puts this in the context of a wider cultural phenomenon in early Stuart England: a nostalgia for various qualities that the earlier reign seemed, in retrospect, to possess. There was a similar nostalgia in Elizabethan England, for the time of Henry VIII. The past could sometimes seem simpler, clearer, more coherent, more leisurely, an altogether merrier England. I am going to come back to this in another post, because there are some very interesting moments where the text works with collective memory and, especially, exposes an interesting uncertainty about what is collectively remembered, and what is not.

Here I want to offer just one example of shortish-range Jacobean nostalgia for Elizabeth I, but one where it’s not clear whether the memory is operating or not. When Cleopatra dies, her maid Charmian remembers her mistress as ‘a lass unparallel’d’. Some people think this is a way of evoking Elizabeth I; the last place I encountered the idea was in an essay by . The idea is that an audience in 1607 might be led, by the challenge of ‘unparallel’d’, to make a parallel with the former Queen, who like Cleopatra was powerful, capricious, and challenging. Female monarchy was something they knew, and here it was again, playing out very differently, but with the flickering potential of a connection.
      I think the subtlety and doubtfulness of the lass / Elizabeth link might be the point. Around 1606 or 1607, when Antony and Cleopatra was first performed, Shakespeare left his audience to wonder whether they do in fact collectively remember Elizabeth so readily when they think of royal lasses and parallels. Individuals can have complex relationships to collective memory; the faint hint in Antony and Cleopatra might have produced an odd sense of isolation-amid-the-collective, the uncomfortable feeling that if ‘I’ am prompted to recall, ‘we’ may not be; or if ‘I’ feel indifferent, the furrowed brows and muttered prayers of ‘we’ might tend another way.
      Of course, in the simple sense that Roediger and Abel are working with, this ‘we’ all do remember Elizabeth, who only died in 1603. Perhaps she hadn’t been a ‘lass’ for a while before that. The experience of remembering, however, how readily, vividly, automatically something comes to mind, how confidently or otherwise that remembering assembles into a collective memory: these are important nuances.