No manuscript has been preserved of a set of rimur composed by the Icelandic author Sigurour Bjarnson in 1862. But, according to William Craigie, a younger brother learned them by heart at the age of fifteen, and at the same time noted the first line of each verse. Fifty-five years later, in Canada, and without having gone over them in his mind for thirty years, he dictated the whole of them, to the extent of 4,000 lines, and they were printed at Winnipeg in 1919.

This is a remarkable case, but by no means unique. Anthropological literature is full of examples of oral traditions drifting through time & space without significant loss. Societies we call primitive often have a quite staggering capacity of remembering. Certain American Indian myths can be traced to Asia, and there are Polynesian communities that can recite, straight off, family trees involving dozens of generations.

Oral people have excellent memories; literate peoples are what Joyce called "ABCED-minded." "Our memories," writes H. J. Chaytor, "have been impaired by print; we know that we need not 'burden our memories' with matter which we can find merely by taking a book off a shelf. When a large proportion of a population is illiterate and books are scarce, memories are often tenacious to a degree outside modern European experience."

Indian students learn a textbook by heart & reproduce it word for word in an examination room; sacred texts are preserved intact by oral transmission alone. It is said that if all written & printed copies of the Rigveda (about as long as the Iliad & Odyssey combined) were lost, the text could be restored from memory, at once, with complete accuracy.

In the late Middle Ages, the Inquisition found it was not enough to burn books. They constantly charged the Waldensians with knowing large portions of Scripture by heart. Other dissenters were said to have known the whole of the New Testament & parts of the Old Testament.

It's easier to recall poetry than prose, and easier still to recall song. But often, what is remembered most clearly is danced-song, learned by heart, then endlessly improvised. Learned "by heart" means the learner is totally involved, his heart or lungs being regarded as the seat of his soul, the place where all senses commingle & all memories live.

Forgetfulness rarely destroys, nor do improvisations mar, a song or dance learned in this way. Cases are common of men revealing songs they had neither sung nor heard for forty years, but remembered perfectly.

The term "oral tradition" is misleading, for generally all the senses are involved in such cases. There seems to be everywhere a natural tendency for the senses to interpenetrate & interplay, "the ear-bone connected to the eye-bone" creating a concert or orchestration in which the ear sees, the eye hears, one smells-tastes color, and all the senses engage in every experience.

An East Indian treatise of the sixth century A.D. describes a conversation in which a sage advises a king that he must first learn the theory of dancing before he can learn the whole meaning of art, since the law of dancing imply the principles that govern painting.

Bill Holm, a student of Northwest Coast Indian art & dance, speaks of "a certain physical satisfaction from the muscle activity involved in producing the characteristic line movement of this art" and the fact that "some of the most skillful artists of the southern Kwakiutl are also among the best dancers and song composers." He writes: "The constant flow of movement, broken at rhythmic intervals by rather sudden, but not necessarily jerky, changes of motion-direction, characterizes both the dance and art of the Northwest Coast."

Writing & print relieve a strain upon memory and give time for deliberate consideration. But they do far more than this: the sensory mechanics of reading, plus the value accorded to the eye at the expense of all other senses, destroy the harmonic orchestration of the senses and reduce each image to one sense or another. The result is that the experience cannot be "relived" in memory. It cannot be learned "by heart" since its unity has been shattered by translation into writing.

I see loss of memory as a by-product of literacy, specifically literacy's role in shattering sensory orchestration. One great advantage of memory loss is that one isn't burdened with masses of obsolete information: the mind is left free to process new data and get on to still more data. In a complex, changing culture, where the mind must process - not store - data, this is an indispensable asset.

But in preliterate cultures, where experience is often limited by geography & limited even more by culture, that culture is presented to its members as clichés, repeated over & over with only slight variation.

The binding power of the oral tradition is very strong. We speak of such societies as "closed societies," and, to a large extent, they are. Little breaks in from without. It's not unlike osmosis where the membrane keeps in, and lets in, desirable fluids, but excludes all that threaten, all that are alien.

I once naively thought my Eskimo hosts would be fascinated to hear about the remarkable world from which I came. In fact, they showed only irritation when I talked about it. If a tubercular Eskimo is taken from his igloo & put in a sanatorium in Brandon, Manitoba, or Hamilton, Ontario, and treated there for four years, gradually being given freedom to wander about the hospital & town, when he returns home, it's unlikely he will ever mention a single thing he witnessed or learned. The outside world is uncertain, dangerous, hostile - above all, alien, untranslatable.

Look at the content of European folksongs. What happens to the person when he leaves his village & valley? He drowns at sea or is hung as a highwayman or abandoned by a false lover or wanders alone through a hostile landscape. The message is clear: nothing good lies outside. The tribe may be small, the village smaller, but, like the child's world, it's complete. It contains enough ambitions & passions to fill the hollow pit of human desire. There's little reason to leave. There's less reason to tolerate intruders.

Little changes within. Yet memory is never fixed & lifeless. There is always improvisation. A singer may be able to reproduce a song after hearing it only two or three times, but his reproduction is never exact, nor are his later renderings always alike. He is free to improvise, never twice rendering the song exactly the same, as long as he never violates its grammar. What he faithfully reproduces, with absolute fidelity, is its underlying structure, that unseen grammar that determines its form & sets its style. We might compare it to learning a 5-times table: one can improvise indefinitely as long as one remains obedient to its rules. The whole point is not to memorize patterns, but to understand rules determining these patterns.

In New Guinea, in a remote native school taught by a local teacher, I watched a class carefully copy an arithmetic lesson from the blackboard. The teacher had written:

4+1=7
3-5=6
2+5=9

The students copied both his beautifully formed numerals & his errors. They were graded on their success in exact reproduction. The difficulty, of course, wasn't merely that the memorized lessons lacked coherency & use, but that one couldn't go beyond them & improvise.

When I speak of my 5-times table, I don't mean mine to do with as I like, but mine as long as I am obedient to it. Artists & musicians may not be as conscious as mathematicians of the underlying rules that govern their fields, perhaps because these rules are not as explicit, but the rules of art & music are nevertheless there and the successful artist or musician obeys them. Obedience frees him to improvise, to play, to become involved creatively, repeating, repeating, repeating with endless variations.

This repeat/repeat of cliché may be the key to memory. There is a vital difference between variations which maintain the freshness of a style and changes which destroy & replace that style. Native art is often startlingly original to us, but in its own context, it is to the highest degree conservative & familiar. When we reproduce this art in books & this music on records, we usually edit it sharply. We delete what is repetitious, since it bores us, in favor of variety, which entertains us. But the originals themselves are highly repetitious. Their recitation provides a tribal beat, a common pulse, to which the group collectively responds.

Preliterate art is not unlike modern advertising, much of which is sung & all of which is highly repetitious. Advertising isn't designed to train perception & awareness, but rather to insist that consumers merge with images & products.

Such art isn't personal. It doesn't reflect the private point of view of an innovator. It's a corporate statement by a group. It's a public celebration. It lives within each member through memory, participation & improvisation.

In contrast, art involving a single sense & expressing a private view exists outside of the observer, in libraries & galleries where it can be studied.

Maurice Wilkins writes: "Art, higher learning, politics, economics - none of these activities today is properly related to human needs: all are fragmented. Like science, art has become remote from living: it is not, as ... in primitive societies, an integral part of our culture, existing in all aspects of life, in everyday matters, in religion. Art has become separate and specialized, understood only by a minority, segregated in galleries, museums and concert halls, and, like science, exploited for political and commercial ends."