Cal Newport vs Zettelkasten – SAD! (Clickbait) by [[Sascha Fast]] on 2024-11-28

The difference between what you work out using the Zettelkasten and the memory palace technique is that the memory palace is a pure memory technique. It uses meaningless connections [emphasis added] and the way the brain works to gain access to information. For example, if I mentally write the date Rome was founded with the mnemonic “BC 753 Rome came to be” as a number on an egg in the kitchen fridge, the only reason for this link between the egg in the kitchen fridge of my memory palace and the year Rome was founded is that I can remember this number.

Certainly not an attack against him, but I feel as if Sascha is making an analogistic reference to areas of mnemonics he's heard about, but hasn't actively practiced. As a result, some may come away with a misunderstanding of these practices. Even worse, they may be dissuaded from combining a more specific set of mnemonic practices with their zettelkasten practice which can provide them with even stronger memories of the ideas hiding within their zettelkasten.

There is a mistaken conflation of two different mnemonic techniques being described here. The memory palace portion associates information with well known locations which leverages our brains' ability to more easily remember places and things in them with relation to each other. There is nothing of meaningless connections here. The method works precisely because meaning is created and attributed to the association. It becomes a thing in a specific well known place to the user which provides the necessary association for our memory.

The second mnemonic technique at play is the separate, unmentioned, and misconstrued Major System (or possibly the related Person-Action-Object method) which associates the number with a visualizable object. While there is a seeming meaningless connection here, the underlying connection is all about meaning by design. The number is "translated" from something harder to remember into an object which is far easier to remember. This initial translation is more direct than one from a word in one language to another because it can be logically generated every time and thus gives a specific meaning to an otherwise more-difficult-to-remember number. As part of the practice this object is then given additional attributes (size, smell, taste, touch, etc., or ridiculous proportion or attributes like extreme violence or relationships to sex) which serve to make it even more memorable. Sascha seems break this more standard mnemonic practice by simply writing his number on the egg in the refrigerator rather than associate 753 with a more memorable object like a "golem" which might be incubating inside of my precious egg. As a result, the egg and 753 association IS meaningless to him, and I would posit will be incredibly more difficult for him to remember tomorrow much less next month. If we make the translation of 753 more visible in Sascha's process, we're more likely to see the meaning and the benefit of the mnemonic. (I can only guess that Sascha doesn't practice these techniques, so won't fault him for missing some steps, particularly given the ways in which the memory palace is viewed in the zeitgeist.)

To say that the number and the golem (here, the object which 753 was translated to—the Major System mnemonic portion) have no association is akin to saying that "zettlekasten" has no associated meaning to the words "slip box." In both translations the words/numbers are exactly the same thing. The second mnemonic is associating the golem to the egg in the refrigerator (the memory palace portion). I suspect that if you've been following along and imagining Andy Serkis gestating inside of an egg to become Golem who will go on to fight in the Roman Coliseum in your refrigerator, you're going to see Golem every time you reach for an egg in your refrigerator. Now if you've spent the ten minutes to learn the Major System to do the reverse translation, you'll think about the founding date of Rome every time you go to make an omelette. And if you haven't, then you'll just imagine the most pitiful gladiator loosing in the arena against a vicious tiger.

Naturally one can associate all their thoughts in their ZK to both the associated numbers and their home, work, or neighborhood environments so that they can mentally take their (analog or digital) zettlekasten with them anywhere they go. This is akin to what Thomas Aquinus and Raymond Llull were doing with their "knowledge management systems", though theirs may have had slightly simpler forms. Llull actually created a system which allowed him to more easily meditate on his stored memories and juxtapose them to create new ideas.

For the beginners in these areas who'd like to know more, I recommend the following as a good starting place: <br /> Kelly, Lynne. Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory Using the Most Powerful Methods from around the World. Pegasus Books, 2019.

Gregor von Feinaigle by [[Art of Memory]] wiki

Origin of finagle? Long-standing question for me, but only bookmarking now.

Chapeau! Een Belgische website kaart dit aan in de context gezond leven.

Class 2, Does Memory Matter? Why Are Universities Studying Slavery and Their Pasts? by David Blight for [[YaleCourses]]

The Office S4.E8 The Deposition, Nov 15, 2007<br /> https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1031476/

Michael is put in an awkward position when Jan sues Dunder Mifflin for wrongful termination and he is deposed as a witness.

Jan: Remember, it's not just a pattern. It's a pattern of disrespect and inappropriate behaviors.

Michael "Dis-ray." My friend Dis Ray got new specs. Dis Ray Spect. My friend In-A-Pro drives a Prius with his behind neighbor.

Jan: Does this work for you?

Michael: Yep.

Michael Scott makes up some truly incredible (bad) mnemonics to try to memorize specific phrases for a deposition.

Interesting to see a mention of Alphonse Loisette here!

But also nice to see the concept of linking ideas and association (associative memory) pop up here in the context of note making, writing, and creating card systems.

One ought to ask what purpose this Rhyme serves?

• Providing emphasis of the material in the chapter;
• scaffolding for hanging the rest of the material of the book upon, and
• potentially meant to be memorized as a sort of outline of the book and the material.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Miles

Interesting. This is a general problem with historical movies. There is almost no such thing as objectivity. By making a movie, you make choices, you select what makes the cut and what doesn't. and by doing so, you form a certain image of the prophet, in this case. The free personal impressions of Majid are in fact a way to represent a certain image of Muhammad.

From what I have read, Majid is blamed for putting forward a Shi'ite Muhammed forward in the movie. Perhaps his free personal impressions are expressed in this regard?

6th club

fifth club

juventus awards with ronaldo

fourth ballon dor

helped madrid win its 11th champions league title

ballon dor award

ronaldos third club and how much he is making

one of his big awards

ronaldos best season and awards during that year

his next team after sporting

key details about ronaldo

his football position

his journey till he made it pro

fun fact about ronaldo that would be important

important information about ronaldo and some basic details

https://web.archive.org/web/20240923070540/https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(24)00421-8/fulltext

(Even mild) covid cases are associated with persistent cognitive damage. Empirical data from 2021/2022. Largest diff between measured groups wrt memory and executive functions. No volunteers self-reported cognitive symptoms. Iow covid is associated with cognitive damage, but you won't notice yourself.

Trender et al 2024.

Paper TrenderChangesMemoryCognition2024 in Zotero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avishai_Margalit

If true, this means that the active destruction of memory ought to further splinter the Republican party in the Trump-era (2016- ?).

thank goodness I'm not the only one to see this... surely there must be some overlap in scholarship here. But where is it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieu_de_m%C3%A9moire

This feels like it's tangential to memory palaces, but I'll have to read more of Nora to discern if he had any experience here or if he's simply stumbled upon a related idea, but one which wasn't taken to it's logical extreme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Nora

Lynne Kelly: Modern memory, ancient methods by [[Lynne Kelly]]

Dash is right here. Smell, and in Enschede's case the shockwave too. The shockwave going through your body was the dividing line between those who were there that day and those who weren't. It was and is a clear tell 24 yrs on.

When I stood at ground zero a few weeks after, the smell is what made me cry then. It catapulted me suddenly back to the explosions in my home town a year before. That a smell could so abruptly and vividly surface those emotions took me by suprise.

(~19:20)

According to Huberman, there is a positive causal relationship between caffeine and reduced reaction time, increasing both speed and accuracy of recall. Thus useful to take in a certain amount of caffeine 30-60 minutes before an important exam or test.

for - adjacency - DNA - as an engram - as a memory - Micheal Levin

adjacency - between - DNA - as an engram - as a memory - adjacency relationship - Very interesting n way to see DNA

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/favorite-quotes-phrases-related-to-memory/83484/18

The 2023 Rover Typewriter: Worst Machine Ever? by [[Typewriter Chicago]]

I know Michaels was carrying the We R Memory Keepers typewriter, but hadn't heard about Home Depot carrying them.

To be fair, for the picture argument... When you have seen a person only once it's more likely you remember their name, not their face. Additionally, if you have not seen someone for a very very long time the same is true.

I get the sentiment though and I agree.

Nishant Kasibhatla memorizes a 30 digit "random" number at the beginning of the video and recalls it correctly, in reverse, at the end of the video.

He uses number visualization of combinations to do this. (every 2 digit number has an image in his mind that he has practiced substantially in relation)... Similar to Mind Palace.

He did make a few mistakes in the normal recall at the beginning... But it is safe to assume that he did it on purpose (for what reason I do not know), because he has a lot of expertise in it.

Theatres of Memory (1994) sounds like it's taking lots of examples from a zettelkasten and tying them together.

It's also interesting to note that he published several books posthumously. Was this accomplished in part due to his zettelkasten notes the way others like Ludwig Wittgenstein?

Indeed. But testing in general, as it is done currently, in modern formal education, discourages deep learning as opposed to shallow learning.

Why? Because tests with marks implore students to start learning at max 3 days before the test, thus getting knowledge into short-term memory and not long term memory. Rendering the process of learning virtually useless even though they "pass" the curriculum.

I know this because I was such a student, and saw it all around me with virtually every other student I met, and I was in HAVO, a level not considered "low".

It does not help that teachers, or the system, expect students to know how to learn (efficiently) without it ever being taught to them.

My message to the system: start teaching students how to learn the moment they enter high school

Memory is the soul. Memory is identity.

Identity is determined by memory, for without our memory, we become mere husks.

Lawrence Levine<br /> The Opening of the American Mind (1996)<br /> note the coverage of "how our memory should function"

for - neuroscience - zebrafish memory experiment

I think context-switching helps a lot as it makes it more challenging to retrieve, thus making stronger neural connections

Short term memory vs Long-term memory

One easy example that comes to my mind is studying for exams vs studying for changing worldview

we need: * critical thinking * better analytical skills

I need to read this book. And re-review this video with a notecard handy. (I wonder if there's a way to use hypothes.is for notes on video/audio?)

I appreciate the space for an oral perspective here in a book from1911.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWVrz5oCt2w<br /> The meaning of Hand Gestures in Art History<br /> Amuze Art Lectures

Middle and ring fingers together to represent modesty. (He doesn't say it, but it also could stand for "M" as in Medici??)

Finger pointing at viewer may indicate a self portrait.

Woman's hand on abdomen may represent pregnancy, a fertile marriage, or the desire to bear children.

quoted section from:<br /> [au moyen âge, on lit généralement en pronançant avec les lèvres, au moins à voix basse, par conséquent en entendant les phrases que les yeux voient.] Jean Leclercq, Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge, 2nd edn (Paris: Cerf, 1963), p. 72.

What connection, if any, is there to the muscle memory of movement while speaking/reading along with sound/hearing to remembering what we read? Is there research on this? Implications for orality and memory?

While Adler may say that a text could be cleverer than you are (is this a direct quote? reference if so), there is an associative nature to our thinking by which one can read further into a text than anything which is actually present. Did the author really mean to "say" the additional associative material? Was it in their lived experience to make such tangential references which associate things in your mind as well?

One ought to be careful that an author can only mean something so far, unless one has much more experience with their additional works and context. If it's not there, does it really exist? Did they mean it?

These associative tricks are what can make texts much richer and deeper than they may have claim to be. Though this doesn't mean that they aren't good "conversation partners."

compare this with doubletalk and https://boffosocko.com/2016/09/30/complexity-isnt-a-vice-10-word-answers-and-doubletalk-in-election-2016/

This underlies the ideas of songlines and oral mnemonic practices and is related to Vannevar Bush's "associative trails" in As We May Think.

Luhmann, Niklas. “ZK II Zettel 9/8b.” Niklas Luhmann-Archiv, undated. https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8b_V.

for - key insight - multicellularity - memory wiping

• key insight
  • individuals have information in their memories about survival
  • when they merge and join, they pool their information and you can't tell whose memories came from whom initially
  • this memory wiping is a key aspect of multcellularity

investigate - salience of memory wiping for multicellularity - This is a very important biological behavior. - Perform a literature review to understand examples of this

question - biological memory wiping - can it be extrapolated to social superorganism?

https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-recording-1-f/

Gilles Deleuze: The ABC Primer / Recording 1 - A to F<br /> DECEMBER 15, 1988

I'm definitely not like this and suspect that most people are not either.

Wells attempts in this essay to help mankind "pull it's mind together" for the betterment of people and the planet. How is this supposed to happen in a modern media environment which is designed to pull our minds apart as rapidly as possible?

How might the strength of capitalism be leveraged to push people back toward a common middle rather than split them apart?

is this from Ognjen Amidzic's research on chess and memory?

Ted Nelson felt visible connections between text were the most important part of his Xanadu project.

There are close parallels between these in digital spaces and songlines and related orality based mnemonic techniques.

reply to u/chiefkeif at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/18fjaya/new_member_here_is_zettelkasten_the_right_method/

Some of your root issues may be addressed directly by engaging with by spaced repetition systems (for improving memory recall: try Anki, Mnemosyne, et al.) as well as mnemonic systems (memory palaces, the major system, etc.). Given that a Zettelkasten can be an instantiation of both of these simultaneously, you may find benefits for using it in such a setting. This being said, you may be better off with either one or both of the more proximal solutions with a zettelkasten being somewhat more distal for your specific needs.

Cevolini seems to be saying that it was an innovation of Harrison's Ark of Studies that it served as a second memory.

Surely my translation is "off" as the use of a variety of notes and writing long prior to this were used in this way.

[[Jorge Arango]] interviews Veronica Erb on Annotating Books

Anecdotal evidence that dyslexia has an overlap with creating links to see a "bigger picture"

• for: quote - Michael Levin, quote - MET of individuality, quote - memory wipe, quote - cancer therapy - MET of individuality

• quote: Michael Levin

  • this is a cancer approach that we work on which is to not to kill those cells but to force them to re reconnect to their neighbors and when they reconnect to the neighbors they once again become part of the collective that's working on making nice skin nice muscle they stop being metastatic and they they go back

• comment

  • Michael refers to cancer as a "memory wipe" where they have forgotten the normative programmed narrative of bodily / collective / multicellular unity

Something fascinating here with respect to orality and associative memory in ancient texts at the border of literacy.

What do others have to say about the use of "key words" with respect to storytelling and orality with respect to associative memory.

The highlighted portion is an interesting example.

What do other examples look like? How common might they be? What ought we call them?

So much to unpack here...

What is the full list of types of links?

There are (associative) links created by the author (of an HTML document) as well as associative (and sometimes unwritten) mental links which may be suggested by either the context of a piece and the author's memory.

There are the links made by the reader as they think or actively analyze the piece they're reading. They may make these explicit in their own note taking or even more strongly explicit with tools like Hypothes.is which make these links visible to others.

tacit/explicit<br /> suggested mentally / directly written or made<br /> made by writer / made by reader<br /> others?

lay these out in a grid by type, creator, modality (paper, online, written/spoken and read/heard, other)

More toward the notes in the video themselves (I'm more in media studies and far less conversant in theater studies): from my own zettelkasten on the live nature/immediacy of performance subject, I've seen how some older cultures (ancient Greeks and all sorts of Indigenous peoples, including modern Australian indigenous) use(d) their associative memories in ways we don't generally today, and as such would have been able to "re-live" performances which have occurred in the past without modern recording tools. Perhaps it's been explored previously, but if it's of interest to you and your current work or perhaps post-Ph.D., Lynne Kelly's Knowledge & Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge, 2015) may be helpful along with the supporting works of Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and Walter J. Ong (esp. Orality and Literacy; Methuen, 1982). If you really want to spelunk this area, there are some additional explorations of these in the overlap of Frances Yates' (1966) discussion of memory theaters in Western culture.

Robert Kanigel's "Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry (Knopf, 2021), may provide a quick/fun (audiobook available) non-technical introduction into Milman's work on Homer for those who haven't come across it before and are interested in early performance techniques. It provides an intriguing and entertaining detective story on multiple fronts.

As ever, thanks for sharing your notes and the fascinating references within them... 🗃❤

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrN0kaE6DkY<br /> Is The Zettelkasten Method Really The Best Personal Knowledge Management System? by Anthony Metivier

meh...

In neighboring cultures in which both have oral practices relating to massebah, one is not just destroying "sacred stones" to stamp out their religion, but it's also destroying their culture and cultural memory as well as likely their laws and other valuable memories for the function of their society.

View this in light also of the people of Israel keeping their own sacred stones (Hosea 10:1) as well as the destruction of pillars dedicated to Baal in 2 Kings 18:4 and 2 Kings 23:14.

(Link and) Compare this to the British fencing off the land in Australia and thereby destroying Songlines and access to them and the impact this had on Indigenous Australians.

It's also somewhat similar to the colonialization activity of stamping out of Indigenous Americans and First Nations' language in North America, though the decimation of their language wasn't viewed in as reciprocal way as it might be viewed now. (Did colonizers of the time know about the tremendous damage of language destruction, or was it just a power over function?)

Use of massebah for remembrance of a name...

Potentially used for other factors? translation? context?

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/oqgH4mx9Ee68_dMgihgD0A (Rachel's massebah in Genesis 35:19-20)

Relationship to the first two commandments against worshiping other gods and the use of idols?

How does this relate to the standing stone found in the room at Khirbet Qeiyafa from the time of David?

Dates of this text with respect to Khirbet Keiyafa?

Description of the arrangement? Circle? Further or suggested usage?

Link to Genesis 28:18: https://hypothes.is/a/NF5p8Gx6Ee65Rg_J4tfaMQ

Metropolitan State University of Denver. “Writing as a Thinking Tool,” June 17, 2021. https://www.msudenver.edu/writing-center/faculty-resources/writing-as-a-thinking-tool/.

Jerry Michalski says that The Brain provides him with a "neighborhood perspective" of ideas when he reduces the external link number for his graph down to 1.

This is similar to Nicholas Luhmann's zettelkasten which provided neighborhoods of related notes based on distance from any particular note.

Also similar to oral cultures who relied on movement through their environment for encoding memories and later remembering them. [I'll use the tag "environmental memory" to track this until a better name comes along.]

Hamacher, Duane, Patrick Nunn, Michelle Gantevoort, Rebe Taylor, Greg Lehman, Ka Hei Andrew Law, and Mel Miles. “The Archaeology of Orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal Oral Traditions to the Late Pleistocene.” Journal of Archaeological Science, August 10, 2023, 45pp.

Pre-print.

See also: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000997

Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:d4ccd0952073ac59932f4638381e6b69

Popular press coverage: https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/august/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives

Zweitgedächtnis, the German Word for secondary memory, might also have been translated as "second brain" and thus the root of this word in the note taking space.

ref: https://hyp.is/hV9LKm71Eeq9s_f_oWRkEg/takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html

Originally 2021-12-31 at https://hypothes.is/a/3tjzWGqjEeyDSae3OLOEWw

https://zh.m.wikisource.org/zh-hans/%E8%A5%BF%E5%9C%8B%E8%A8%98%E6%B3%95

The difficult thing to pick apart here is the writer's intention and the reader's reception and base of knowledge.

In particular a lot of imaginative literature is based on having a common level of shared context to get a potentially wider set of references and implied meanings which are almost never apparent in a surface reading. As a result literature may use phrases from other unmentioned sources which the author has read/knows, but which the reader is unaware. Those who read Western literature without any grounding in the stories within the Bible will often obviously be left out of the conversation which is happening, but which they won't know exists.

Indigenous knowledge bases have this same feature despite the fact that they're based on orality instead of literacy.

a second use of "mental card catalogue", though somehow he doesn't seem to realize the inherent value for building knowledge... ?

https://github.com/ContextLab/human-memory

better to use Go1.18 versions to avoid these limitations

interesting so if data is small, it is managed by the cpu registers by the compiler, stack is not used

https://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/zettelkasten/

I'd found this page through general search and then a few days later someone from Metivier's "team" (an SEO hire likely) emailed me to link to it from a random zk page on my own site (not a great one).

Metivier seems to have come to ZK from the PKM space (via a podcast I listened to perhaps?). This page isn't horrible, but seems to benefit greatly from details I've added to the Wikipedia page over the past few years.

Taixu seems to have claimed that, on awakening (if we describe his experiences as such), his capacity for memorization deteriorated?

(But maybe he just lost interest in memorization/didn't dedicate as much time to it afterwards?)

It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

reply to u/drogers8 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/14ot4na/inserting_a_maincards_with_lack_of_memory/

I would submit that your first sentence is wildly false.

What topic(s) cover your newly made cards? Look those up in your index and find where those potentially related cards are (whether you remember them or not). Go to that top level card listed in your index and see what's there or in the section of cards that come after it. Find the best card in that branch and file your new card(s) as appropriate. If necessary, cross-index them with sub-topics in your index to make them more findable in the future. If you don't find one or more of those topics in your index, then create a new branch and start an index entry for one or more of those terms. (You'll find yourself making lots of index entries to start, but it will eventually slow down—though it shouldn't stop—as your collection grows.)

Ideally, with regular use, you'll likely remember more and more, especially for active areas you're really interested in. However, take comfort that the system is designed to let you forget everything! This forgetting will actually help create future surprise as well as serendipity that will actually be beneficial for potentially generating new ideas as you use (and review) your notes.

And if you don't believe me, consider that Alberto Cevolini edited an entire book, broadly about these techniques—including an entire chapter on Luhmann—, which he aptly named Forgetting Machines!

Learning happens when we add memory to thinking. So, thinking precedes learning, and is fundamental to learning.

note to self: is thinking required for memory?

Mini memory course

How to learn the art of memory (quick)

This seems to represent the cycle of life, that the old will make place for the new, and will be forgotten or remembered. The new comes, trying to make inroads, and tries to be remembered? (work on this further...)

The high sea opens up new possibilities of connecting. This passage of the chapter follows a moment of solid and fixed textual memory. After managing the recitation of two terzine from Inferno 26 that initiate the encounter with Ulysses, Levi indicates his frustration at his inability to translate, but also points to Jean’s ability to connect from afar, from a cultural and linguistic remove. Then a gap in memory, a struggle to recall. Half phrases finally crystallise in a well-remembered line, ‘Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto’ (Inf. 26, 110). This line first prompts Levi to play the role of teacher, explaining to Jean how ‘misi me’ is not the same as the French ‘je me mis,’ but rather something bolder (see also this annotation). In doing so, in envisioning the liberatory potential of breaking a boundary, a chain, putting oneself beyond a barrier, Levi sees a precious and telling connection between himself and Pikolo: ‘noi conosciamo bene questo impulso’. There is a flattening of difference here, a forging of a bond between two men that stretches across the Mediterranean, across a linguistic and poetic divide. Levi is no longer explaining, translating, teaching; instead, they have found a connection in seeking to go beyond, to break out and be free.

Importantly, this oceanic connection privileges Jean’s experience over Primo’s technical knowledge. It is by no means the same as the disdain for intellectuals shown by Alex at the beginning of the chapter. Rather, this emphasis on Pikolo’s experience - ‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire…’ - is a way to privilege what might be gained through the perspective of the cultural outsider. Jean has been on the sea; he apparently knows what Primo describes as that feeling of freedom when there is nothing left but the aroma of the ocean. Has Primo not had that? (Perhaps only in the pages of books, by Salgari, Conrad?) Is he thus able to have a wholly different, more potent experience of Inferno 26 as a result of this ‘non-native’ reading? Earlier in the chapter, the ‘leggero odore’ of paint and tar have - strangely, almost paradoxically - brought to Levi’s mind ‘qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’, but this is of another order. Primo’s experience seems to have been shore-bound; Jean has truly sailed.

Because Pikolo knows (and the use of ‘sapere’ is telling here, in contrast to the ‘canoscenza’ of Ulysses’ dictum to follow), Primo can convey with both precision and lyricism that mode of apprehension and feeling of emancipation: ‘è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare’. He is envisioning and embodying the possibilities of freedom, of being unbound and certainly not being inundated by odours of a very different kind, such as the paint and tar evoked earlier. The image of the horizon closing in on itself stands in stark contrast to the end of both Dante’s Inferno 26 and the end of this chapter, when it is the sea that closes over Ulysses and his companions, and - by implication and association - over Primo and Jean once more as well. The use of the verb ‘rinchiudere’ in that final moment is also striking, almost as if to imply that there are moments such as this one that open out to the world at large but there is the inevitable return to the horror of the camp that once more closes over them. Here, though, the sea is freedom: it is a simple, straight line of the horizon that connects these individuals together in their desire to escape.

In that exquisite, bittersweet phrase ‘dolci cose ferocemente lontane,’ there is something not just Ulyssean (‘né dolcezza di figlio…’), not just hybrid (‘dulcis’ and ‘ferox’ together, which also resonates with the ‘viver come bruti’ to come), but also a channeling of Purgatorio. One might think in particular of the opening of Purgatorio 8: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio | ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core | lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio…’. Here, too, the sweet memory of things left behind is made bitter by their absence and separation across the sea. Such a way of thinking Ulysses and the ocean voyage across the Commedia is almost a banality; it nonetheless serves to give us some impetus to thinking about Levi as a reader of not just Inferno, but of other parts of the poem as well.

And it serves to have us perhaps think about this powerful moment of Mediterranean connectivity a little differently, to take that insight of valorising Jean’s non-native perspective out to the world at large. In his 1990 work Poetics of Relation, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant espouses Relation as a means to connect globally and valorise the multilingual, multicultural nature of the Caribbean as a model for global culture that is rhizomatic and not tied to a single, Western line of becoming. Glissant sees the Mediterranean as an enclosed sea, ‘a sea that concentrates’, while the Caribbean is ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts’. In this moment of SQ, I wonder if we might find the Caribbean model as one that resonates more with the Primo-Jean dynamic, as Jean’s experience of the open sea asks us to see Dante’s text as one that is not enclosed but rather must be opened up to the global reader. Indeed, Glissant himself characterises Dante’s Commedia as a work that is committed to cultural mixing, dwelling on how ‘one of the greatest monuments of Christian universalisation stresses the filiation shared by ancient myths and the new religion linking both to the creation of the world’. Perhaps this moment of connection, of seeing the liberatory possibilities in the open sea that beckons, is not just a way to palpably feel the strength of Primo and Jean’s new bond, but also to urge us as global readers to embrace the diffractive, rhizomatic potential of a decolonised Dante.

AK

My reflections here build on Lino Pertile’s 2010 essay, ‘L’inferno, il lager, la poesia’. Pertile notes the profound correspondence between the opening poem of the book (OC I, 139) and this chapter. He points out how the main theme of Levi’s book, the dehumanising experience in the Lager, based on the annihilation of people’s identity, is expressed in the poem and resurfaces explicitly again in the chapter dedicated to Dante’s Ulysses. The key term revealing the correspondence of themes and intentions is ‘Considerate [consider]’, used twice in Levi’s poem (‘Consider if this is a man | … | Consider if this is a woman’) and rooted in the memory of Dante’s famous tercet where Ulysses addresses his crew as they sail towards the horizon of their last journey beyond the pillars of Hercules: ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’ (Inf. 26, 118-20 and OC I, 228).

There are many other correspondences between the chapter of Ulysses and the opening poem, besides the ‘Considerate’, and that they are profound and filtered through the theme of memory, an eminently Dantean theme: the urgency to fix in the memory itself what is or will be necessary to tell, or the urgency to express and recount what is deposited in memory. Indeed, for Levi, the memory of each individual person contains that person’s humanity.

Memory is immediately activated as Primo and Jean exit the underground gas tank (‘He [Jean] climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the brightness of the day. It was warm [tiepido] outside; the sun drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth that made me think of [mi ricordava] a summer beach of my childhood'). Temporarily escaping hell by means of a ladder (a sort of Dantesque ‘natural burella’), it is the tiepido sun and a characteristic smell that evoke the childhood memory and that at the same time the reader cannot avoid connecting to the tiepide case of the initial poem (‘You who live safe | in your heated houses [tiepide case]’ [my emphasis]). It is then around the memory ‘of our homes, of Strasbourg and Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied, of our mothers’ that another theme in the chapter coalesces, the theme of friendship (‘He and I had been friends for a week’), a theme that had already emerged in a more general connotation in the opening poem (‘visi amici’). Warmth, friendship (visi amici…Jean), the kitchens as destination for Primo and Jean’s walk (the walk from the tank with the empty pot is ‘the ever welcomed opportunity of getting near the kitchens’, not for that hot food [cibo caldo] evoked in the poem, but for the soup of the camp, an alienating incarnation of Dantesque ‘pane altrui’ whose various names are dissonant). During the respite of the one hour walk from the tank to the kitchens, the intermittent memory of Dante’s canto emerges as if from an underground consciousness, the memory of Inferno as a partial and imperfect mirror of the human condition in the Lager, Ulysses as poetic memory, a sudden epiphany of a semenza, a seed, of humanity that the Lager is made to suppress, and Primo’s wondering in the face of this sudden internal revelation of still possessing an intact humanity. Primo’s memory of his home resurfaces as if springing from the memory of Dante’s text: the ‘montagna bruna’ of Purgatory is reflected in the memory of ‘my mountains, which would appear in the evening dusk [nel bruno della sera] when I returned from Milan to Turin!' But the real, familiar landscape is too heartbreaking a memory of ‘sweet things cruelly distant’, one of those hurtful thoughts, ‘things one thinks but does not say’. There is an epiphanic memory then, the poetic memory that surfaces during the walk and that reveals to Primo that he still is a man, a memory to which he clings despite the sense of his own audacity (‘us two, who dare to talk about these things with the soup poles on our shoulders’); there is also a more intimate memory, equally pulsating with life and humanity - but dangerous, because it makes Primo vulnerable to despair, threatening his own survival in the camp.

The urgent need to remember Dante’s verses in this chapter develops the theme of memory, which has been central from the opening poem. In Levi’s poem, though, memory is perceived from a different angle: the readers (who live safe…) must honour that memory and transmit it as an imperative testimony of what happened in the concentration camp from generation to generation, testifying to the suffering of the man and the woman ‘considered’ in the poem. This is a memory to be carved in one’s heart, which must accompany those who receive it in every action and in every moment of each day like a prayer. Not coincidentally the poem follows the text of the most fundamental prayer of Judaism, the Shemà Israel, which is read twice a day, a memory to be passed on to one’s own children, a responsibility which is a sign of one’s humanity. The commandment to remember of the opening poem (‘I consign these words to you. | Carve them into your hearts') issues a potential curse to the reader, threatening the destruction of what most fundamentally characterises their humanity - home, health, children: ‘Or may your house fall down, | May illness make you helpless, | And your children turn their eyes from you’. Finally, Primo’s act of remembering during the walk to the kitchens is submerged by the Babelic soup (‘Kraut und Rüben…cavoli e rape…Choux et navets…Kàposzta és répak…Until the sea again closed – over us’) and yet the memory of it becomes part of his testimony in such a central chapter of the book written after surviving the Shoah. If the memory of Dante’s verses contributed to Primo’s faith in his own humanity and his psychological and physical survival in the camp, he then accomplishes the commandment of memory and his responsibility as a man through his own writing.

CS

Despite this and other gaps in his recall, Levi actually succeeds in reconstructing just under half of Dante’s narrative of the encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26, wholly or almost wholly recalling (a notable) 26 out of 58 verses (24 complete verses, two partial) - and with remarkable accuracy.

The verses shown in bold below from Inferno 26 (85-142) are the ones Levi remembers. To explore this comparison for yourself, jump to the Dante tab.

KP

The subject of mothers arises often in the conversations between prisoners in SQ. When Schlome questions Levi in the chapter ‘Sul fondo,’ he asks 'Dove tua madre?' (OC I, 156) Standing in the long-awaited sunshine in ‘Una buona giornata,’ the teenager Sigi ‘[a]veva cominciato col parlare della sua casa di Vienna e di sua madre’ (OC I, 195), and Levi tells us that, in this moment of relative peace, he and the other prisoners likewise ‘siamo capaci di pensare alle nostre madri e alle nostre mogli, il che di solito non accade’ (OC I, 197).

These references to mothers are likely to remind us of the mothers who were deported to the Lager, whom Levi describes in the chapter ‘Il viaggio’:

Ognuno si congedò dalla vita nel modo che più gli si addiceva. Alcuni pregarono, altri bevvero oltre misura, altri si inebriarono di nefanda ultima passione. Ma le madri vegliarono a preparare con dolce cura il cibo per il viaggio, e lavarono i bambini, e fecero i bagagli, ed all’alba i fili spinati erano pieni di biancheria infantile stesa al vento ad asciugare; e non dimenticarono le fasce, e i giocattoli, e i cuscini, e le cento piccole cose che esse ben sanno, e di cui i bambini hanno in ogni caso bisogno. Non fareste anche voi altrettanto? Se dovessero uccidervi domani col vostro bambino, voi non gli dareste oggi da mangiare? (OC I, 143).

This affecting passage - the first instance, after the introductory poem in which Levi confronts the reader directly, demanding that we place ourselves in the position of the prisoners - enacts a human connection intimately related to the bond that Levi and Jean share in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’.

CLL

Memories of childhood always send a pang through the heart. Not because they are sad. Perhaps they are, but the pang can be deeper when they are good, for they tell us of what is utterly lost and are thus redolent of our relentless passage through time, projected as we are towards death with, so it seems, an increasing rapidity as we get older. Levi passes quickly over this moment of thought of his infancy. But it sets the tone for ‘Il canto di Ulisse’: the tone of something utterly lost and yet completely present. The childhood beach with its peculiar smell of paint and tar is wholly past and yet it is Levi, here, now. In this moment it is everything he is. Just so, the canto is utterly gone, belonging to a different life, the life Levi had before Auschwitz, and yet is here, now, making him this particular individual man with this burden of identity. He is freighted with the memory of the beach as he is with the memory of those lines from Dante.

When I was a child, I was sometimes taken in the summer in my parents’ car to one of the few sandy beaches near to where I grew up. The car park was behind the dunes and was itself a vast expanse of coarse grass worn flat and of impacted sand. The smell of that beach was the smell of the grass and sand mingled with that of the hot interior of the car, leather and metal warmed through, the bench seat offering to my child’s body a kind of place of perfect rest, long enough for me to stretch out on it to warm myself after the coldness of the sea. For me, leather and metal are what paint and tar were to Levi: the odours of these at the beach, suffused with the smell of hot sand.

I cannot think of those odours and all they bring back to me of my childhood without pain, intense but somehow delicious in its melancholy. This is all lost but it is mine and no-one else’s, giving me an acute sense of my individuality. I grasp that Levi had the same sense in remembering that smell of paint and tar from his childhood, even in this dark place. This is why he needs to mention it; this is why he passes over it so rapidly. It is everything and nothing; it is painful and sweetly delicious. This experience of the memory of the beach, surging up out of the nowhere of the camp, is at one with the eruption in Levi’s mind of the canto from Dante. Not everyone can read Dante. But everyone knows of these odours of childhood. Levi is saying: somewhere in this nightmare, in this hell created by some human beings to torture other human beings, there is someone else who, perhaps deprived of culture and learning, ill-educated and uninterested in books, nonetheless has a feeling for his or her childhood as I do for mine. I move from that to Dante; this other person will not. No matter. What binds me to that other, even this side of good and evil where theft is honoured and cheating praised, in this world of remorseless self-concern for the sake of survival, is that he or she too will smell the tar and paint, or some other material, and then be joined again to a moment of childhood. There is a common fellowship after all, a fellowship forged by the fact that that other unknown person and I are both returned to our childhood in some fleeting moment that is saturated in an odour.

Levi then tries to express this in turning to Pikolo and grasping after those fragments from Dante in order to get him to understand these words of a – for Pikolo – foreign language and feel the depth of Levi’s response to Dante. But it is the beach that is at the back of that: the Dante stands proxy for a more universal feeling – that feeling that we can have, says Levi, even here, perhaps especially here, for our lost childhood.

CH

Very often, when we think about ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we tend to recall only the most famous pages in which Levi tries to remember Dante’s canto. The depth and sense of urgency of the Ulyssean passages are so overwhelming and passionate that they may distract us from other elements in the chapter. However, if we go back to the text and read it closely, we cannot avoid noticing that, after a brief opening in which Levi introduces Pikolo and narrates how he came to be Pikolo’s ‘fortunate’ chaperone to collect the soup for the day, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ also dwells quite significantly on a moment of domestic memories. While going to the kitchens, Levi writes: ‘Si vedevano i Carpazi coperti di neve. Respirai l’aria fresca, mi sentivo insolitamente leggero’. This is the first moment in the chapter in which Levi refers to the mountains as something that revitalises him and makes him feel fresh and light, both physically and mentally.

This moment foreshadows another, also in this chapter, when Levi goes back to his mountains, those close to Turin, and compares them to the mountain that the protagonist of Dante’s canto, Ulysses, encounters just before his shipwreck with his companions:

... Quando mi apparve una montagna, bruna

Per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto

Che mai veduta non ne avevo alcuna.

Sì, sì, ‘alta tanto’, non ‘molto alta’, proposizione consecutiva. E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano... le montagne... oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino! Basta, bisogna proseguire, queste sono cose che si pensano ma non si dicono. Pikolo attende e mi guarda. Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare ‘non ne avevo alcuna’ col finale.

The significance of the mountains in Levi’s narration is confirmed in this passage. For him, the mountains represent his experience of belonging, his youthful years, and his work as a chemist – the job he was doing when he commuted by train from Turin to Milan. At the same time, Levi’s own memories of the mountains intertwine and overlap with another mountain, Dante’s Mount Purgatory. Here, a deep and perhaps not fully conscious intertextual game starts to emerge and to characterise Levi’s writing. The lines that Levi does not remember are these (compare, on the Dante page):

Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto,

ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque,

e percosse del legno il primo canto.

For Dante’s Ulysses, Mount Purgatory signifies the final moment of his adventure and his desire for knowledge. The marvel and enthusiasm that Ulysses and his company feel when they see the mountain is suddenly transformed into its contrary. From the mountain, a storm originates that will destroy the ship and swallow its crew: ‘Tre volte il fe’ girar con tutte l’acque, | Alla quarta levar la poppa in suso | E la prora ire in giù, come altrui piacque’. Dante’s Mount Purgatory, so majestic and spectacular, represents the end of any desire for knowledge that aims to find new answers to and interpretations of human existence in the world without God’s word.

Going back to Levi’s text, we find that, instead, in a kind of reverse overlapping between his image and that of Ulysses, the image of the mountain of Purgatory suggests to Levi a very different set of thoughts that, although seemingly and similarly overwhelming, opens up new interpretations: ‘altro ancora, qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto, nell’intuizione di un attimo, forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. For a moment, it is almost as if Levi, a new Dantean Ulysses in a new Inferno, stands in front of Mount Purgatory and forgets the terzine and the shipwreck. Maybe Levi cannot or does not want to remember those terzine because the mountain in Purgatory represents something very different for him than for Dante’s Ulysses. Levi’s view of the mountain does not lead to a moment of recognition of sin, as it does in Dante’s Ulysses. For him, the mountain, like his mountain range, is the gateway to knowledge, enrichment, and illumination and to a world that lies beyond the imposed limits of traditional, constricting, and distorted views and that awaits discovery (‘qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto’). Something about and beyond the Lager.

To better understand how the mountains are central in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we have to remember that Levi’s view of the mountains strongly depends on his anti-Fascism, which he expressed particularly vigorously in two moments of his life: during his months in the Resistance, just before he was captured and sent to Fossoli, and, even more intensely, during the adventures of his youth, when he was a free young man who enjoyed climbing the mountains surrounding Turin. As Alberto Papuzzi has suggested, ‘le radici del suo rapporto con la montagna sono ben piantate in quella stagione più lontana: radici intellettuali di cittadino che cercava sulla montagna, nella montagna, suggestioni e risposte che non trovava nella vita, o meglio nell’atmosfera ispessita di quella vita torinese, senza passato e senza futuro’ (OC III, 426-27). Indeed, reports Papuzzi, Levi confirms that:

Avevo anche provato a quel tempo a scrivere un racconto di montagna […]. C’era tutta l’epica della montagna, e la metafisica dell’alpinismo. La montagna come chiave di tutto. Volevo rappresentare la sensazione che si prova quando si sale avendo di fronte la linea della montagna che chiude l’orizzonte: tu sali, non vedi che questa linea, non vedi altro, poi improvvisamente la valichi, ti trovi dall’altra parte, e in pochi secondi vedi un mondo nuovo, sei in un mondo nuovo. Ecco, avevo cercato di esprimere questo: il valico.

The heart of that epic story made its way into the chapter ‘Ferro’ in Il sistema periodico. The discovery of this (brave) new world, ‘mondo nuovo’, is an integral part and a direct achievement of Levi’s experience in the mountains. The mountains open a new understanding and a new perspective on the world.

Something that escapes common understanding is revealed through the experience of the mountains, both in Levi’s memories of his youth and in his literary recounting of Auschwitz. Reciting Dante in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ is therefore not only an intertextual exercise for Levi. Only by inserting Levi’s literary references in the complexity of his own experience – before, during, and after Auschwitz – can we fully capture the depth of his reflections. Levi mentally and metaphorically brought to Auschwitz not only Dante but also his ‘metafisica dell’alpinismo’. Together, they contributed to his attempt to come to terms with that reality.

‘The Canto of Ulysses’ records a truly remarkable feat of cultural memory, as Levi recalls and recites Dante amidst the ruin of Auschwitz. He does so to teach Italian to his campmate Jean. But as he recites the words of Dante, Levi also feels his past come back to him. He begins to recover something of his identity and his humanity in the degraded world of the Lager, to feel again that he is ‘a man’.

Dante is not, however, the only canonical writer to appear in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. So too does Shakespeare. <br /> Levi admits to ‘gaps’, ‘holes’, and ‘lacuna[e]’ in his memory as he recites Dante, some of which would seem to be ‘irreparable’. Unable to recall his Dante, Levi is forced to confront ‘silence’:

I would give today’s soup to know how to connect ‘the like on any day’ to the last lines. I try to reconstruct it through rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers – but it is no use, the rest is silence [il resto è silenzio]. Other verses dance in my head: ‘…The sodden ground belched wind …’, no, it is something else. [Woolf’s translation.]

‘[T]he rest is silence’: Levi is quoting the last words that are spoken by Hamlet, before he dies:

O, I die, Horatio!

The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit.

I cannot live to hear the news from England.

But I do prophesy th’election lights

On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice.

So tell him, with th’occurrents more and less

Which have solicited – the rest is silence.

With his ‘spirit’ succumbing to the ‘potent poison’ Claudius and Laertes have used to kill him, Hamlet undertakes the impossible: to testify to his own death, to ‘tell’ in words his fall into deathly silence. This is his ‘dying voice’.

What is Hamlet doing in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’? Why does Levi place it where he does, in ‘the caesura’, the abyssal gap between Auschwitz and his cultural identity and memory, embodied by Dante? It is certainly ironic that Levi draws once again on the Western canonical literary tradition to record the moment of its ostensible breakdown. What emerges from the lapse, the silence that Levi testifies to, is another tie to his compromised past, and the literary culture that would seem to have been obliterated by the Holocaust – even if Levi does not choose to bring obvious notice to his allusion by using quotation marks or by writing, ‘as Hamlet says’. The poetry of Hamlet appears to be among the ‘other verses’ Levi has confusedly ‘dancing in his head’ while he tries to fill the gaps in his memory.

By quoting Hamlet, Levi would appear to again testify to the power of literature as a mainstay of culture and humanity, evincing his commitment to humanist ideals. This is certainly the positive interpretation of Hamlet in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. I would make the case, however, that Levi is using Shakespeare for an altogether more challenging purpose. By appropriating the ‘dying voice’ of Hamlet, Levi records the place where his memory and his identity collapse, testifying to the reduction of the camp inmate to silence and oblivion. Bryan Cheyette writes that ‘even when his memory self-consciously fails him’, Levi is always ‘at pains to bear witness to those moments of failure’ (Cheyette 1999, 64). Levi seeks to testify to the silence, to show that ‘something has occurred even if it cannot be understood’ (Druker 2009, 64). This is the role played by Hamlet in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. Levi does not use the play to testify to the endurance of the human spirit in the camps, but to silence, to a ‘world of negation’ (OC I, 235). Hamlet, perhaps ironically given its near-unrivalled canonical and cultural status, marks the space beyond language and culture, into which Levi is at risk of falling. This, as Levi called it, is the ‘black hole’ of Auschwitz (OC II, 1663).

Through his allusion to Hamlet, Levi rewrites Shakespeare from the perspective of Auschwitz, endowing the play with new meanings as he confronts the lacunae and voids produced by the world of the concentration camp. Levi uses the play to record the disintegration of humane values in Auschwitz, as memory and language are brought to the point of collapse. Jacques Derrida does much the same in his own work on the play. He draws Hamlet into conversation with Holocaust testimony when he compares the play to the poetry of survivor Paul Celan in his 1995 piece ‘The Time is Out of Joint’. Derrida contends that the paradox of testimony is that the witness must uncannily ‘outlive his life’ (3.2.117) – or ‘survive’ that which is not ‘survivable’: the collapse of all meaning and death (Derrida 1995). This is the sense in which Hamlet is a play about the ‘impossible possibility of testimony’, as Derrida calls it. Hamlet has ‘seen the worst’ and is ‘the witness of the worst disorder, of absolute injustice’, writes Derrida. Hamlet has witnessed too much for words – but testimony, ‘though it hath no tongue, will speak’ (2.2.546).

Levi must also confront and testify to the painful death of memory, the destruction of human identity and culture, before the event of physical death itself – or as Jacques Lacan would call it, ‘symbolic’ before ‘actual’ death, the death of the self before physical death. Lawrence Langer uses the phrase ‘deathlife’ to name the same phenomenon, of ‘dying while one is living’ (Langer 2021, 13). Not unlike the melancholic prince, Levi attempts the impossible of testifying to his own demise. He deploys Hamlet to record his fall into a place beyond humanity and beyond culture – even beyond language. It is, to adopt the words of Jean Améry, an act of both resignation and revolt: resignation to silence, and a determined revolt against oblivion, by testifying to it. It is an astonishing moment.

RA

Giovanni Falaschi (Falaschi 2002) points out that for Levi to remember ‘compagna | Picciola’ but not the equally famous ‘orazion picciola’ is not credible. The same goes for ‘folle volo’, another almost proverbial expression. Falaschi explains this case of ‘selective memory’ as Levi fearing that these expressions might be perceived - either by Pikolo or by his readers - as diminishing or critical of Ulysses, and thus he ‘forgets’ them. However, ‘orazion picciola’ simply means ‘brief speech’, and Falaschi maintains that, while Levi certainly was aware of this, he might have wanted to avoid any confusion.

EL

The ‘hole in the memory’ that swallows up Dante’s verses and prevents Levi from sharing them with Pikolo is reminiscent of both the underground tank described at the beginning of the chapter, and the vast crater that is Dante’s hell. Visually these ‘holes’, be they real or metaphorical, are the negative cast of the mountains mentioned later in the chapter: Levi’s beloved Alps, and Ulysses’ Mount Purgatory - these, instead, bearers of positive meanings, as they respectively represent home and human ambition. (Levi’s very last newspaper article was given the title ‘Il buco nero di Auschwitz’, OC II, 1662-65.)

EL

As noted earlier, Jean Samuel’s memories of this episode are described in Il m’appelait Pikolo, pp. 39-40. Consider, for example, this sentence: ‘Encore maintenant je m’interroge sur ce mystère de la mémoire: nous avons eu tous deux le sentiment d’une rencontre cruciale, inoubliable, mais elle ne se fondait pas sur les mêmes gestes, les mêmes paroles, les mêmes sensations’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 40).

MJ

Benjamin Franklin letter to Miss Stevenson, Wanstead. Craven-street, May 16, 1760.

Franklin doesn't use the word commonplace book here, but is actively recommending the creation and use of one. He's also encouraging the practice of annotation, though in commonplace form rather than within the book itself.

Giovanni Falaschi (Falaschi 2002) points out that for Levi to remember ‘compagna | Picciola’ but not the equally famous ‘orazion picciola’ is not credible. The same goes for ‘folle volo’, another almost proverbial expression. Falaschi explains this case of ‘selective memory’ as Levi fearing that these expressions might be perceived - either by Pikolo or by his readers - as diminishing or critical of Ulysses, and thus he ‘forgets’ them. However, ‘orazion picciola’ simply means ‘brief speech’, and Falaschi maintains that, while Levi certainly was aware of this, he might have wanted to avoid any confusion.

EL

My reflections here build on Lino Pertile’s 2010 essay, ‘L’inferno, il lager, la poesia’. Pertile notes the profound correspondence between the opening poem of the book (OC I, 139) and this chapter. He points out how the main theme of Levi’s book, the dehumanising experience in the Lager, based on the annihilation of people’s identity, is expressed in the poem and resurfaces explicitly again in the chapter dedicated to Dante’s Ulysses. The key term revealing the correspondence of themes and intentions is ‘Considerate [consider]’, used twice in Levi’s poem (‘Consider if this is a man | … | Consider if this is a woman’) and rooted in the memory of Dante’s famous tercet where Ulysses addresses his crew as they sail towards the horizon of their last journey beyond the pillars of Hercules: ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’ (Inf. 26, 118-20 and OC I, 228).

There are many other correspondences between the chapter of Ulysses and the opening poem, besides the ‘Considerate’, and that they are profound and filtered through the theme of memory, an eminently Dantean theme: the urgency to fix in the memory itself what is or will be necessary to tell, or the urgency to express and recount what is deposited in memory. Indeed, for Levi, the memory of each individual person contains that person’s humanity.

Memory is immediately activated as Primo and Jean exit the underground gas tank (‘He [Jean] climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the brightness of the day. It was warm [tiepido] outside; the sun drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth that made me think of [mi ricordava] a summer beach of my childhood). Temporarily escaping hell by means of a ladder (a sort of Dantesque ‘natural burella’), it is the tiepido sun and a characteristic smell that evoke the childhood memory and that at the same time the reader cannot avoid connecting to the tiepide case of the initial poem (‘You who live safe | in your heated houses [tiepide case]’ [my emphasis]). It is then around the memory ‘of our homes, of Strasbourg and Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied, of our mothers’ that another theme in the chapter coalesces, the theme of friendship (‘He and I had been friends for a week’), a theme that had already emerged in a more general connotation in the opening poem (‘visi amici’). Warmth, friendship (visi amici…Jean), the kitchens as destination for Primo and Jean’s walk (the walk from the tank with the empty pot is ‘the ever welcomed opportunity of getting near the kitchens’, not for that hot food [cibo caldo] evoked in the poem, but for the soup of the camp, an alienating incarnation of Dantesque ‘pane altrui’ whose various names are dissonant). During the respite of the one hour walk from the tank to the kitchens, the intermittent memory of Dante’s canto emerges as if from an underground consciousness, the memory of Inferno as a partial and imperfect mirror of the human condition in the Lager, Ulysses as poetic memory, a sudden epiphany of a semenza, a seed, of humanity that the Lager is made to suppress, and Primo’s wondering in the face of this sudden internal revelation of still possessing an intact humanity. Primo’s memory of his home resurfaces as if springing from the memory of Dante’s text: the ‘montagna bruna’ of Purgatory is reflected in the memory of ‘my mountains, which would appear in the evening dusk [nel bruno della sera] when I returned from Milan to Turin!' But the real, familiar landscape is too heartbreaking a memory of ‘sweet things cruelly distant’, one of those hurtful thoughts, ‘things one thinks but does not say’. There is an epiphanic memory then, the poetic memory that surfaces during the walk and that reveals to Primo that he still is a man, a memory to which he clings despite the sense of his own audacity (‘us two, who dare to talk about these things with the soup poles on our shoulders’); there is also a more intimate memory, equally pulsating with life and humanity - but dangerous, because it makes Primo vulnerable to despair, threatening his own survival in the camp.

The urgent need to remember Dante’s verses in this chapter develops the theme of memory, which has been central from the opening poem. In Levi’s poem, though, memory is perceived from a different angle: the readers (who live safe…) must honour that memory and transmit it as an imperative testimony of what happened in the concentration camp from generation to generation, testifying to the suffering of the man and the woman ‘considered’ in the poem. This is a memory to be carved in one’s heart, which must accompany those who receive it in every action and in every moment of each day like a prayer. Not coincidentally the poem follows the text of the most fundamental prayer of Judaism, the Shemà Israel, which is read twice a day, a memory to be passed on to one’s own children, a responsibility which is a sign of one’s humanity. The commandment to remember of the opening poem (‘I consign these words to you. | Carve them into your hearts') issues a potential curse to the reader, threatening the destruction of what most fundamentally characterises their humanity - home, health, children: ‘Or may your house fall down, | May illness make you helpless, | And your children turn their eyes from you’. Finally, Primo’s act of remembering during the walk to the kitchens is submerged by the Babelic soup (‘Kraut und Rüben…cavoli e rape…Choux et navets…Kàposzta és répak…Until the sea again closed – over us’) and yet the memory of it becomes part of his testimony in such a central chapter of the book written after surviving the Shoah. If the memory of Dante’s verses contributed to Primo’s faith in his own humanity and his psychological and physical survival in the camp, he then accomplishes the commandment of memory and his responsibility as a man through his own writing.

CS

The high sea opens up new possibilities of connecting. This passage of the chapter follows a moment of solid and fixed textual memory. After managing the recitation of two terzine from Inferno 26 that initiate the encounter with Ulysses, Levi indicates his frustration at his inability to translate, but also points to Jean’s ability to connect from afar, from a cultural and linguistic remove. Then a gap in memory, a struggle to recall. Half phrases finally crystallise in a well-remembered line, ‘Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto’ (Inf. 26, 110). This line first prompts Levi to play the role of teacher, explaining to Jean how ‘misi me’ is not the same as the French ‘je me mis,’ but rather something bolder. In doing so, in envisioning the liberatory potential of breaking a boundary, a chain, putting oneself beyond a barrier, Levi sees a precious and telling connection between himself and Pikolo: ‘noi conosciamo bene questo impulso’. There is a flattening of difference here, a forging of a bond between two men that stretches across the Mediterranean, across a linguistic and poetic divide. Levi is no longer explaining, translating, teaching; instead, they have found a connection in seeking to go beyond, to break out and be free.

Importantly, this oceanic connection privileges Jean’s experience over Primo’s technical knowledge. It is by no means the same as the disdain for intellectuals shown by Alex at the beginning of the chapter. Rather, this emphasis on Pikolo’s experience - ‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire…’ - is a way to privilege what might be gained through the perspective of the cultural outsider. Jean has been on the sea; he apparently knows what Primo describes as that feeling of freedom when there is nothing left but the aroma of the ocean. Has Primo not had that? (Perhaps only in the pages of books, by Salgari, Conrad?) Is he thus able to have a wholly different, more potent experience of Inferno 26 as a result of this ‘non-native’ reading? Earlier in the chapter, the ‘leggero odore’ of paint and tar have - strangely, almost paradoxically - brought to Levi’s mind ‘qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’, but this is of another order. Primo’s experience seems to have been shore-bound; Jean has truly sailed.

Because Pikolo knows (and the use of ‘sapere’ is telling here, in contrast to the ‘canoscenza’ of Ulysses’ dictum to follow), Primo can convey with both precision and lyricism that mode of apprehension and feeling of emancipation: ‘è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare’. He is envisioning and embodying the possibilities of freedom, of being unbound and certainly not being inundated by odours of a very different kind, such as the paint and tar evoked earlier. The image of the horizon closing in on itself stands in stark contrast to the end of both Dante’s Inferno 26 and the end of this chapter, when it is the sea that closes over Ulysses and his companions, and - by implication and association - over Primo and Jean once more as well. The use of the verb ‘rinchiudere’ in that final moment is also striking, almost as if to imply that there are moments such as this one that open out to the world at large but there is the inevitable return to the horror of the camp that once more closes over them. Here, though, the sea is freedom: it is a simple, straight line of the horizon that connects these individuals together in their desire to escape.

In that exquisite, bittersweet phrase ‘dolci cose ferocemente lontane,’ there is something not just Ulyssean (‘né dolcezza di figlio…’), not just hybrid (‘dulcis’ and ‘ferox’ together, which also resonates with the ‘viver come bruti’ to come), but also a channeling of Purgatorio. One might think in particular of the opening of Purgatorio 8: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio | ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core | lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio…’. Here, too, the sweet memory of things left behind is made bitter by their absence and separation across the sea. Such a way of thinking Ulysses and the ocean voyage across the Commedia is almost a banality; it nonetheless serves to give us some impetus to thinking about Levi as a reader of not just Inferno, but of other parts of the poem as well.

And it serves to have us perhaps think about this powerful moment of Mediterranean connectivity a little differently, to take that insight of valorising Jean’s non-native perspective out to the world at large. In his 1990 work Poetics of Relation, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant espouses Relation as a means to connect globally and valorise the multilingual, multicultural nature of the Caribbean as a model for global culture that is rhizomatic and not tied to a single, Western line of becoming. Glissant sees the Mediterranean as an enclosed sea, ‘a sea that concentrates’, while the Caribbean is ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts’. In this moment of SQ, I wonder if we might find the Caribbean model as one that resonates more with the Primo-Jean dynamic, as Jean’s experience of the open sea asks us to see Dante’s text as one that is not enclosed but rather must be opened up to the global reader. Indeed, Glissant himself characterises Dante’s Commedia as a work that is committed to cultural mixing, dwelling on how ‘one of the greatest monuments of Christian universalisation stresses the filiation shared by ancient myths and the new religion linking both to the creation of the world’. Perhaps this moment of connection, of seeing the liberatory possibilities in the open sea that beckons, is not just a way to palpably feel the strength of Primo and Jean’s new bond, but also to urge us as global readers to embrace the diffractive, rhizomatic potential of a decolonised Dante.

AK

‘The Canto of Ulysses’ records a truly remarkable feat of cultural memory, as Levi recalls and recites Dante amidst the ruin of Auschwitz. He does so to teach Italian to his campmate Jean. But as he recites the words of Dante, Levi also feels his past come back to him. He begins to recover something of his identity and his humanity in the degraded world of the Lager, to feel again that he is ‘a man’.

Dante is not, however, the only canonical writer to appear in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. So too does Shakespeare. <br /> Levi admits to ‘gaps’, ‘holes’, and ‘lacuna[e]’ in his memory as he recites Dante, some of which would seem to be ‘irreparable’. Unable to recall his Dante, Levi is forced to confront ‘silence’:

I would give today’s soup to know how to connect ‘the like on any day’ to the last lines. I try to reconstruct it through rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers – but it is no use, the rest is silence [il resto è silenzio]. Other verses dance in my head: ‘…The sodden ground belched wind …’, no, it is something else. [Woolf’s translation.]

‘[T]he rest is silence’: Levi is quoting the last words that are spoken by Hamlet, before he dies:

O, I die, Horatio!

The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit.

I cannot live to hear the news from England.

But I do prophesy th’election lights

On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice.

So tell him, with th’occurrents more and less

Which have solicited – the rest is silence.

With his ‘spirit’ succumbing to the ‘potent poison’ Claudius and Laertes have used to kill him, Hamlet undertakes the impossible: to testify to his own death, to ‘tell’ in words his fall into deathly silence. This is his ‘dying voice’.

What is Hamlet doing in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’? Why does Levi place it where he does, in ‘the caesura’, the abyssal gap between Auschwitz and his cultural identity and memory, embodied by Dante? It is certainly ironic that Levi draws once again on the Western canonical literary tradition to record the moment of its ostensible breakdown. What emerges from the lapse, the silence that Levi testifies to, is another tie to his compromised past, and the literary culture that would seem to have been obliterated by the Holocaust – even if Levi does not choose to bring obvious notice to his allusion by using quotation marks or by writing, ‘as Hamlet says’. The poetry of Hamlet appears to be among the ‘other verses’ Levi has confusedly ‘dancing in his head’ while he tries to fill the gaps in his memory.

By quoting Hamlet, Levi would appear to again testify to the power of literature as a mainstay of culture and humanity, evincing his commitment to humanist ideals. This is certainly the positive interpretation of Hamlet in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. I would make the case, however, that Levi is using Shakespeare for an altogether more challenging purpose. By appropriating the ‘dying voice’ of Hamlet, Levi records the place where his memory and his identity collapse, testifying to the reduction of the camp inmate to silence and oblivion. Bryan Cheyette writes that ‘even when his memory self-consciously fails him’, Levi is always ‘at pains to bear witness to those moments of failure’ (Cheyette 1999, 64). Levi seeks to testify to the silence, to show that ‘something has occurred even if it cannot be understood’ (Druker 2009, 64). This is the role played by Hamlet in ‘The Canto of Ulysses’. Levi does not use the play to testify to the endurance of the human spirit in the camps, but to silence, to a ‘world of negation’ (OC I, 235). Hamlet, perhaps ironically given its near-unrivalled canonical and cultural status, marks the space beyond language and culture, into which Levi is at risk of falling. This, as Levi called it, is the ‘black hole’ of Auschwitz (OC II, 1663).

Through his allusion to Hamlet, Levi rewrites Shakespeare from the perspective of Auschwitz, endowing the play with new meanings as he confronts the lacunae and voids produced by the world of the concentration camp. Levi uses the play to record the disintegration of humane values in Auschwitz, as memory and language are brought to the point of collapse. Jacques Derrida does much the same in his own work on the play. He draws Hamlet into conversation with Holocaust testimony when he compares the play to the poetry of survivor Paul Celan in his 1995 piece ‘The Time is Out of Joint’. Derrida contends that the paradox of testimony is that the witness must uncannily ‘outlive his life’ (3.2.117) – or ‘survive’ that which is not ‘survivable’: the collapse of all meaning and death (Derrida 1995). This is the sense in which Hamlet is a play about the ‘impossible possibility of testimony’, as Derrida calls it. Hamlet has ‘seen the worst’ and is ‘the witness of the worst disorder, of absolute injustice’, writes Derrida. Hamlet has witnessed too much for words – but testimony, ‘though it hath no tongue, will speak’ (2.2.546).

Levi must also confront and testify to the painful death of memory, the destruction of human identity and culture, before the event of physical death itself – or as Jacques Lacan would call it, ‘symbolic’ before ‘actual’ death, the death of the self before physical death. Lawrence Langer uses the phrase ‘deathlife’ to name the same phenomenon, of ‘dying while one is living’ (Langer 2021, 13). Not unlike the melancholic prince, Levi attempts the impossible of testifying to his own demise. He deploys Hamlet to record his fall into a place beyond humanity and beyond culture – even beyond language. It is, to adopt the words of Jean Améry, an act of both resignation and revolt: resignation to silence, and a determined revolt against oblivion, by testifying to it. It is an astonishing moment.

RA

The ‘hole in the memory’ that swallows up Dante’s verses and prevents Levi from sharing them with Pikolo is reminiscent of both the underground tank described at the beginning of the chapter, and the vast crater that is Dante’s hell. Visually these ‘holes’, be they real or metaphorical, are the negative cast of the mountains mentioned later in the chapter: Levi’s beloved Alps, and Ulysses’ Mount Purgatory - these, instead, bearers of positive meanings, as they respectively represent home and human ambition. (Levi’s very last newspaper article was given the title ‘Il buco nero di Auschwitz’, OC II, 1662-65.)

EL

Memories of childhood always send a pang through the heart. Not because they are sad. Perhaps they are, but the pang can be deeper when they are good, for they tell us of what is utterly lost and are thus redolent of our relentless passage through time, projected as we are towards death with, so it seems, an increasing rapidity as we get older. Levi passes quickly over this moment of thought of his infancy. But it sets the tone for ‘Il canto di Ulisse’: the tone of something utterly lost and yet completely present. The childhood beach with its peculiar smell of paint and tar is wholly past and yet it is Levi, here, now. In this moment it is everything he is. Just so, the canto is utterly gone, belonging to a different life, the life Levi had before Auschwitz, and yet is here, now, making him this particular individual man with this burden of identity. He is freighted with the memory of the beach as he is with the memory of those lines from Dante.

When I was a child, I was sometimes taken in the summer in my parents’ car to one of the few sandy beaches near to where I grew up. The car park was behind the dunes and was itself a vast expanse of coarse grass worn flat and of impacted sand. The smell of that beach was the smell of the grass and sand mingled with that of the hot interior of the car, leather and metal warmed through, the bench seat offering to my child’s body a kind of place of perfect rest, long enough for me to stretch out on it to warm myself after the coldness of the sea. For me, leather and metal are what paint and tar were to Levi: the odours of these at the beach, suffused with the smell of hot sand.

I cannot think of those odours and all they bring back to me of my childhood without pain, intense but somehow delicious in its melancholy. This is all lost but it is mine and no-one else’s, giving me an acute sense of my individuality. I grasp that Levi had the same sense in remembering that smell of paint and tar from his childhood, even in this dark place. This is why he needs to mention it; this is why he passes over it so rapidly. It is everything and nothing; it is painful and sweetly delicious. This experience of the memory of the beach, surging up out of the nowhere of the camp, is at one with the eruption in Levi’s mind of the canto from Dante. Not everyone can read Dante. But everyone knows of these odours of childhood. Levi is saying: somewhere in this nightmare, in this hell created by some human beings to torture other human beings, there is someone else who, perhaps deprived of culture and learning, ill-educated and uninterested in books, nonetheless has a feeling for his or her childhood as I do for mine. I move from that to Dante; this other person will not. No matter. What binds me to that other, even this side of good and evil where theft is honoured and cheating praised, in this world of remorseless self-concern for the sake of survival, is that he or she too will smell the tar and paint, or some other material, and then be joined again to a moment of childhood. There is a common fellowship after all, a fellowship forged by the fact that that other unknown person and I are both returned to our childhood in some fleeting moment that is saturated in an odour.

Levi then tries to express this in turning to Pikolo and grasping after those fragments from Dante in order to get him to understand these words of a – for Pikolo – foreign language and feel the depth of Levi’s response to Dante. But it is the beach that is at the back of that: the Dante stands proxy for a more universal feeling – that feeling that we can have, says Levi, even here, perhaps especially here, for our lost childhood.

CH

Jean Samuel’s memories of this episode are described in Il m’appelait Pikolo, pp. 39-40. Consider, for example, this sentence: ‘Encore maintenant je m’interroge sur ce mystère de la mémoire: nous avons eu tous deux le sentiment d’une rencontre cruciale, inoubliable, mais elle ne se fondait pas sur les mêmes gestes, les mêmes paroles, les mêmes sensations’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 40).

MJ

This is similar to how I've been feeling lately. I cross a corner on the street and I can remember what podcast/audiobook I was listening to at that time and that too with proper context. It's weird, to say the least, and utterly fascinating.

Reply to Will Simpson at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17939/#Comment_17939

There should be more conversation about zettelkasten as both a "ratchet" as well as a "flywheeel". Sometimes I feel like it's hard to speak of these things for either lack of appropriate words/naming and/or having a shared vocabulary for them.

Even Luhmann's "second memory" has a mushiness to it, but I certainly see your sense of it as a thing which moves forward. I have the same sort of sense with the Aboriginal cultural idea of a "songline" which acts as both a noun as well as having an internal sense of being a verb to me. The word "google" has physically and specifically undergone the transition from noun to verb in a way which "second memory" and "songline" haven't, though perhaps they should? The difference is that the word google is much more concrete and simple while second memory and songline have a lot more cultural material and meaning sitting with them if you know them and their fuller attendant practices.

@Will Thanks for always keeping up with your regular threads and considerations.

I've been keeping examples of people talking about the "magic of note taking" for a bit. I appreciate your perspectives on it. Personally I consider large portions of it to be bound up with the ideas of what Luhmann termed as "second memory", the use of ZK to supplement our memories, and the serendipity of combinatorial creativity. I've traced portions of it back to the practices of Raymond Llull in which he bound up old mnemonic techniques with combinatorial creativity which goes back to at least Seneca.

A web search for "combinatorial creativity" may be useful, but there's a good attempt at what it entails here: https://fs.blog/seneca-on-combinatorial-creativity/

via: Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), vii–viii; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 129f.

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/anyone-here-who-has-experience-with-the-vaughn-cube/41484

Dean Vaughn has a series of music theory videos from 2007 that utilizes what he calls a Vaughn cube which on first blush appears to be a standard numbered room as used in the method of loci.