TIM BOUCHER RAW!

So I’ve been messing around with this memory technique…

This what?

Memory technique. You know, like mnemonics?

You mean hooked on phonix? Speak and spell – that sorta shit?

Uh uh. You know that movie, “Total Recall”?

Well, it’s not like that either. But it’s this traditional method of memorization. It’s foolproof. Completely routed in daily experience.

And I’m not talking about making memories. I’m talking about retrieving them.

Remembering shit.

For example, take a half a pack of playing cards, shuffle them and then memorize their order. Get back to me and tell me how long that takes you…

If you have no method, no technique, you don’t have the means to accomplish this task. It’ll just be like throwing a bunch of darts at a wall, none of which stick because the points have been taken out.

I did it without actual cards. I wrote down a list like AH for Ace of Hearts, 4D, four of clubs. Then I envisioned an idealized version of my bike route from my house to work. Having gone down that same stretch of road so many times, I’ve noticed quite a lot of things about it. Little nuances, twangs, trends, feels, things other people might not notice – people who only travel through here on their way from somewhere else to somewhere else: probably shopping.

Some of the things about the places I picked to remember by has to do with geographical features. A lot of it is human geography: cultures, habits, things that spring up almost automatically – it seems – from the ground. Plants, dirt, roots, weeds. Crazy people, good people. People I don’t talk to any more. Not for any nameable reason. Ghosts that have passed.

Finding the places was an easy process. First I gave each a poetic nickname only I would recognize, listing them all on the back of a blank strip of paper during a show. Next to each of those, dropping those AH-4D type lines across the cypher all down the list until each of all places had their card. Took me about 45 or 50 minutes to put that all down in memory. The hardest part was not the actual remembering. The hardest part was to keep myself on task. To sit in contemplation for extended moments composing inner pictures within an ordered sequence. It’s a forgotten, almost magical art. When you actively memorize information, especially as in the journey method, you’re training your thinking away from its wanderings. You’re giving it a path. Something it can repeat to itself in silence, a little game for that gabbering goblin that won’t shut up inside. It’s like a treat for it, the right kind of exercise in the right motions and the right shapes, makes the muscle stronger and stronger, more disciplined, more nuanced.

My next set of information (I used to the same initial geographical loci) was a randomized list of 26 animals that just came to me off the top of my head. Animals I’ve always liked, things that have appeared striking or interesting to me in the past. The first two were RABBIT and FROG. This sequence took me less than ten minutes to memorize without error, all through active visualization with the journey method.

Now each location is marked with both a spirit animal and a member of the lower arcana, with not just numeric value but elemental information as well.

Next set I was more “nervous” to try. Each attempt produces an intense nervousness and a feeling of impossibility, like there’s simply no way to possibly do it. Some part of your mind freaks out and wants to smash a second story window and jump out of it. That’s the part we have to tell to shut the hell up during this process.

It’s like meditation, except practical. Which is not to say I’ve never gained anything out of meditation suchlike where you empty your mind, because I have. I really have, but I could never *do* anything with it. Didn’t go anywhere. This, I can use in my daily life, at my job.

Today was the first rehearsal of a new show, always a momentous and much stressed-out over day where a group of people sit down and decide to create a time and a space which doesn’t always exist within the present moment, but always seems to flit in and out of memory as some lost golden age…

So I decided to rememberize the cast list, a group of around 22, give or take. Took about 7-9 minutes. I have to step away from clocks for a second and their world to get into this memorization space, this place where I intentionally invoke inner images into existence. So I never quite no how long it takes. Or if its always working. The names made me nervous – each one the promise of a person with unique talents and needs. How will I be able to balance them all effectively together to facilitate the creation of the best possible arte, the best possible intentional human construction…

Starting with the list made sense, the names have power. Actors always have powerful names. Name your babies well mothers, words build or destroy.

Eventually I got it.

The part I really tripped myself out on last night was when I started cutting out the loci and bridging together elements which had been associatively overlaid on the same spot. So the first two items became AH-RABBIT and 4D-FROG. Genetic code sequences for the invocation of memory.

At some point early on, aboriginal style, on foot, I began walking backwards in physical space through the locations which I had marked imaginatively. Going on foot, its true, as opposed to going by Jeep allows you more room to explore the meaning and images of these places and all their actual and constructed associations. You can tell your stories. I found the effect at a certain early point cascading. Associations bled together into new figures, tales, incidences, variations. I began to see how the early bards and poets much have been able to do it. They literally can “go there” not just in their minds, but in reality – chaining the two together: the reality of ordinary physical spaces, the beautifully mythically infused landscape, trampling it under foot. It resounds like drums in the distance. All the earth shall be our lyre.

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