Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images

1. Atlas Gazed: Mnemosyne—Its Origins, Motives, and Scope

1 Atlas Gazed: Mnemosyne—Its Origins, Motives, and Scope Memory Mnemosyne mater musarum. Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses. Mnemosyne, who personifies memory, whose pool in Hades complements Lethe, the river of forgetfulness . Mnemosyne, who, as Friedrich Hölderlin writes in the first strophe of his gnomic hymn “Mnemosyne” (ca. 1803), allows “the true” to occur despite, or perhaps because of, “time”: Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lang ist Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber Das Wahre.1 (1–3, 15–17) 1. Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke, Briefe, Dokumente (Munich: Winkler, 1969), 198–199. Composed probably in 1803, “Mnemosyne” was Hölderlin’s last hymn. I quote the zweite Fassung of the poem. On the three versions of “Mnemosyne,” see David Constantine, Hölderlin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 272–273, 276–278. In Greek mythology Mnemosyne is a Titan, the daughter of Uranos (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth), the mother via Zeus of the nine Muses. 2 Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images A sign we are, without meaning, Without pain we are and have nearly Lost our language in foreign lands, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Though the time Be long, truth Will come to pass.2 Memory, Hölderlin intimates, sets us an endless, impossible task in part because we are forever shuttling between the familiar and “the foreign.” And if “language” is the principal means by which we remember, as the rich imagery and allusions in the hymn’s three strophes urge, then this is because it is fueled by metaphor whose task, as Aristotle and many others after him have observed, is to exploit our thirst for the “foreign,” that we might see similarities in things initially perceived as being quite dissimilar. Tellingly, in the last version of this poem—the last hymn he wrote before his Umnachtung, or “loss of sanity”3 —Hölderlin completely transforms the first strophe , rendering it less abstract, if no more transparent, by replacing “sign,” “language ,” and even “time” with concrete images expressing the “law” of change: Reif sind, in Feuer getaucht, gekochet Die Frücht und auf der Erde geprüfet und ein Gesetz ist, Das alles hineingeht, Schlangen gleich, Prophetisch, träumend auf Den Hügeln des Himmels.4 (1–5) Ripe are, dipped in fire, cooked, The fruits and tried on earth, and it is law, Prophetic, that all must enter in, Like serpents, dreaming on The mounds of Heaven.5 If “all” must try the “fruits” of mutability, then each does so differently, no matter the common dream of something more permanent. Because, Hölderlin intimates, we are constantly called to remember ephemeral pleasures and mourn mortality, 2. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 23. 3. In Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2.2, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer , 1951), Beißner notes that there are two Überschriften for the erste Fassung: “Die Nymphe” and “Mnemosyne” (819). 4. Hölderlin, Werke, Briefe, Dokumente, 199–200. 5. Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Harmondsworth , UK: Penguin Books, 1994), 259. Mnemosyne—Its Origins, Motives, and Scope 3 the fragile persistence of memory and the images it furnishes offer tangible proof that human existence derives much of its meaning from the experience, recollection , and thus repetition of this “law” of change. Memory persists even if we can imagine a place and a time, as Wallace Stevens memorably does, “where ripe fruit never falls.” More particularly, when Hölderlin recalls, in both versions of the hymn’s last strophe, Am Feigenbaum ist mein Achilles mir gestorben . . . By the figtree My Achilles died . . .6 he spurs us not only to ask how and why he has emphatically made the dead Achilles his own (“mein . . . mir”), but also to pose again those questions riddling the history of all imitation of classical models, myths, and gestures. When the classicizing poet or artist remembers, whose memories is he reviving? Does he elect, if you will, to drink of Mnemosyne’s pool, or does he drink unwillingly, unknowingly, having perhaps also drunk of Lethe? What kind of knowledge does he gain by remembering ? Is memory a personal daemon, or is her task to give birth to collective, cultural memories? When and how, that is, does the pathos of “my Achilles” become that of “our Achilles”? With his enigmatic yet concrete hymn, with his ambiguous “figtree,” Hölderlin offers no facile...