| "Hiroshima," the placename, evokestogether with images of the first atomic bombingthe largest dilemmas of the nuclear age and humankind's capacity for massive violence. It also evokes the theme of memory. Images arising from the place of Hiroshima speak to us: Remember Hiroshima. Hiroshima never again. We "hear" this rhetoric of memory whenever Hiroshima comes to mind. Yet, as Robert Jay Lifton observes, "The great majority of people no longer experienceincreasingly few rememberthe original impact of the totality of nuclear killing" (BC, pp. 386-7). This first place of nuclear violence, together with its ''original impact," claims a crucial yet neglected place in the psychic terrain of our individual and collective memories. How can this claim be acknowledged and given its proper place? |
| In her book, The Art of Memory, Frances Yates describes a method of imagining used by classical rhetoricians and their predecessors, the tellers of myth and story, to remember essential information as they spoke. The art of memory involves the formation of remembered places in the imagination, such as the distinct features and rooms of a house. In these places mnemonic images are deposited that remind one of associated information through their "striking and unusual,... beautiful or hideous, comic or obscene" character (AM, p. 10). In this tradition of memory, as in its mythic parentage, the power of precisely defined and strange images to move, to "strike" the soul, is displayed. There are affinities, as James Hillman has observed, between this art of memory and contemporary archetypal psychology,1 which likewise seeks to cultivate a precise awareness of "places" and images of the psyche, and emphasizes the moving power of unusual, disturbing or "unnatural" shapes of imagination. |
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