Memory

Memory by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

MY mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour--
'Twas noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May--
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

On human memory, astrologer C.E.O. Carter wrote in his Encyclopedia of Psychological Astrology :

"Memory depends chiefly upon Mercury. If this planet is strong, especially in fixed signs, the memory will be good. The Moon and Cancer should also be considered; they often bestow a very retentive memory if strong; and attention should be directed to the third house........Mercury afflicted by malefics in cadent houses or mutable signs generally impairs the memory and a strong Pisces element in the nativity often has the same effect."

I've read elsewhere that Cancer can bestow a retentive memory, I'm lucky enough to have one, so perhaps I should thank my Cancer ascendant for it. I'm not convinced that the ascendant sign is mainly involved in "how others see you and how you see the world", I've come to the conclusion, from experience and observation, that the rising sign simply becomes part of the personality mix, colouring, augmenting and modifying other factors. My natal Mercury's position, strong near the descendant angle, and in organised Capricorn, is likely to be helpful to memory also.

Husband has Mercury in Pisces, conjunct Saturn, and he can be pretty absent minded and forgetful. C.E.O. Carter nailed that one! I have to say though, when it comes to remembering anything connected with jazz husband is amazing. He might not know what day it is, or even what month, or what he had for breakfast, but he knows who's playing trumpet and who's on piano, etc. the minute he hears a piece of jazz !

Perhaps on some far future day, humans will be able to go to the store (or hospital), for a memory upgrade, to augment what Mother Nature bestowed.

Rosemary & Memory

 (Hyssopus officinalis LINN.)

History ~ The Ancients were well acquainted with the shrub, which had a reputation for strengthening the memory. On this account it became the emblem of fidelity for lovers. It holds a special position among herbs from the symbolism attached to it. Not only was it used at weddings, but also at funerals, for decking churches and banqueting halls at festivals, as incense in religious ceremonies, and in magical spells. At weddings, it was entwined in the wreath worn by the bride, being first dipped into scented water....Together with an orange stuck with cloves it was given as a New Year's gift - allusions to this custom are to be found in Ben Jonson's plays.
(See Botanical.com)

Here's an interesting article. It's yet another vindication of a piece of folk medicine. I've long been curious as to how these medicines were first discovered by our early ancestors. Was it trial and error, or had they access to some ancient, now lost, advice, and if so, from whom did it come?

"What does rosemary do to your brain?"

"In folk medicine, rosemary has been associated for centuries with having a good memory. But is it worth investigating whether it really has any powers, asks Dr Chris Van Tulleken."
SNIPS:

...Prof Mark Moss at Northumbria University. His team is running an experiment to test whether rosemary essential oil could benefit future memory.....

Here's how the experiment worked. The team at Northumbria recruited 60 older volunteers to test the effects of not only rosemary oil but also lavender oil. They then tested these volunteers in a room infused with either rosemary essential oil, lavender essential oil or no aroma. Participants were told they were there to test a vitamin water drink. Any comments about the aromas were passed off as irrelevant and "left over from the previous group to use the room".

The volunteers... then took a test which was designed to test their prospective memory. It's a clever test with many layers so you never quite know what's being tested............(see full article for detail)

What Mark's team found was remarkable. The volunteers in the room with the rosemary infusion did statistically significantly better than those in the control room but lavender caused a significant decrease in performance. Lavender is traditionally associated with sleep and sedation.

Was the lavender sending our volunteers to sleep and decreasing their performance? How could vaporised essential oils possibly have this effect?

It turns out that there are compounds in rosemary oil that may be responsible for changes in memory performance. One of them is called 1,8-cineole - as well as smelling wonderful (if you like that sort of thing) it may act in the same way as the drugs licensed to treat dementia, causing an increase in a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine.

These compounds do this by preventing the breakdown of the neurotransmitter by an enzyme. And this is highly plausible - inhalation is one of the best ways of getting drugs into the brain. When you eat a drug it may be broken down in the liver which processes everything absorbed by the gut, but with inhalation small molecules can pass into the bloodstream and from there to the brain without being broken down by the liver.

As further confirmation Mark and his team analysed blood samples and found traces of the chemicals in rosemary oil in the blood.

Ve-ery int-eresting!

Gimme Hope! ~ Forgotten Song Remembered

Music and songs have the almost unworldly power to arouse old memories.  
Sometimes it happens the other way around - the "man bites dog" effect. For some inexplicable reason a memory from the early 1990s surfaced from the depths the other day, and set me on a search for the related song.

We (late partner and I), sometime in the early 1990s, on an annual jaunt to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, were walking along the sea front area one evening on our way somewhere. We spied a colourfully dressed African guy singing and playing guitar in an open-fronted bar. The music was infectious. We sat down, ate, drank and listened for hours. The evening ended with the singer encouraging (actually forcing) us all onto our feet to form a chain and dance around the bar to a song I'd never heard before. That song was the one bugging my memory. I had to be a bit creative on the Google, I couldn't remember any detail, only the feeling, but after many attempts I eventually found the song on YouTube, with lyrics.



Eddy Grant, it turns out, was the composer and original vocalist. He was born 5 March 1948, in Guyana but as a child he emigrated to London, England with his parents. He had hits in the 1980s with I Don't Wanna Dance in the UK, and with Electric Avenue in the UK and USA. Many of his songs were politically slanted, especially against the apartheid regime then existing in South Africa.
The song bugging my memory: Gimme Hope Jo'anna was one of these ("Jo'anna" = Johannesburg, South Africa). It was a song about apartheid, and banned in South Africa. The line: "The Archbishop who's a peaceful man" is a reference to Desmond Tutu, first black South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town who received the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against apartheid.

All of that was unknown to me as we danced and enjoyed the infectious rhythm. Why this song should surface from the depths of memory just now I don't know - except that the message, minus names and places, remains relevant:
"Gimme hope!"

More wise words on HOPE:

"HOPE has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.
Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face." ~~~ Chris Hedges.

"Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost."
― Margaret George, "Mary Queen of Scotland & The Isles".

Memory - Digital and Human

At the weekend we upgraded my computer's memory, known to geeky types as RAM, I think. HeWhoKnows manfully donned an anti-static wrist strap to plumb the depths of my trusty Dell.

256MBs of memory had proved adequate for my modest needs until I started mucking about with Windows Movie Maker, and wondering about more software for the future. Delly now boasts a big 2 GB. HWK carefully inserted two new memory sticks, obtained via the internet, et voila ! My computer gives a quicker, cleaner and crisper performance than ever before!

I got to thinking about human memory, and turned to astrologer C.E.O. Carter's Encyclopedia of Psychological Astrology to see what he had to say about it:

"Memory depends chiefly upon Mercury. If this planet is strong, especially in fixed signs, the memory will be good. The Moon and Cancer should also be considered; they often bestow a very retentive memory if strong; and attention should be directed to the third house........Mercury afflicted by malefics in cadent houses or mutable signs generally impairs the memory and a strong Pisces element in the nativity often has the same effect."

I've read elsewhere that Cancer can bestow a retentive memory, I'm lucky enough to have one, so perhaps I should thank my Cancer ascendant for it. I'm not convinced that the ascendant sign is mainly involved in "how others see you and how you see the world" - I've come to the conclusion, from experience and observation, that the rising sign simply becomes part of the personality mix, the recipe - colouring, augmenting and modifying other factors. My natal Mercury, strong near the descendant angle in organised Capricorn, is likely to be helpful to memory too.

HeWhoKnows has Mercury in Pisces, conjunct Saturn - and he is pretty absent minded and forgetful. C.E.O. Carter nailed that one! I have to say though, when it comes to remembering anything connected with jazz HWK is amazing. He might not know what day it is, or even what month, or what he had for breakfast, but he knows who's playing trumpet and who's on piano, etc. the minute he hears a piece of jazz !

Perhaps one day humans will be able to go to the store(or hospital),for new memory sticks to upgrade what Mother Nature bestowed. That'd be fun!