The Last Memorizers

The examiner names two places. A square in Islington, a hospital across the river. The candidate sits across the desk in a Transport for London office on Baker Street and calls the run out loud: the streets in order, the exact curb where the passenger is set down. Each appearance gives him four of these calls in about twenty minutes. Marks come off for wrong street names and banned turns. Hesitation alone can sink an answer, because a route that cannot be recalled at traffic speed cannot be driven at traffic speed. This is the Knowledge of London, and it still begins and ends the same way, with a human being reciting a city from the skull.

London has examined its cabbies since 1865. The complaints that forced the examination were ordinary: cabmen who could not find their way. The syllabus is the Blue Book, 320 runs crossing the city, and the candidate answers for more than 25,000 streets and their landmarks inside a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. Most candidates need three to four years, much of the time spent riding the runs on a scooter with a map board strapped to the handlebars. The years are paid for in evenings and weekends. About half of those who start will qualify.

Eleanor Maguire’s team at University College London published the first scans in 2000. The journal was the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the subjects were licensed London taxi drivers. Deep in the brain sits the hippocampus, a curved ridge of tissue shaped and named for a seahorse, and its rear was significantly larger in drivers than in men who had never driven a cab. The front of the same organ was larger in the other men. And the effect scaled with service: the longer a man had driven, the larger the rear of the organ.

Men born with bigger map rooms might be the ones who pass. Maguire and Katherine Woollett answered by running the study forward. They scanned 79 trainees at the start of the Knowledge and again three to four years later, beside 31 men who had not trained. By the end, 39 had qualified. Only their brains had changed: gray matter had grown in the rear hippocampus on both sides. The failed trainees had spent the same years at the same work, and their scans matched the ones taken at the start. The city had been loaded into the skull, and the skull had made room. There was a bill. The qualified trainees did worse than the others on certain memory tasks with no London in them, as if the organ had traded range for depth. A later study compared the cabbies with London bus drivers, men who drive the same streets on routes someone else chose. The bus drivers showed no such enlargement.

A hafiz carries a scripture. A cabbie carries a city. An actor carries a play. A singer carries an epic. The guild is old. Its members work trades that do not know one another. Every one of them is now optional.

A boy in a hifz school rocks over his page. The school could be in Karachi or Chicago. He chants Arabic he may not yet understand. The page belongs to the school. The book is becoming his. He is working toward the title hafiz, guardian, given to the one who carries the whole Quran: 114 chapters arranged in thirty sections, 6,236 verses by the standard count. The old counting schools differ by a handful because they disagree about where certain verses end. They do not disagree about the words. The thirty sections exist so a carrier can pace a month of nights against the book, and across Ramadan a congregation hears the whole of it from the skull of the man leading the night prayer.

The work takes years. A teacher hears the student’s complete recitation before certifying it, and the certificate names a chain of teachers running back through the centuries. The memorized text is public property. On any night of Ramadan a hafiz leads the prayer and recites from the skull, and when he slips, the row behind him gives the verse aloud, and he picks it up and goes on.

The written Quran exists because the carriers began to die. In 632, months after the death of Muhammad, the battle of Yamama killed many of the men who knew the revelation by heart. The account preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari records what followed. Abu Bakr, pressed by Umar, commissioned Zayd ibn Thabit to gather the text before more carriers fell. Zayd collected what had been written on palm-leaf stalks, shoulder blades, and pieces of parchment, along with what remained in the memories of men. The rule was strict: a verse entered the book when memory and witnessed writing agreed, and nothing entered on one testimony. One closing passage turned up in the keeping of a single man, Khuzaima, and went in on his word, the exception recorded openly, because a carrier’s standing was itself evidence. Had Khuzaima fallen at Yamama, the passage would have gone with him. The book was compiled as insurance against the mortality of the guild. Yet the guild kept memorizing. It has not stopped.

The stage keeps the sharpest accounting. Hamlet runs 1,422 lines by the standard count, the largest role Shakespeare wrote, better than a third of the longest play in the canon. The actor who signs the contract buys the whole load. No screen in the wings will save him. A prompter sits with a book, and a house full of strangers has paid to learn whether one skull can hold the part for three hours. He gets no second take.

Shakespeare’s own actors carried the play on harsher terms. A hired man received a cue script: his own speeches, each headed by the two or three closing words of the speech before his. He never held the play. Paper was dear and a full script was a theft risk, so he held only his part, and the play existed whole only at performance, distributed across the company, each man guarding his slice of it.

I worked as Arthur Kopit’s assistant in the winter of 1990. The job came through a Columbia internship, and it put me inside the Circle Repertory staged reading of his play Bone-the-Fish, later produced in full as Road to Nirvana. Sigourney Weaver was in the cast. One night I seated Arthur Miller in the last row. He never asked my name. A staged reading is the theater’s sanctioned exception: the actors hold the pages, and everyone in the room knows that holding the page is half the craft. The other half is the carrying, bought with weeks of private life, with line runs in kitchens and on subway platforms, before the page can be put down.

One man carried the largest text in the guild, and he was a singer. The proof sits in a small room in Widener Library at Harvard.

Milman Parry was stuck on Homer. He was a young Harvard classicist with a fresh Sorbonne doctorate, working in the early 1930s. The Iliad is longer still, and both epics are older than the Greek alphabet that preserved them. For centuries scholars had no good answer for how such poems could exist before writing could hold them. Parry’s answer was in the ready-made phrases: swift-footed Achilles, the wine-dark sea. Those phrases, he argued, were tools, parts that let a singer compose in performance, in meter, at the speed of speech. The idea could not be tested on ancient Greeks. Parry went looking for living ones.

He scouted Yugoslavia in the summer of 1933. June 1934 brought him back with his family and a graduate assistant, Albert Bates Lord, and the party settled in Dubrovnik. Parry learned Serbo-Croatian, and for an academic year they moved through Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro collecting heroic songs. The equipment was built for the work: a recorder with two turntables, so the song could run straight through while an aluminum disc was changed. The haul was more than 12,000 texts and some 3,500 twelve-inch discs.

Parry found his singer in July 1935, in the town of Bijelo Polje. Avdo Međedović was about sixty, a farmer and butcher who could not read, a guslar who drove his songs with the one-stringed gusle. Asked for a long one, he dictated The Wedding of Smailagić Meho across a week of July sittings. It came to 12,311 lines of strict ten-syllable verse, the length of the Odyssey, which holds 12,109. The story already existed in a printed songbook at 2,165 lines. Avdo knew it from hearing the book read aloud. He gave the story back at nearly six times its printed length.

Parry then ran the guild’s oldest claim as an experiment. He had another good singer, Mumin Vlahovljak, perform Bećiragić Meho while Avdo sat and listened, a song Parry had quietly confirmed was unknown to him. Heard once, taken in through the ear, the song entered Avdo’s stock. When he sang it himself, his version ran 6,313 lines, swelling scene after scene past the version he had heard. Retrieval alone cannot explain the extra scenes. They were composed in performance, out of the stock every guslar carries.

Parry never wrote the book the collection demanded. On December 3, 1935, three months after the fieldwork ended, he was found in a Los Angeles hotel room, dead at thirty-three of wounds from a gun he had in his possession. Lord spent the rest of the century on the material and in 1960 published The Singer of Tales, the book every later argument has had to answer. Homer was this kind of singer, and a text carried in the skull is a different substance from a text on a page: it regenerates each time it is sung.

The singers are gone. Lord returned in 1950 and 1951 to record the survivors. The collection the two men built now occupies Room C in Widener Library, the discs and the notebooks together, and a digitization project has been feeding the aluminum into servers since 2002. The tradition itself did not survive the century that recorded it. Radio reached the coffeehouses and print reached the villages, and a guild that had carried epic for centuries put the load down within a generation.

Every one of these crafts is now optional. The claim wants precision. London still examines the Knowledge because the license demands it; regulation is the last refuge of a guild. Devotion keeps the hifz schools full and asks no one’s permission. An actor’s contract still refuses the page. And no one anywhere needs to sing an epic.

The load has moved to the machine. In 2017 Hugo Spiers and his colleagues at University College London scanned volunteers navigating a simulated Soho. Left to find their own way, the volunteers’ hippocampi fired at every junction, and the activity rose with the number of streets on offer. At Seven Dials, where seven streets meet, the organ worked hardest; at a dead end it dropped away. Following turn-by-turn instructions, it stayed quiet. “When we have technology telling us which way to go, however, these parts of the brain simply don’t respond to the street network,” Spiers said. The organ that grew in the cabbie goes quiet in the passenger. A schoolroom that once made children carry poems now issues tablets.

The case against memorization deserves its full weight. Storage is cheap, and storage does not die at Yamama. It will even reroute around the traffic jam the cabbie cannot see. All true, and all of it prices the wrong good. The guilds were never selling storage. What leaves, when nothing must be known by heart, is the carrier.

A text carried by ten thousand bodies polices itself. The congregation that corrects the imam holds the same book he holds, and no one has to call a supervisor. A text held in one device is corrected by whoever owns the device.

The cabbie’s hippocampus grew because the city refused to be carried any other way. A culture that asks nothing of the organ gets the quiet hippocampus Spiers scanned. The guilds were training programs, and the trainee was the artifact. A guild is a machine for building a certain kind of person, and it runs on requirement. When the requirement goes, the training goes with it.

The carrier exceeds the text. Avdo heard a song once and returned it enlarged. Zayd’s commission set memory to audit writing and writing to audit memory, and one passage reached the book through a single keeper. A library repeats what it holds. A carrier interprets, expands, corrects, and every so often keeps the last copy alive.

Parry’s discs sit in Room C of Widener Library. Three and a half thousand aluminum circles, in their sleeves. Everyone who sang into them is dead, and the villages that listened are listening to something else. The Knowledge holds its appearances on Baker Street, four runs a visit. The hifz schools take children. Somewhere tonight an actor is running the soliloquy across a kitchen floor, because the house will not accept a phone. The guild is smaller than it was, and every member is a volunteer now. It is still taking members.