Chatwin’s Songlines and Yates’ The Art of Memory
From Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, the passage where he mentions Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory:
To some, the Songlines were like the Art of Memory in reverse. In Frances Yates’s wonderful book, one learned how classical orators, from Cicero and earlier, would construct memory palaces; fastening sections of their speech on to imaginary architectural features and then, after working their way round every architrave and pillar, could memorise colossal lengths of speech. The features were known as loci or ‘places’. But in Australia the loci were not a mental construction, but had existed for ever, as events of the Dreamtime.