Have you seen the 2021 movie Don’t Look Up? It’s pretty good, although as a metaphorical satire it’s a bit heavy-handed. But the title makes me think — everybody looks up. Looking up, to the sky, or the clouds, or the vee of the migrating geese, or the contrail of the jetliner you might wish you were on heading for London or Paris or Tokyo or anywhere. Looking up is what we do. When you’re trying to think of something that’s just one the tip of your mind, do you look up? I do — up and to the right, I think. What I’m looking for is never really there, but somehow looking up helps me find it anyway.
But where is that idea, or notion, or memory, or passing thought? Is “where” even the right way to talk about such things? The many rooms of your memory palace don’t occupy a space; they have no location or position. And yet the memory palace is an ancient idea; to remember things clearly you imagine an actual palace, and you store each memory in its own room. As far as anybody knows, Simonides of Ceos came up with it. He lived from about 556 to about 468 BCE on the island of Ceos. More recently the island is called Kea; you can get there by ferry. Simonides was mostly a poet, but the memory palace idea comes from a story about him. He was enjoying a dinner in a dining hall with a nobleman named Scopas. He was called outside to meet someone, only to discover nobody there. But behind him, the dining hall collapsed and everyone was crushed. He was the one asked to identify all the remains, and did it by visualizing the seating arrangements.
The memory palace technique was also called the “method of loci” (“loci” means “places” in Latin) in Greece and Rome, and persisted for centuries. As recently as 2006, the World Memory Champion used the system to memorize 1040 random numbers in 30 minutes. Personally, I think I completely forgot there was such a thing as a World Memory Champion. But I can’t find anything in my house either, so those might go hand in hand.
Looking upward to remember something is a different, but still valid technique, and this one is backed by neurology. Apparently when your eyes roll upward, its associated with alpha waves in your brain. Alpha waves are characteristic of the “alpha state,” which is that mental realm between being awake and asleep, and it actually does, on a physical level, help you locate a particular memory.
There are other reasons to look upward. Probably since people have been conscious and able to communicate, there have been mysterious, magical things in the sky. That’s where many of the gods have always lived. At night, the mysterious stars are up there. Long ago, people connected them into allegorical pictures, and saw the future in the sky. More recently, people calculated the speed of light, found that those stars are thousands of light years away, and saw the past in the sky. On February 9, 1913, people along the eastern shore of North America saw the Great Meteor Procession, visible from Canada to Bermuda. That night the present was in the sky. It was probably a large meteorite that fragmented into pieces as it entered the atmosphere.
That’s another reason we look upward; the atmosphere and its energetic processes. Which is just a long-winded way to say “weather,” obviously. The weather used to be something you had to pay attention to; your crops could be at risk, your herd of animals could be affected, and you yourself might have to take shelter. In the developed world we’ve had a few decades of general respite from needing to be centrally concerned with the weather, but there are signs that those times may be gone. But lucky for us; instead of just hoping and wondering, now we have at least a bit of advance information about the weather and whether it’s going to turn destructive.
We have February 9 to thank for some of that — today is the anniversary of the day in 1865 that President Grant signed the bill establishing the Weather Bureau. Originally it was part of the Department of War, and its first name was “The Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce.” The prevailing winds were against that title right from the start, and it didn’t take too long to change it to “Weather Bureau” (a name you were more likely to recall without needing to resort to memory techniques).
There can be other good reasons to look skyward. You might, after all, be involved in a pastime where if you weren’t attentive, something could hit you on the head. That could happen in Mintonette, a game invented on February 9, 1895 by William Morgan. Morgan studied physical education at Springfield College, and worked at the local YMCA. He met James Naismith there, right around the time that Naismith invented basketball in 1891. Just a few years later he had the idea for a less vigorous sport that the older YMCA members could enjoy, and he came up with Mintonette, a game based on badminton, but using a ball and no racquets. And sure enough, when you’re playing Mintonette, you’d better look up. Oh, and you should also call it “volleyball;” the name “Mintonette” only lasted a short time.
If you were around on February 9 in 1986 you would have had an excellent reason to look upward; Halley’s Comet was visible (barely). It’s the only comet that’s both visible without a telescope, and with an orbit that makes it possible for a human to see it twice — it reappears roughly every 75 years. Because we know when it’s visible, we can search historical records for mentions of something up there — because after all, people have been looking up since the dawn of time. The oldest mention found so far is from 240 BCE. Mark Twain thought he had a connection to the comet; he was born in late November, 1835, just a couple weeks after the comet’s appearance. He predicted that he would die when it appeared again, in 1910 — and sure enough, he died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet’s closest approach. So maybe you really can find the future up there in the sky.
The folks in Don’t Look Up certainly found their future in the sky. No spoilers here, though. It’s worth seeing the film if you haven’t yet.
