We've mostly forgotton these ways, what with writing taking the place of oral tradition, and then again with the rise of the internet. But memory champions (and multilingualists like me) still use them. And so today, as I wrote, I went to a park to make a memory palace to walk through. Thus, I started at some nameless statue, where I put "玉阶” and then onto a little platform where "生白露" went. This process continued for six more steps until I had put the whole poem into physical locations. One was the set of steps in front of a stage; the next the stage itself. This kind of thing strains the notion of linearity, or of time moving from A to B. For the poem, it may, but for memory...well, it can be spatial, and I certainly needn't recall "秋月” after "玲珑望." Nor does any of us, with our own memories. Memories gain primacy not by age or immediacy, but by becoming totemic; by becoming central to other, lesser memories. In this way, they are like characters in a book, which, being persons, or animals, or ideas, or something else, are characters in as much as they are something the text surrounds and seems to be working towards.