Every autumn I visit Chapterhouses, and every autumn some Apprentice asks me, a little indignantly, why the Guild insists that its rites be learned by heart. The Papers are printed. The words are the same whether they come from the memory or the page. Why spend weeks on what a music stand would do in a moment?
It is a fair question, and it has three answers.
Attention cannot be in two places
The whole technique of our Art is the holding of attention on one point. A practitioner who is reading has the attention on a page. It is as simple as that. The eye is finding its line, the hand is holding the paper toward the lamp, and some part of the mind is wondering whether the next page is the right way up. Whatever is left over goes to the rite. In my experience it is about a third.
The body must know it too
A rite is not a text. It is words, movement, breath and gesture done together, and they do not come together until the words have sunk below the level at which they must be thought about. Anyone who has learned to drive, to dance or to play an instrument knows the moment at which the instructions vanish and the thing is simply done. In ritual that moment cannot arrive while a page is in the hand.
What is learned by heart is kept there
The phrase is exact. Words committed to memory go on working when the Hall is closed. Members tell me that the address to the West comes to them at a hospital bedside, or the affirmation of the center on a crowded train. A rite that lives only in a folder can do nothing for you when the folder is at home.
How to learn a rite
The old orators learned their speeches by walking through a building in the mind and leaving a part of the speech in each room. We have the advantage of them, since our building is real and we are standing in it.
- Learn it in the Hall, on your feet. Not in a chair, and not on the bus. Stand where you will stand, and face where you will face.
- Learn it by quarters. Give the first week to the East and nothing else. Let each Gate hold its own words. When you turn to the South, the South will hand you the next line.
- Learn it aloud. The voice remembers what the eye forgets. Whisper if you must, but move the lips.
- Add one sentence a day. Say everything you have, then add one sentence. A rite of forty sentences is yours in six weeks, and you will never lose it.
- Keep the page in the room, face down. Its presence will steady you. Turning it over is permitted, and is entered in the Record.
When the words go
They will go. They go for Masters, in full Convocation, in front of sixty people. When it happens, do three things. Stop. Take one breath. Begin the sentence again from its first word. Nine times in ten the rest will follow, because the memory was in the rhythm and not in the words.
If the sentence does not come, say in your own words what it was for, and go on. Do not apologize to the room. Nothing that is present objects to plain speech, and the rite is not a recitation to be marked.
A note on plain language
It is far easier to memorize what one understands. This is one of the reasons the Guild puts its rites into the language of those who work them. I learned the Gates in French in Montreal and again in English at Lantern House, and I can report that they are the same rite, and that each took me six weeks.
The Apprentice's piece is the Rite of the Four Gates from memory, and I have never known an Apprentice who was sorry afterward to have been asked for it.