How to remember: A poet’s theory

In Patti Smith's wonderful memoir, Just Kids, she is forever referring to the constellation of objects she and her dearest friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, found and gathered and treasured together. She writes of a day early in their relationship:

One Indian summer day we dressed in our favorite things, me in my beatnik sandals and ragged scarves, and Robert with his love beads and sheepskin vest. We took the subway to West Fourth Street and spent the afternoon in Washington Square. We shared coffee from a thermos, watching the stream of tourists, stoners, and folksingers. Agitated revolutionaries distributed antiwar leaflets. Chess players drew a crowd of their own. Everyone coexisted within the continuous drone of verbal diatribes, bongos, and barking dogs. 

We were walking towards the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. 

"Oh, take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband. "I think they're artists."

"Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids." 

Well, they did turn out to be artists, and reading the book you can't help but wonder if Smith remembers her stories so clearly because she poured herself into her treasured artifacts…as poet Giacomo Leopardi eloquently argues: 

To function, memory requires a fixed, stable object. It can remember indeterminate things only with great difficulty, or piecemeal, or in relation to other fixed objects. Whoever wants to remember something has to fix an object in mind; we do this all day without being aware of it. Words stabilize. Lines of poetry stabilize: the material has an inherent, sharp, recognizable definition, every line marking limits and boundaries. The whole secret to enabling memory comes down to giving the sharpest possible physical shape to things or ideas. The more you can do this, the better your memory will recollect things. The more you train the memory faculty, the easier it becomes to remember things even more vaporous than those you could remember as a baby or child.

Sounds like a testable, verifiable theory…