An interesting article in this week's New Scientist (only the opening paragraph available for free), which argues that forgetting is healthy. This may not seem so to those of use who can't recall the name of someone we know well, or anybody's telephone number, but the burden of a complete memory can be intense. It can apparently be obsessive, block creativity, or merely not allow you to forget something embarrassing, traumatic or distressing - therefore forbidding you from "moving on" in the current idiom. Fancy being able to remember where you put your keys when you entered the house 13 years ago, what dress you were wearing, and whether the cat had drunk its milk! Neither of the people mentioned in the article had been able to turn their memories to academic or professional advantage, there were just burdened by them.
All this reminded me of Borges' story, Funes the Memorious. Funes remembers everything, and it is an intolerable burden, and the death of thought:
We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day ... Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.
This has dramatic consequences for him, and his life - physically limited by being a bed-bound cripple - is mentally limited too:
He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion. Swift writes that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously make out the tranquil advances of corruption, of caries, of fatigue. He noted the progress of death, of moisture. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform world which was instantaneously and almost intolerably exact.
There is much more to the story than this, and its eight pages is a world of tragedy and mockery, philosophical speculation and daily toil. Funes the Memorious is in Labyrinths, and is a wonderful fictional counterpart to the idiot savants and their companions in Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, a series of compelling, beautifully written factual accounts of disabilities which amaze and teach us something profound about the working of the brain and the human condition, too.
Comments