Writing and (a special kind of) memory

Writing is, on many levels, work with memories. How we remember dictates how we write. The more deficient our memory, the more frustrating our texts.

Writing involves remembering ideological, cultural stratagems proven to have worked in ideological, cultural pasts. It involves, as well, remembering strategies that didn't work according to the rules of the powers that be: dislocations, rebellions, sidesteps that enabled, at some point or other, a walk on the wild side, a new attempt, an innovation, a whiff of freshness, a step ahead. But these are large instances I'm talking about. They have social, communal resonances. They grow across groups and communities. They are not understood in terms of solitude or isolation.

What I'm interested in bringing up here, where I want to discuss the issue of memory in relation to writing, is something very personal, something impossible to dislocate from individuals. This kind of understanding of memory involves, most significantly, remembering the interior architecture of a writer's mind.

The angry writer

Like all technologies, which exist in order to be employed and are discarded as soon as they have fulfilled their purpose, writing is a means to an end. With writing, one uses a very specific technology in order to give visual shape to a mental preformation. As it's apparent from this very sentence, writing comes after something: after a thought, after an idea, after an outline, after a project, after a hope. It is its coming-after that makes writing both interesting and unreliable, since in this way writing appears as a second-tier operation, which not only relies on something else, prior to and possibly better than itself, but also on the representability of that 'something else.'

What is, indeed, absolutely necessary in order for any text whatsoever to be given form is the anterior existence of a conceptual preformation. Even to a Surrealist, who might argue that automatic writing is possible, thought formations (intentionality, agency, conscious use of writing technologies) are inevitable. So that every materialization (in writing or otherwise) is a materialization of an abstraction. We must agree at least on this. But by agreeing we also enter the territory where writing is at its most irritating. We enter the space where the task of writing angers the writer, where it causes mental blockages, where it generates psychoses.

A writer's frustration is often caused by this crucial difficulty they have in facing the shape, the sound, the colour of a thought. It often happens that I cannot, for the soul of me, turn the perfection I found in my mind into a sentence of equal perfection.

I am not bragging here when I say "perfection." All creative thoughts, mine or anybody else's, present themselves as perfections, insofar as they appear to us as yet-unmaterialized, i.e. yet-unspoiled by the intervention of tools, operations, conventions. A thought that exists in its state of thoughtness is perfect because it is. And also (less philosophically) because it makes us happy. A creative thought that matters always brings joy: on the one hand because of this pristine state in which it exists, and on the other hand because of the prospect it makes apparent: the possibility of something to appear from (apparently) nothing.

So when I find myself incapable of reproducing that thought, I am simply plagued by the pain of losing that former perfection.

Let's take the example of a description in a literary text. There's the place, there's me, the observer, there's the observation, there's the possibility opened inside my mind of describing that place. All elements are in place, and yet something is missing. And that something is the reason I'm failing in my attempt to write down the said description.

The missing thing

What I find out when I think about this situation is that it is not the world that's returning to me as a descriptive impossibility. Neither is there some lexical shortage that's causing this impotence in me. What I become aware of when I'm in this impasse is the presumably simple connection between my mind and the creative act I'm performing. What becomes apparent, I think, is that this connection has been severed. So that the world of thoughts and the world of words remain isolated from each other. But I want to see this severance as a problem of memory. What I lose when thoughts and words become separated is this memory of the perfection that once existed in my mind. And then I need to start employing stratagems. I start devising metaphors, word combinations, all in the hope of reproducing, through the most trivial of ways, the state of bliss that stood at the foundation of the entire exercise.

I would liken this situation to that situation familiar to all mortals: the thing that happens when we dream and then forget the very dream that had caused a stir in our mind. When we are compelled to recount such a dream to an outsider, we need to employ associations, we need to approximate, to invent, to build the entire dream anew, to create.

Did I do this?

As with dreams, we forget, in writing, the frenzy that lived in our mind, the state of exceptionality that caused a short-circuit in our mental apparatus. The complexity of the dream, its appeal, is equal to the enthusiasm I feel engulfed in when I find myself capable of a beautiful thought. Everything starts from this awe that comes back to me with every creative brainwork: 'Have I, indeed, been capable of such a feat of thinking?' This question, I have to admit it, is the expression of a reflective suspicion. With this wonderment, I implicitly concede that I have seldom imagined myself capable of thinking such thoughts, of conceiving such beauties, of conjuring up such efficiencies. And because this expression of stupefaction is so prominent, it overwhelms the very substance of the thought that I was about to express. In the dream state, it is the awakening that obliterates the dream: the surprise I experience at finding out that the dream has been mere phantasy, a Cartesian demon, perhaps, who has succeeded in deceiving me. This surprise, this terror I wake up to, is laid over the bridge between dreams and so-called reality. It is laid over it and, therefore, obliterates it. Hence the surprise, hence the loss of memory.

The way from thought to word is forgotten in a similar way. And all because of that state of stupefaction. 'Have I, really, been able of such perfection?'

The if of expression

It is only by discovering myself as capable of thinking (of producing/creating/building by means of mental processes) that I also find in me the need to discover expression. This is a realisation that caused Cioran to think that writing was a terrible mistake. This, as well as a deep mistrust in signification, which is (must be) on the agenda of all philosophers and artists. With the intervention of signs, the chaotic game of memories is shattered. Signs make memory unnecessary. A word, a painting, a cathedral, appear precisely in order to elude recollection. You don't need to remember the features of a text, the plot of a novel, an extraordinary line in a dramatic piece, the magnificence of a cathedral, since that text, that novel, that dramatic piece, that cathedral will be there for you tomorrow, next year, next decade. Every text is virtually immortal, virtually impossible to erase. Even if (or mostly when) nobody has read it.

A light bulb forgotten in a drawer doesn't lose its ability to shine, even if it has never been removed from its confinement. A word I'm writing on a page is a sign I am consciously employing in my attempt to re-create the consistency of a thought or, more precisely, in my attempt at making apparent writing's inherent potential to represent my thoughts.

To be noted: a potential is not a guarantee! That's why I'm so frustrated when things don't turn out the way I wanted: because I know it's possible, and because, at the same time, I know I'm not there yet.

All translations are by definition imperfect

'Getting there' is my problem. Getting-there which is, in fact, a question of remembering the way back – a question of returning. The return – the impasse of every translation, of every rendition.

It's not some insufficiency on the part of languages that makes me think of translation as impossible. I am rather inclined to think that the same model of the short-circuited memory is the one that can bring light to this impasse of rendition as well. I am incapable of perfect translations because I cannot remember which one of the multiple versions is the right one. Not to forget that this problem is also due to another defective memory, to which I don't have access at all: the memory of the original source, the first author. And so, from approximation to approximation, forward we move, authors and translators alike, all authors as translators, all translators as forgetful artists.

With these approximations, the problem of the transfer proves, once again, to be a problem of delivery. How to hand over the product without ruining the merchandise? How to transfer the thought without turning it into something else? How to use words to say what was there in the beginning, in the mind? I wish I had good answers to these questions. They would make me a perfect writer. But since I don't have them I am doomed to be what I've always been: a biped imperfection, an endless list of attempts.

The losing of dreams

There’s this game of cat-and-mouse we play with memory. I know I, for one, wake up sometimes after having dreamed the perfect sentence, the perfect combination of words. There’s this mist enveloping my head, this feeling of elation, from which I don’t want to depart but which I will have to destroy soon. Very, very fragile, this ecstasy. So fragile, it comes to me in fragments, not as a full-bodied article.

Light, the destroyer

Before my eyes open for good and light returns to rule over my world, there’s this state of in-betweenness, where things are still happening without a program, and where I find the texts I might be able to write – I find them perfectly formed, perfectly written. Only not on my page, not on my screen. They are there, in me, and yet not exactly there. I encounter them the way I encounter the accidents of my life, and I rejoice at seeing them (or rather feeling them) the way I rejoice at the sight of pregnant newness. Oh my god, I say. Oh my god, I've got it. I've nailed my best one ever. The words and everything – lined up in a beautiful string like beads queuing patiently after one another, everything making sense, everything making more sense than anything else. The thoughts – their hard surfaces and their soft malleability – their fragile being materialized in a state between states. The genial embrace of the muse through the blanket covering me head to toe. The feeling, the good feeling, covering me like a blanket too – I am it.

And then – damn, I wake up. And every time I ask: Why do I have to wake up? Why do I have to ruin this wonderful moment? Wakefulness brings about its own monsters – darker than the monsters of the night, harder – if not impossible – to push away. The stubborn monsters of reality, the menaces of daylight. They come and steal away my best sentences. They eat them up like they were slices of cake. The worst thing about these monsters of daylight is that they steal away my brilliant ideas, with that rapacious gluttony of ravenous ogres.

Source: Deviant Art

I find this in a poem by Tomas Tranströmer, and I know he means exactly what I’ve been saying so far.

“A dizzying commedia that is inscribed

inside the eyelids’ monastery walls.

A sole exemplar. There it is right now!

It is, in the morning, altogether erased.

The mystery of that great extravagance!

Obliteration… As when the tourist is stopped

by suspicious men in uniform –

they open his camera, unroll his film

and allow the sun to kill the pictures:

so dreams are blackened out by the light of day.”

And they say daylight is good… It may be for plants, but the photosynthesis of thoughts is different. Unlike plants, they grow well in darkness as well as in full light. Maybe better, sometimes.

The threshold

Tranströmer’s example is one that calls for some thinking.

You think: when there’s no way out for thought, one way will have to be invented. Take the gift of speech away, and you’re left with the gift of telling. Because speaking and telling are not the same thing – no way. The turning of one into the other is not a taken-for-granted metamorphosis. The pronunciation of words does not make the thought apparent. But telling – telling can be achieved without words. You can tell with your hands, with your eyebrows, with the color in your cheeks, with the trembling of Adam’s apple.

And so, the passing of speech into telling requires a threshold of its own. This threshold may be speech’s own progression into meaning, and at the same time its state of uncertainty: the point where it’s not yet clear if what you’re saying will be understood, if it will be made apparent in the form of something told. What is clear, though, is that not everything will pass through. The threshold is not only a passage but also a filter. Like a sieve that allows the water to leave while keeping the solids in place, it is a termination of something and an inception of something else. This is where speech loses its inarticulateness and where it starts to take the forms of meaning – where it becomes articulated.

The threshold. So many good moments died at the threshold between my nights and my days that I’m thinking: isn't it unfair that we depend so much on this state of conscious wakefulness to create things that are mostly irrational? Poetry comes from where reason gives up in embarrassment. Writing in general comes from the same regions, although there must be a secret potion somewhere that transforms writing-in-general into poems. It needs to pierce through all this barrage of reason, this unbearable daylight, in order to get back to where it is possible – to where poetry is not poetry but a dream, an event that hasn't occurred yet but which is about to take place.

Source: portland.net

At the threshold, there are no certainties. There are the things behind and the things ahead, none of which shine true. Behind and ahead are mere coordinates, not to be relied on. Since the ground is shaking, the only things I am left with are questions. Where is my muse now? Where is her promise to deliver the Idea? Is she hidden? Is she forbidden to cross the threshold? Am I left alone? Should I be worried?

If there’s a muse out there, she must be worried by the threshold, because this is where her mirage becomes apparent, where it is exposed as hallucination.

The archive

The situation in which I find myself when I forget this way and try to bring the forgotten back from the recesses of a memory that is not exactly memory (since, as I still believe, dreams come from a region that’s independent from mundane experiences, if often caused by them), this situation in which I try to bring to the surface something that lurked underground, i.e. under the ground of my conscience, is a writing situation. It is a writing situation insofar as it presents precisely the possibility of a recollection; but a recollection that is remembrance in the sense in which putting members together, when a body has been pulled apart, will not create the original body, but something else: something more monstrous, like a mere collection of members. Remembrance is recollection, no doubt.

When I wake up and realize that my words and my thoughts have flown away from me, that they are broken apart, I timidly formulate the hope that writing might be a salvation for me, because I've been taught (by whom? I can’t recall) to think of writing as an aid to memory. But also because (as I've learnt by myself) writing is more likely to be a storage system. If I could use this potential of writing to store, I would never be worried again about my thoughts slipping away. If only.

But as things stand, writing is nigh impossible at that threshold between the conscious state and the state of slumber. When I manage to cross this threshold what I am faced with is a series of sorry recollections. I see improbability and incompleteness when I try to view what’s happening at the threshold. I see my thoughts trying to take shape and failing. I see, therefore, the need for a system of recording; for an archive of sorts.

Source: Matrix

Writing, as a system of notation, is this rescue I am hoping to get from somewhere. But writing, I need to remind myself, is not a means of producing copies. Writing is not a copy of the thought, of the real, of the World. Writing is creation of worlds, of thought, of realities. So it cannot be the rescue I am hoping for. Even when I take pen and paper immediately after I wake up (the way some psychiatrists advise their patients in order to monitor their flow of dreams and the significance of recurrences), what I write on the paper never sounds complete. It does not have the same weight as the words/the thoughts I encountered in my sleep. Not even when I’m sure that I've put down the exact same words I heard/sensed in my dream, with the same inflection, with the same logical succession.

But can I ever be completely sure? With thoughts, as with texts, certainty is a risky enterprise. They can be anything and nothing at the switch of a button; at the crossing of a threshold.

Writing and naming (2)

There is a beautiful sentence in the beginning of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude:

“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

This is a world where humans enjoy the comfort of the index finger. The index finger is a guarantor of sincerity and of objectivity. Behind the index finger we cannot hide. It is too thin and too imperative to allow us such self-concealments. Most importantly, because it doesn’t contain an utterance, the index finger is true to nature. It does not represent anything; it only points out.

But once things become complicated in Macondo (in the world at large), once there is an inflation of objects, pointing is no longer sufficient. Language appears right here – at the moment when the index finger loses its referential power.

Of forgetting (again)

But the deluge of objects is not only the beginning of language; it is also the beginning of forgetfulness. A new problem appears along with the naming of things: how to remember what we’ve called this object, and this, and this?

When it is discovered that the sickness of insomnia had struck the town of Macondo, the Buendía men in One Hundred Years of Solitude devise a stratagem to impede forgetfulness (because insomnia, García Márquez explains, was not exactly about not-sleeping; it was about not-remembering: “a kind of idiocy that had no past”). This stratagem, this remedy is none other than the art and craft of Writing. In order to overcome the plague of forgetfulness, José Arcadio Buendía decides to brand the world:

“With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana.”

And then he is struck by the reality of writing: the fact that writing deceives, the fact that it transforms objects into signs:

“He realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.”

And henceforth the inscriptions he hangs from objects become detailed descriptions, whereby future readers are told, for instance, what a cow is and how it is to be used (fed, watered, milked, slaughtered).

Here is presented, in a fictional guise, the fundamental problem of writing as a form of deceit. Brought about as a promise to cure forgetfulness, writing severs the ties between world and language. And the cut is so deep, the damage is permanent. The world will never be the same.

Of how little we know

A name makes apparent a lack of knowledge on the part of the one who’s doing the naming. In the naming of a place, we make apparent how little we know about the place in question. Captain James Cook calling a place in New Zealand ‘Doubtless Bay’ – an excellent example.

"This bay I have named Doubtless Bay": James Cook's journal entry
recording the naming of a place completely foreign to him (1769)
Source: The Doubtless Blog

This is how the story goes (for my non-New Zealand readers). December 9^th, 1769; Sunday afternoon. Navigating along the eastern coast of northern New Zealand, Cook has this piece of land in sight. He comes very close but doesn’t land here, because he doesn’t know if the water in the bay is deep enough for safe navigation. Then some winds drag the ship away and he gives up. From a distance, however, he decides to call the spot Doubtless Bay, because this one thing is certain about the place: it is a bay. Simple as that. Trivial. Ridiculously uncomplicated, like the name itself. From the distance of a ship that never makes it to this shore, the place is given a name. The story is significant because it makes apparent the fundamental problem of distance: naming marks a separation between the place as a presence and the place as a document (the place as it exists and the place as it is written down).

Note: the bay was given a name not because James Cook was a professional baptizer, but because the gesture served the purpose of his expedition. Back in London, a few years earlier, he had been given the task of creating a map of the unknown (an imagined but much hoped-for southern continent). He had been sent to the Southern Seas to find a place invisible to the British Empire at home. He was to find this place and make it visible through writing. With the words ‘Doubtless Bay’ attached to its presence, the place becomes recognizable to the Empire, i.e. readable. Now, the place is written down. And as such, the name becomes a lie of the place (not to be mistaken for ‘the lie of the land,’ a technical term but not entirely exempt from a similar interpretation).

A doubt turned into a certainty; a lack of knowledge conveniently covered up by means of an arbitrary sign – a word. This is what naming is: a trick that helps us camouflage our inferiority.

Let’s face it: a place is far more than us; it is larger, it is smarter, it has been through what we can’t even imagine, it has come to us from aeons for which we don’t even have a proper means of calculation. So what do we do, when faced with this terrible embarrassment? What do we, humans, do? We cheat. We take a shortcut. We force the place to fit through the bottleneck of our language. We give the place a name for the record. So that it can be listed, catalogued, mapped, drawn, narrated, taught in schools, made into an encyclopaedia entry. In other words, we put the place to human use.

That’s why naming is lying.

Of babies and their curse

We name babies at a stage in their lives when we know absolutely nothing about them. And once the name has been approved, it becomes the label by which the child will be known for the rest of their lives. Through a mere word, we condemn the child to carry the burden of a lie in the telling of which he/she has had no part. We condemn them to carry about a sign of recognition: like a tag, like a yellow star, like a number tattooed on the skin. By means of this name, they will be easily told apart, isolated, policed, notified of their duties, slowly transformed into citizens. We tell them this name is their identity. And that’s a big fat lie, because their names are only words on paper. Their names are not the names of gods, which nobody is allowed to pronounce. And by the way, where is this interdiction coming from? Whence this fear of calling a god’s name? Not from some kind of dread that we might mispronounce the names of those we are obliged to venerate? That we might cause trouble among mortals by using a name where no name is possible other than the index finger?

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam.
The moment when man dropped the index finger.
Source: Wikipedia

The names of citizens are meant to be known, because they are not subjected to the divinity; they are subordinate to the state. Citizens are vassals, and vassal-ness can only be communicated in written form: through sealed agreements or coercions, through codices, through official documents, through nomenclatures.

Names, like anathemas. Like stigmata. Visible, readable. Names, the facts of our identities that somebody else has decided we needed in order to fare well through life. And all for the sake of writing. It could only be for the sake of writing; because (remember?) pointing us out could have been done through the use of the index finger, which requires no stress, no need to differentiate. Baptized by the index finger, we would have had a chance of living with the gods; maybe of being gods.

If it hadn’t been for our attachment to signs…

Why I think writing is super-human (2)

Let’s come again to why I think writing is super-human. The question put again. The question re-membered.

Writing is more like a divorce

You see now how close writing is to data storage, which is the thing we tend to associated with computers. They (writing and the computer) both preserve texts for the use of an entity different from the one that’s doing the storage. What this means, if I manage to put it into simpler words, is that mere storage – mere writing – is not sufficient if taken in isolation. A piece of text can stay where it has been written for thousands of years and be a masterpiece; nobody knows about it – it’s useless. So the text is nothing if not read. Reading is the soul of writing; it is the life blown into that text. Can you imagine an archive? Millions of texts sitting there; so many, it has been impossible for the whole team of archivists to go through them all – to even know what many of them contain. Those are dead texts. Inexistent texts, in spite of the fact that they are right there, in that confined space of the archive.

Writing is separation.
Source: www.astavki.com

And from the above sentence I arrive at another one: writing is separation. Only things cut away from their source can be stored. Right? Let’s take a look at our thoughts again. It wouldn’t be hard for us to agree that it’s impossible to pickle them inside our brain, like millennium eggs, and keep them there for eternity. No, that is not humanly possible. Maybe in the world of Funes the Memorius, but even there, some problem will arise at one point or other, and the whole castle will crumble, as attested by Borges, who would have liked things to be different.

So now, if we’re taking these thoughts to their logical conclusion, we may finally say that writing is not human. It is, indeed, super-human – not as in Superman, but as in prosthetics.

Writing is more like a fake limb

All forms of art (and writing is one) are prosthetic in nature. They do what we cannot do by means of our physical abilities. At the beginnings of science, the scientific disciplines were called arts – you probably knew that. So seeing further (telescopes) or deeper (microscopes), helping people walk when no limbs are in place – all this, of course, implies prosthetics. Prosthetics help the human individual do what he/she wouldn’t be able to do by using their limbs/bodies alone. And so with writing. It does something our minds cannot do: remembering.

iHand. Source: Designboom

For this reason alone, writing is, indeed, super-human. (The title of this piece finally makes sense.)

And now you’ll look upon your daily scribbling in a different way, won’t you? Nah. Maybe not. In fact, writing has become so closely tied to you – your breath, your heart beats, your blood pressure, your bone marrow – you don’t believe it possible for you not to have it. The thought of not having writing is perhaps more tormenting than the thought of being left alone in the middle of a jungle, snakes and tigers and tarantulas lurking around and looking at you from the dark with fiery eyes. That’s how deeply writing has penetrated into your blood stream. And it’s not at all a bad thing, because without this forgetting of writing’s nature we would never be capable of accepting other, more subtle, more sublime, more miraculous things enabled by writing. I say ‘Literature,’ and I need not go any further.

Let us not disparage writing, though

I said here things that have put writing in a bad light. I said it didn’t help memory. Well, it doesn’t – in principle. But writing is not entirely foreign to the things we remember. No. The device, alright, the device is the holder of the memory. That’s where we believe it’s safely deposited, like a bonus bond promising a certain return. But there’s a process taking place here. The very process of scribbling; of putting pen to paper. Well, it so happens that between pen and paper something occurs. And that’s a mental process: we activate the thought that will be immortalized on the page. This thought navigates from our brain to our hand, and from there not straight to the paper but to our brain again.

I say, to the brain again. How’s that? Well, writing doesn’t happen haphazardly. Yes, Master Plato, it doesn’t. It is the result of a mental process and it generates another mental process. If it weren’t this way, we wouldn’t be able to re-member with the device. We would not recognize the text. But as we very well know, when we see the post-it on the fridge we recognize it. We re-visit it. We recollect having known it before. Which means when we read the message we are in fact finding something we have always already been familiar with. We are returning that thing to the receptacle of our mind, where our mind rejoices at the sight of a dear old friend. What we recognize is not only our own handwriting, but the very nature of Writing itself: the inscription of marks on a solid surface. That, before anything else, appears to us as a recognition of writing. The device is showing us the way. (The Tao of Writing. Somebody should use this as a title somewhere.)

I just can't resist the association.
Source: www.peachesandhotsauce.com

This sounds good, I know. Feels good too. It feels like relief. We’re not so doomed to be Platonic failures, after all. But beautiful as this may seem, we need to realize that we won’t escape the device. Technology (and this is a word I haven’t used in my posts so far) is the grand mediator without which we would be left with a huge gap between us and the thing we like to call ‘the world.’

Proof? Don’t forget the way we store phone numbers in the phone’s internal memory. At least that. Oh, and maybe this as well, from Edgar Allan Poe:

“If you wish to forget anything, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”

Just to take us back to the post-it issue, and the super-human nature of writing.

Why I think writing is super-human (1)

Let’s try to clarify one thing about writing: its association with memory. Writing enables us to remember things – that’s how the saying goes. But I wouldn’t be so fast in perpetuating this almost dogmatically embraced dictum.

Let’s take a look at the most recent thing you’ve written. I don’t know – anything. Say, the email you’ve written this morning. How much of it can you remember? Really. Not just recollecting (which is a milder version of the same thing, don’t we agree?) but remembering: putting the members together. Got it? Re-membering. Yeah, that’s what I mean.

Writing is not (our) memory

So. How much can you remember? Let’s say, a lot. Let’s say the whole frigging thing – commas and full stops and exclamation marks and all. Every single thing, to the breath in your lungs while you were typing the message after having brushed your teeth with your favourite mint-flavoured tooth paste, and after having had your breakfast eggs the way you like them: sunny side down. Let’s say.

Wow. I’m hardly ever capable of that. I’m more of a Platonic type, you know. (Of this, a little later, though.) So well done you. Well done.

But.

If you say you’re so good at remembering things, I wonder: why did you need to write the whole damn thing? How is this feat of memory indebted to your having put all that stuff into words?

Of course, an email (you’ll say) is never written in order to remember anything, but in order to remind (presumably others). Not to re-member, but to re-mind. To re-mind. To make the mind feel good in repetition. But you are catching my drift, aren’t you? If not, check out another type of writing. Let’s take a post-it stuck to your fridge. Telling you that you need to buy milk and coffee. Now that’s a more accurate depiction of how we are made to remember through writing, right?

Wrooong!

You didn’t remember because of those words, but in spite of them. You remembered because you were endowed with a spectacular memory in the first place – you lucky thing you. You did not remember with the words on the paper but with the words in your mind. And in that mind of yours, in that beautiful receptacle of ideas, things are not written. Never. Not with a pen or pencil, no.

Source: TMG

Writing is more like putting things in a cupboard

The question that arises straight away is this: when we speak of memory, whose memory do we mean? Because, we need to admit it, some kind of memorisation is taking place every time we write. And we kind of agreed (have we?) that it’s not our memory, because ours is busy with all manner of things which are not written – cannot be written, unless we’re talking about writing in a metaphorical sense; but we don’t want to complicate things.

Here’s my thought: the memory we’re talking about belongs to the device: paper, computer, smart phone, tablet, piece of bark with incrustations on it, papyrus, wall, noticeboard – whatever. I mean the object itself, not the text upon it. It’s in the device that the text is placed. It’s in the device that we find what we stored earlier. So what does this make of the thing we call writing? Well, let’s say writing is not actually a form of memory. It is not mémoire (read this à la French, s’il vous plaît), but aide-mémoire. Help to memory, to be more precise: a prop, a prosthetic device.

Now we’re onto something. And that’s this: Writing is truly storage. It’s where we put things in order to find them later. Like a cupboard, if you like, or like your kitchen drawer. Or (yes, why not?) your bookshelf.

Do you understand now where our obsession with having things in the right place at all times comes from? Oh yes, we have derived it from another obsession, which is truly a necessity: the need to store. Since we can’t carry all our possessions with us everywhere we go, we need a safe place to put things to rest; to take them off our minds, in fact. Hence – writing, reading, and the whole OCD we have developed around correct reading, the ‘right way’ of texts, the ‘actual’ meaning, and so many other legends we’re not going to elaborate on here.

Source: Treasure Chest of Memories

So what was that thing that Plato said?

Theuth, the inventor god of numbers, calculation, geometry, astronomy, and writing, meets king Thamus to exhibit the extraordinary features of his arts. When it comes to writing, which he promotes as “a potion for memory and for wisdom,” Theuth goes:

“O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wised and will improve their memory.”

But the king, wiser himself than the god who’d spoken to him, finds the effects of writing “the opposite of what they really are,” and swears that those who employ the art of writing are doomed to millennia of stupidity:

“They will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.”

Plato is famous for this rejection of writing, in Phaedrus. The reason of his distrust is clear, I hope. Haven’t we, so many centuries after him, discovered the truth of Plato’s words when we started using the memory of our mobile phones rather than our own memory? We have given the device what has always been the device’s. We have embraced writing together with the reliance on its memory.

What can we say to Plato, then? Sorry, Sir, but among other things we have also discovered the pleasures that lie in the art of forgetfulness. Oh, yes, we have. We’ve built libraries and archives, we’ve conceived of human beings capable of remembering everything, and have invented machines that do so in real time. We have, in other words, fallen prey to the lures of this art, of this deceit. But man, we’re loving it.

(to be continued)