Recycling ...

Recycling, this time relating to creativity and imagination, is key because if one cannot forget, the ability to create becomes impossible, something beautifully expressed by Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer able to write about dreams, information and creativity in ways most powerful and eloquent without question.

I GO BACK: Jorge Luis Borges, the celebrated Argentine novelist, cultivated a powerful memory from a young age to compensate for a condition that caused him to lose his sight later in life. He memorized many of his favorite texts. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

In 1942, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published a short story called “Funes the Memorious.” The unnamed narrator recounts a story from his memory, which centers on a Uruguayan man named Ireneo Funes. The narrator learns Funes has fallen off his horse, hitting his head and leaving him housebound. Not long after, Funes contacts the narrator, asking to borrow some of his books in Latin, which is the narrator’s specialty. He gives Funes a selection of his most difficult Latin texts, ones that he has trouble making sense of himself.

A few days later, when the narrator goes to collect his books, he finds that Funes has memorized, in just a matter of days, long and complicated passages in Latin, despite no prior knowledge of the language. Funes tells the narrator that, ever since the accident, his memory has changed. He no longer can forget. As Funes describes it, his experience is now of one “intolerable richness and sharpness.” Whereas the rest of us look out and see a tree here, a group of people there, Funes sees the pixel-level information, frame by frame. Because he retains the full clarity of these scenes in memory, his memories have indistinguishable precision when compared to his present reality.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, a useless mental catalogue of all the images of his memory) are senseless, but they betray a certain

stammering grandeur. They permit us to glimpse or infer the nature of Funes' vertiginous world. He was, let us not forget,  an almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the word dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) 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 every time he saw them. 

With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.

"In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.” In the morning, the narrator leaves for Buenos Aires. He never sees Funes again

1 point perspective ... 2020

The act of memory is an act of imagination.

Memory provides the building blocks for mental time travel.

I wish I had penned these. :)