Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

"freedom depends on the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera

• Memory is accreted (like a seashell, armor, crystal) in our bodies and blood*, taking on a recognizable pattern, a body and meaning that can be called a life. when we are young and have no memory we have no such psychic detritus carried around us, but as we age we can't help picking up memories, symbols, songs, and attaching them to ourselves as sort of an addendum to that central self
• Thus we can say of an object, idea, person, moment, that it “gathers world” (ie: accrues meaning), which though often psychic or imaginative in nature can be displayed in a physical manner (wrinkles, collections of junk, crumbling, etc…)
• World itself could be considered an artifact of time, the shell or record (imprint) left behind by the movement of light/ life, in the way vinyl is a physical imprint of the sound waves of a song.
• Memory is not a recollection in the past, but a reconstruction in the present of what one images the past was like, and like dreams, may not bare any factual resemblance to what actually happened.+
• The longer ago something occurred, the less factual or clear the memory becomes. it is much easier to remember yesterday as it happened than last year, or childhood. as memory recedes it turns into myth (ie: its meaning takes on larger and metaphorical proportions turning the contents of our lives into a cohesive story instead of a disjointed series of circumstances).
• Memory is aided by symbolic, emotional, or physical cues (mnemonic triggers) in which the present reflects or replays some similar aspect of the past. music is an excellent example of this, hearing the first strains of a song related to your first relationship can years later still bring tears to your eyes.
• Object-bound (codified) memory is called history, imagination-based memory is called dream, or in the collective, myth. history is no more factual than myth, as both are perspectives relating event to meaning. and as myth is an amalgamation of countless archetypified memories, so is history a collective story we build around ourselves (in the world) in order to give ourselves a sense of time
• Media (writing, recordings, photographs, etc.) act as External Memory Devices, in that they take on the burden of memory into a physical object, thus removing any dreamlike/ mythic qualities of the memory. the current proliferation of EMDs marks a transition from myth to history, as well as the view of World from mind (“God”) to one large medium (artifact, the husk or corpse of “God”)
• While memory remains in imagination (subjective), it is fluid, malleable, and can take on whatever perspective or meaning the rememberer chooses. in a process similar to Dreaming Back, “bad” memories, moments of failure, anger, regret, can be re-remembered in a different light, one that allows the rememberer to get over or move past certain negatively ingrained perspectives or hang ups, thus altering where they stand in the present, as well as what they can make of their future.
• When a memory calcifies into history (becomes objective/ objectified), it is no longer fluid and can no longer be re-remembered in a different angle (unless of course the process of objectification is one of re-remembering), as it is no longer in the world itself. this also means that the memory is no longer personal, and belongs to the collective store of memory, the Record, and thus available to anyone as a memory of their own life. this is particularly true in ages of hyper-information, like this one, where the contents of individuals’ daily lives are offered up and become more readily available to strangers than ones own childhood. an example is a song coming on he jukebox and everyone singing along, even if they do not know the words or hadn’t heard the song before. what this means in terms of collective myth remains to be seen.
• With this vast store of memories to draw on, it would seem the artist should have no end of themes and experiences to draw on, effectively being bale to take on any life that is presented to them. However, art that is drawn from one’s own emotions and experiences rings the most true, as it has been lived, and the artist must be wary of assuming experiences that have no relation to their own. yet there is a balance to be found in taking the historicized memories and already written works of art of the collective and running them through one’s own experiences to create art that is both true and able to touch upon those deepest and most common themes of being human: love, death, family, struggle, the search for place and meaning. this could now be said to be the task of the modern artist, to take these themes that are available in the collective memory and return them to the fluidity of the subjective, where they are once again able to be reshaped or re-dreamed into whatever form imaginable or desirable, and thus to recreate the lost sense of myth in our culture. as Joseph Campbell put it: “dreams are private myths, and myths are collective dreams.”


• * memory and the body– one talks about having intellectual memories, emotional memories, muscle memory (the learning of physical tasks to a subconscious level). really, this separation of memories is a misnomer, as mind and emotion exist nowhere but in the body. there is only physical memory, the storing of tensions in muscle, the decay of skin cells with age, the patterning of genes, which can be read on a variety of different levels. take for example accounts of a person doing yoga for the first time, or receiving a strenuous massage. memories stored in the muscle tension are released and they have a flashback to that memory, effectively reliving the primary experience. however, most of us are not nearly so attuned to our bodies as to have such visceral remembrances.

• + time and memory– the trichotomy of past/ present/ future is also a misnomer, and the perception of time as a linear flow is an illusion, although sometimes a convenient one. Really all we live in is the present, and any perceptions of past or future are but imaginative extrapolations of this one current moment. a kind of subjunctive pattern recognition in which we can assert a sense of causality and desire in order to effectively plan our next action, and feel not so lost in the chaos of sensory data. as World accrues meaning, like seashells or thorns buried in the skin, so does times (our sense of eventuality or continuation) leave shards or ripples of itself in the periphery of our experiencing. these objects of memory are interpreted as a “coming from” that “goes somewhere,” and give us a reason and context for our present. it is also possible to remember the future, interpreting the present pattern in a manner that points to what will happen (prophecy).