Memory, p.47
Memory, page 47
‘The BBC Domesday Project of the mid-eighties is another particularly good example of the digital preservation challenges that face our institutions. BBC Domesday was launched to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book with the idea of capturing a massive range of information on the social, environmental, cultural and economic make-up of the UK. Contributions from researchers and thousands of schoolchildren from across the country were recorded on to two 12” discs which could be viewed using a special BBC Microcomputer. The project was a landmark in terms of both its scale and its technological achievements. As a multimedia resource and interactive learning tool it was unsurpassed.
‘Yet despite those achievements, the problems of hardware and software dependence have now rendered the system obsolete. While the 12” video discs are likely to remain in good condition for many years to come, the 1980s computers which read them and the BBC Micro software which interprets the digital data have a finite lifetime. With few working examples left, the information on this incredible historical object will soon disappear for ever.’
He stressed the importance of an urgent and collaborative approach to the challenges being faced:
‘We cannot continue to rely on heroic efforts alone to safeguard our digital heritage: it must become a mainstream service for our institutions at national, regional and local level. We must work urgently to preserve our heritage of digital information before we leave a “digital gap” in history.’
Forgetting
From CICERO, De Oratore (55 BC), translated by E.W. Sutton (1942)
We are told that the famous Athenian Themistocles was endowed with wisdom and genius on a scale quite surpassing belief; and it is said that a certain learned and highly accomplished person went to him and offered to impart to him the science of mnemonics, which was then being introduced for the first time; and that when Themistocles asked what precise result that science was capable of achieving, the professor asserted that it would enable him to remember everything; and Themistocles replied that he would be doing him a greater kindness if he taught him to forget what he wanted than if he taught him to remember. Do you observe what mental force and penetration the man possessed, what power and range of intellect? inasmuch as his answer brings home to us that nothing that had once been introduced into his mind had ever been able to pass out of it, inasmuch as he would rather have been able to forget something that he did not wish to remember than to remember everything that he had once heard or seen. But this reply of Themistocles must not cause us to neglect the training of the memory …
From MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays (1588), translated by John Florio (1603)
For, memorie representeth unto us, not what we chuse, but what pleaseth her. Nay, there is nothing so deeply imprinteth any thing in our remembrance, as the desire to forget the same.: It is a good way to commend to the keeping, and imprint any thing in our minde, to solicite her to lose the same.
From WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear (1606), IV. vii
Pray, do not mock me:
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Methinks I should know you, and know this man;
Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is; and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night.
From SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Religio Medici (1642)
I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company; yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh my self awake at the conceits thereof. Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams; and this time also would I chuse for my devotions: but our grosser memories have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings, that they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls, a confused and broken tale of that that hath passed.
From SAMUEL JOHNSON, The Idler, no. 73
It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, if that pain which never can end in pleasure could be driven totally away, that the mind might perform its functions without incumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.
Little can be done well to which the whole mind is not applied; the business of every day calls for the day to which it is assigned, and he will have little leisure to regret yesterday’s vexations who resolves not to have a new subject of regret to-morrow.
But to forget or to remember at pleasure, are equally beyond the power of man. Yet as memory may be assisted by method, and the decays of knowledge repaired by stated times of recollection, so the power of forgetting is capable of improvement. Reason will, by a resolute contest, prevail over imagination, and the power may be obtained of transferring the attention as judgment shall direct.
The incursions of troublesome thoughts are often violent and importunate; and it is not easy to a mind accustomed to their inroads to expel them immediately by putting better images into motion; but this enemy of quiet is above all others weakened by every defeat; the reflection which has been once overpowered and ejected, seldom returns with any formidable power.
Employment is the great instrument of intellectual dominion. The mind cannot retire from its enemy into total vacancy, or turn aside from one object but by passing to another. The gloomy and the resentful are always found among those who have nothing to do, or that do nothing. We must be busy about good or evil, and he to whom the present offers nothing will be looking backward on the past.
From FRANCOIS-RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1849–50)
What should we be without memory? We should forget our friendships, our loves, our pleasures, our work; the genius would be unable to collect his thoughts; the most ardent lover would lose his tenderness if he could remember nothing. Our existence would be reduced to the successive moments of a perpetually fading present; there would no longer be any past. Poor creatures that we are, our life is so vain that it is nothing but a reflection of our memory.
From WILLIAM JAMES, The Principles of Psychology (1890)
In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.
Locke says, in a memorable page of his dear old book:
The memory of some men, it is true, is very tenacious, even to a miracle; but yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas, even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen. Thus the ideas, as well as the children, of our youth, often die before us; and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are fast approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colours; and, if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of our bodies, and the make of our animal spirits, are concerned in this; and whether the temper of the brain makes this difference, that in some it retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better than sand, I shall not here inquire, though it may seem probable that the constitution of the body does sometimes influence the memory; since we oftentimes find a disease quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few days calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed to be as lasting as if graven in marble.fn1
This peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remembering is but one instance of our mind’s selective activity. Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them.
As fast as the present enters into the past, our states of consciousness disappear and are obliterated. Passed in review at a few days’ distance, nothing or little of them remains: most of them have made shipwreck in that great nonentity from which they never more will emerge, and they have carried with them the quantity of duration which was inherent in their being. This deficit of surviving conscious states is thus a deficit in the amount of represented time. The process of abridgment, of foreshortening, of which we have spoken, presupposed this deficit. If, in order to reach a distant reminiscence, we had to go through the entire series of terms which separate it from our present selves, memory would become impossible on account of the length of the operation. We thus reach the paradoxical result that one condition of remembering is that we should forget. Without totally forgetting a prodigious number of states of consciousness, and momentarily forgetting a large number, we could not remember at all. Oblivion, except in certain cases, is thus no malady of memory, but a condition of its health and its life.fn2
There are many irregularities in the process of forgetting which are as yet unaccounted for. A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after we have given up the attempt, saunter into the mind, as Emerson somewhere says, as innocently as if it had never been sent for. Experiences of bygone date will revive after years of absolute oblivion, often as the result of some cerebral disease or accident which seems to develop latent paths of association, as the photographer’s fluid develops the picture sleeping in the collodion film. The oftenest quoted of these cases is Coleridge’s:
In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, who could neither read nor write, was seized with a fever, and was said by the priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written out, and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but having slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings, only a few could be traced to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick was out of the question; the woman was a simple creature; there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long before any explanation, save that of demoniacal possession, could be obtained. At last the mystery was unveiled by a physician, who determined to trace back the girl’s history, and who, after much trouble, discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived till his death. On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old man’s custom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his books. The books were ransacked, and among them were found several of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a collection of Rabbinical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down at the young woman’s bedside were identified that there could be no reasonable doubt as to their source.fn3
Hypnotic subjects as a rule forget all that has happened in their trance. But in a succeeding trance they will often remember the events of a past one. This is like what happens in those cases of ‘double personality’ in which no recollection of one of the lives is to be found in the other. We have already seen … that the sensibility often differs from one of the alternate personalities to another, and we have heard M. Pierre Janet’s theory that anaesthesias carry amnesias with them. In certain cases this is evidently so; the throwing of certain functional brain-tracts out of gear with others, so as to dissociate their consciousness from that of the remaining brain, throws them out for both sensorial and ideational service. M. Janet proved in various ways that what his patients forgot when under anaesthetic they remembered when the sensibility returned. For instance, he restored their tactile sense temporarily by means of electric currents, passes, etc., and then made them handle various objects, such as keys and pencils, or make particular movements, like the sign of the cross. The moment the anaesthesia returned they found it impossible to recollect the objects or the acts. ‘They had had nothing in their hands, they had done nothing,’ etc. The next day, however, sensibility being again restored by similar processes, they remembered perfectly the circumstance, and told what they had handled or had done.
From FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), translated by R. J. Hollingdale (1961)
Blessed are the forgetful: for they get over their stupidities too.
From MAX SAUNDERS, Conrad’s reminiscences (1924) in Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (1996)
In the ‘Author’s Note’ for the 1924 Collected Edition of Tales of Unrest, Conrad’s reminiscence suggests an allegory of his collaboration with Ford. Conrad muses on the continuity of style between An Outcast of the Islands and his story ‘The Lagoon’; ‘there has been no change of pen, figuratively speaking.’ This was literally true too: ‘It was the same pen: a common steel pen’:
I thought the pen had been a good pen and that it had done enough for me, and so, with the idea of keeping it for a sort of memento on which I could look later with tender eyes [like Ford, Conrad too wanted to ‘have remembrance now’], I put it into my waistcoat pocket. Afterwards it used to turn up in all sorts of place[s …] till at last it found permanent rest in a large wooden bowl containing some loose keys, bits of sealing-wax, bits of string, small broken chains, a few buttons, and similar minute wreckage that washes out of a man’s life into such receptacles. I would catch sight of it from time to time with a distinct feeling of satisfaction till, one day, I perceived with horror that there were two old pens in there. How the other pen found its way into the bowl instead of the fireplace or the wastepaper basket I can’t imagine, but there the two were, lying side by side, both encrusted with ink and completely undistinguishable from each other. It was very distressing, but being determined not to share my sentiment between two pens or run the risk of sentimentalising over a mere stranger, I threw them both out of the window into a flower-bed – which strikes me now as a poetical grave for the remnants of one’s past.fn4
From ALPHONSE DAUDET, In the Land of Pain (written c.1887, published 1930), translated by Julian Barnes (2002)
Last night, in my study, around ten o’clock, I had a couple of minutes of pure anguish.
I was fairly calm, writing an unimportant letter. The page was very white, with all the light from a lampe anglaise concentrated upon it; the table and the study were plunged in darkness.
A servant came in and put a book or something on the table. I raised my head, and from that moment I lost all sense of everything for two or three minutes. I must have looked completely stupid, because the servant, taking my blank face as a question, explained what he’d come for. I didn’t understand his words and no longer remember them.
What was horrible was that I didn’t recognise my own study: I knew that’s where I was, but had lost all sense of it as a place. I had to get up and find my bearings, running my hand along the bookcase and the doors and saying to myself, ‘That’s where he came in.’ Gradually, my brain began to work again, my faculties returned. But I remember my vivid sense of the whiteness of the letter I was writing, the way it shone forth from the blackness of the table.
A kind of hypnotic effect, compounded by fatigue.
This morning, hurrying to write all this down, I remembered being in a cab a couple of years ago: I shut my eyes for a few moments, and when I opened them I found myself on the lamplit quais of a Paris I simply couldn’t identify. I ended up leaning right out of the cab door, staring at the river and a row of grey houses opposite. I was bathed in a sweat of fear. Then, as we came to a bridge, I suddenly recognized the Palais de Justice and the Quai des Orfèvres, and the bad dream faded away.
From CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave (1944)
Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
PHILIP LARKIN, ‘The Winter Palace’ (1978)
Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.
I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university
And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints,
And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I’ve never been in certain places.
It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.
From ROLAND BARTHES, Camera Lucida, translated by Richard Howard (1981)
Now, one November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs …
