Mnemotechny (1)

Gary Wolf's article immediately brought to mind one of Borges' short stories Funes, el Memorioso.

Borges had a precociously shrewd position on mankind's relationship with information, coupled with a prescient understanding of the key dilemmas that the Information Age would expose.

Funes is a crippled street-kid from a small town in Uruguay in the 1880s suffering from an reverse aphasia involving 'perfect' memory and perception.

"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. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he would scarcely have finished classifying even all the memories of his childhood."

A consequence of this condition is that Funes is "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."

With his imagination overawed by particulars, Funes lives in a darkened room, able to attain the abstraction of sleep only with difficulty. He spends his days mentally reconstructing other entire days. (A version of Borges' metaphor of the map that perfectly matches the terrain.)

The narrator uncovers an important paradox: "Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details."

"All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed. Perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything there is to know."

Wolf recounts his amused astonishment when Ted starts camcording his notebook during an interview - an apparently obsessive behaviour that the journalist associates with the pathology of ADD. Yet perhaps Ted is subconsciously laying down a perfect Borgian map to his thinking, or maybe even a complex set of breadcrumbs which can be put together in any number of ways to trace a pathway through all the particulars he's gathered. (Does it ever reach its destination?)

In conversation at least, Ted seems to be delegating part of his attention to a recording device. Whether or not that frees up his mind to perceive things differently is an interesting question, but he does seem to converse in unconventional ways.