Memorious

Borges’ - “Funes, the Memorious”: Digital Memory & Digital Memories (Spring, 2014)

https://medium.com/@donnamillerwtts/memorius-ness-6c799bad28d8

In “Funes, the Memorious”, Jorge Luis Borges’ narrator describes his acquaintance with the amazing Ireneo Funes, of the spectacular memory. The narrator meets Funes in his youth, and jokingly refers to him as “The Human Chronograph.” After a fall that paralyzes him, Funes’ memory takes over his entire state of being; although perhaps it would be just as accurate to say his entire being takes over his entire memory, and both are expanded. The story reaches a climax of sorts as the narrator reveals the full extent of Funes’ memory and consciousness, and in doing so, adds on to what the reader begins to understand is a collective consciousness ever enlarged, yet, always stuffed full.

Funes reads from Pliny’s Historius Naturalis, from what the narrator tells us is the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book, the subject of which is memory. The last words are “..ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum.” Translated: “So that, nothing that has been heard can be retold in the same words.” Funes enumerates things in the world according to his reverse-digital system: Numbers are transformed into nouns: “…in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar,” and in the transformation, the analysis made possible by mathematics is impossible, at least on the “front-end” of Funes’ memory.

“Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.”

These two statements illustrate the mystery of Funes: He is an ever-vigilant recorder, and a repository of the minutest memories and perceptions, yet he collects without forgetting and is thus an involuntary hoarder, a junkman of the mind. Funes’ memories, which accumulate upon each and every second of existence, consume his experience, even as the experience of his present immediately becomes memory, experiencing, producing, storing, and experiencing the memory of the experience.

Reading historical texts provides no balm for this condition, for which Funes does not desire a cure, because each new reading and re-reading is a new experience, each new utterance, a new piece of consciousness, all of which must be stored. Borges’ naming of this character with the prefix to the Spanish and Portuguese word for ill-fated — funesto — provides us with a judgment of such an existence.

Funes’ state is a kind of pure consciousness without breakpoints. His extreme memory and hyper-real perceptions recall the vast amounts of information, the scrupulous and minute perceptions and recountings of details of mundane life available on the vast arrays of information repositories, cloud instances, and the Internet as a whole. Relentless indexing of any information that has been exposed to digital nets, countless personal recollections, interior monologues, and even homework assignments, live in perpetuity in “the ether.”

The rise of cloud computing gives all information a greater persistence. There is much repetition of information and experience in tweets of re-tweets that have been re-tweeted. Crowd-sourced repositories and crowd-sourced databases and Wikis re-tell existing vetted sources of information along with new informal sources of information, and this information is recycled again in school papers, marketing materials and personal conversations. Obviously, social networks and sharing sites expand the collective hoarded memory further. And while we name every capability and site only after an assiduously conducted name search, ultimately, the named properties and everyday objects of the digital age cloak numbers, in their constituent pieces, and directives.

I may be stretching and distorting the elegance of Borges’ story to call up a point others have made about digital existence today, when I say that this story made me think of the digital memory management, data storage, and personal data-sharing challenges societies face as we push along our age’s timeline. And yet, as Borges writes:

“The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.”

Is Funes’ memory a garbage disposal that is only to be emptied upon his death at 19? How can digital societies address the continual, compulsive, automated indexing and information accounting, storing, recounting, re-saving that is ongoing, along with the energy demands of these activities? Funes’ memory is not contained at his death; it lives on anew with each re-telling, each new reading of his story.

In this story, Funes becomes a kind of consciousness of the world and all it puts before him: imbibing, recording, archiving, seeing experiences in eight dimensions. The sip of wine becomes the glass, where it was blown, the vines, what the sun looked like as the grapes grew. I admire this story because it hails from the past to meet our digital presents and futures, while at the same time, in its intense descriptions of Funes’ extreme experience, it recalls heightened memory- and sense-experiences that each of us has had, at some point, in life.

We are recording and archiving so much of our lives that I think many are missing the lived, felt, experiences of life, however immediate the modern recording media may be. I wonder whether or not this may contribute to a shallowness of experience about which much has been written recently.

If you are always recording, saving, and archiving, you already have one foot outside of an experience. I am here and I am recording myself here. There’s the unseen or maybe acknowledged current or future audience with you, experiencing your experience of the experience which includes your recording of all of it. And what’s more, the experience may be something like…what I had for dinner, how I am doing my hair, etc. I understand this kind of compulsive recording and saving activity for chronicling the growth and development of one’s children and family, but for many, the recording and archiving is a way of life over which they seem to exercise little conscious control.

What does this mean for human memory? At a rare family event a few years ago, I asked my brother, a professional photographer, whether or not he wanted a photo someone had taken of a particularly sweet scene during the event. He said no, that he wanted to remember the image, the scene, instead. In his casual answer, it struck me that the more photos, accounts, and recordings we take, look at, have, archive, of moments of our lives, the thinner our experience of them in non-digital memory may become. In light of this potential overload, could human memories become richer without extreme reliance on digital artifacts?

Under optimal circumstances (nutrition, rest, time of day, etc.), memories rise and fall, depending on need and associations. Memory is elastic, and while many pieces of information will fall by the wayside, other pieces will be ordered, placed in deep memory, emerge only in dreams, or will sit on one’s forehead-desktop awaiting our call. These orderings and placements change dynamically, as we live our lives.

As scientists work further on data storage models that approach the brain’s elasticity, incorporating biology and nanotechnology, the energy demands for physical storage will eventually decrease, though this science and engineering may take longer than we hope. We imagine that records like surveillance tapes in markets and other places of commerce are purged periodically, or perhaps even degrade “naturally”(?). We imagine that the volumes of superannuated code, under the stewardship of software, digital advertising, and Internet corporations and organizations, are retired, gradually but finally. However, even as digital data decompose, the archiving, the preservation of new information, new data, new-old data, continues unabated and supplants what has disappeared.

I have very few pictures of myself as a child: Only those taken at school or at a weird little photo studio where my grandmother had us photographed as present and correct, once a year. Yet I have very rich memories of childhood experiences. I know these “memories” are not necessarily accurate, because I also know that human memory is unreliable.

Still, I suspect that human memory travels in the opposite direction of the recorded “tangible” memory artifact of a photograph, video or audio recording. Instead of having a thinning effect on one’s experience of the past, human memory qualifies, moves, and extends experience, even as it contains miles of mis-rememberings. While one’s own memories may contain their own immutable, chronological truths in the ways that one’s mind calls them up and patches them together, it is in these memories, accurate or embroidered upon through time and associations, like the unending trails and numerical translations of Funes, that one can begin to see how stories evolve–one’s own and those of others.