Intimate Stranger by Breyten Breytenbach

Author:Breyten Breytenbach
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Published: 2009-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

(mirror note 4)

Is the mirror the memory? Is it not true that memory is always in the present tense, with the tenseness of the unpassed present? In his Imaginative Horizons the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano quotes Saint Augustine famously claiming that memory “is like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses. In it are stored away all the thoughts by which we enlarge upon or diminish or modify in any way the perceptions at which we arrive through the senses, and it also contains everything else that has been entrusted to it for safe keeping, until such times as these things are swallowed up and buried in forgetfulness.” And later on he has Augustine suggesting that it is “a sort of stomach of the mind.” Which brings one by the ways of nature to digestion and to reflections on flatulence (a tautology, surely). To excretion. That which has not been absorbed, “buried in forgetfulness” (the mind), will be shat in words. And how are we to preserve the crap? Never before in the history of mankind has so much memory been created so effortlessly, odorlessly saved in electronic files, disseminated in blogs; never before have we been able to access and to log on so broadly. All together, in pealing silence, we establish an all-inclusive virtual consciousness. We could say God. How to stock it in time though? Soon we will not be able to access it — support, software, programs, the machines themselves will be nullified by time and become obsolete. As we forge and spread and imagine we wipe out. We will know everything and remember nothing. There will be no origin, only process. We will be the immaculately conceived offspring of Narcissus. The stomach will be a forgotten myth, the ass a dry mouth.

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