Tuesday, December 11, 2012

MEMORY

Judith: Man In Nursing Home Reacts To Hearing Music From His Era
Lena: Discussion: mnemosyne the Greek Goddess of memory and mother of the muses.

Labrinths and links to alchemy


Brian: Borges Labrinth

"Funes the Memorious"
Premise: I wish I could remember everything.
The narrator recalls his encounters in the 1880s with Ireneo Funes, an Uruguayan whose fall from a horse has left him paralyzed; but "when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories" (63). "In fact, Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it" . This gift becomes a curse of multiplicity, as Funes is unable to ignore precise differences between entities and thus is "incapable of ideas of a general Platonic sort" . The narrator realizes that "To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence" (66). "He thought that by the hour of his death he would not even have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood" .
Funes, the narrator reports, died of a "congestion" .

Book: 'The Future of Nostalgia': Boym: Svetlana Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities-St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JfYjmo5OA


Seoidín: Film clip (6 mins) from La jettee by Chris Marker (1962)


Brian: Third Memory Film clip from Dog Day Afternoon Pierre Huyghe:

A mode of perception that lies in the interstices between reality and its representation is the subject of his two-channel video, The Third Memory (2000), which reenacts the 1972 hold-up of a Brooklyn bank immortalized in Sidney Lumet's acclaimed film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Almost 30 years later, Huyghe provides a platform for the heist's charismatic mastermind, John Wojtowicz, to relate his version of that infamous day in a reconstructed set of the bank. However, rather than clarify the personal history that Hollywood wrested from him, Wojtowicz appears to have been heavily influenced by the film, a testament to the inextricable merging of real events, the distortions of memory, and the mediating power of popular culture.

Teresa: Reads her own writing from her MA Thesis
talks of influence from Bergson

Matter and Memory: "Bergson distinguishes two different forms of memory. On the one hand memories concerning habitude, replaying and repeating past action, not strictly recognized as representing the past, but utilizing it for the purpose of present action. This kind of memory is automatic, inscribed within the body, and serving a utilitarian purpose. Bergson takes as an example the learning of a verse by rote: Recitation tending toward non-reflective and mechanical repetition. The duration of the habitual recitation tends toward the regular and one may compare this kind of memory to a practical knowledge or habit. "It is habitude clarified by memory, more than memory itself strictly speaking." Pure memory, on the other hand, registers the past in the form of "image-remembrance", representing the past, recognized as such. It is of a contemplative and fundamentally spiritual kind, and it is free. This is true memory. Bergson takes as his example the remembrance of the lesson of learning the same verse, a dated fact that cannot be recreated. Pure memory or remembrance permits the acknowledgment that the lesson has been learned in the past, cannot be repeated, and is not internal to the body."

Judith: Music and memory - How music effects the minds of alzheimers patients:
Man in a nursing home

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