'We, amnesiacs all…'
Greg Brown’s writing on forgetting reminds me of the amusing, unsettling, and profound Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, which I had a chance to visit earlier this week. To describe it as a wunderkammer isn’t quite accurate: to really understand, listen to this NPR segment on the museum, or read this interview with founder David Wilson.
Among the museum’s many enigmatic exhibits is one dedicated to the work of memory researcher Geoffrey Sonnabend and his three-volume opus, “Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter.” It’s the largest and most elaborate section of the museum, and for good reason: Sonnabend’s theories are a complex and elegant consideration of forgetting.
According to the exhibit, during a period of fruitless research into neural pathways in carp, Sonnabend suffered a nervous breakdown and withdrew to Brazil in 1936, where a view of Iguazú Falls and the voice of an amnesiac opera singer inspired him to write an elaborate new model of memory and forgetfulness over one sleepless epiphanic night. Though Sonnabend’s theory was a breakthrough, his eccentric life left his work ignored by most modern scholars.
In his view, memory is an illusion, created to hide the reality that all experience is forgotten. “We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present,” he writes in “Obliscence,” “have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events.”
Instead, Sonnabend holds that “there is only experience and its decay” — that the thing we know as memory is simply a set of decomposing moments of sensory perception, or “our experiencing the decay of an experience.” To illustrate this idea, he models experience and memory as a cone, static along a fixed axis, moving over time through a series of dynamic planes:
As the exhibit’s summary of Sonnabend explains:
In its most basic form Sonnabend’s model of obliscence consists of two elements: the Cone of Obliscence and the Plane of Experience (sometimes also known as plane experience).
All living things have a Cone of Obliscence by which the being experiences experience. This cone is sometimes also known as the Cone of True Memory (and occasionally the Characteristic Cone.) Sonnabend speaks of this cone as if it were an organ like the pancreas or spleen and like those organs its shape and characteristics are unique to the individual and remain relatively consistent over time. This cone (occasionally referred to as a horn) is composed of two elements - the Atmonic Disc (or base of the cone) which Sonnabend described as “the field of immediate consciousness of an individual” and the “hollows” (or interior of the cone). A third implied element of the Characteristic Cone is the Spelean Axis, an imaginary line which passes through the tip of the cone and the center of the Atmonic Disc. The Spelean Axis can be thought of as the individual’s line of sight or perspective, with the eye of the individual firmly held at the intersection of the Spelean Axis and the Atmonic disc.
The second element of the basic Sonnabend dyad — the Plane of Experience— is far more dynamic. Planes of Experience are always in motion, always (in Class I planes) moving from the Obverse Experience Boundary (or leading edge) to the Perverse Experience Boundary (or trailing edge).
As the cone, (human observation) passes through a plane (sensory perception), we percieve the intersection first as involvement in an experience, when the plane is first tangent to the cone, later as memory of that experience, as it passes further and the conic section narrows, and finally as a forgotten experience, once the cone has passed far enough that the plane no longer intersects, to somewhere beyond the single point to which the cone tapers. The thing we call memory is modeled “as a progressively constricting or diminishing disc,” a geometric metaphor for the way that “experiences pass and memories fade.”
It’s an interesting idea — that perhaps forgetting is not just an important counterpart to remembering, as Greg reminds us, but the only component of memory. And it makes some sense — how often do you discover that a childhood memory has decayed over the years as you share stories at the Thanksgiving table or peruse an old photo album? More important, it is a powerful way to think about memory. Though our Cones of Obliscense have varying slopes and heights, Jill Price’s is a cone of infinite height, and Ireneo Funes’s is not a cone at all, but a solid cylinder that extends forever, a visual analog to his endless memory.
Of course, the dedicated researcher may find Sonnabend’s work elusive. “Obliscense” remains out of print, his papers are inaccessible, and the finer details of his extraordinary life and research are sometimes ambiguous and contradictory. A devoted skeptic might write off his work altogether for lack of access to primary sources. But like the rest of us amnesiacs, he would be forgetting something.
