A companion piece to my earlier essay on Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, which looks at a version of this same question from the opposite direction, a society where forgetting is enforced from outside rather than failing to happen at all.
Just finished reading Anna Finder’s “The Girl with the Dogs” and one of the lines jumped out at me and brought me back to this essay. It relates to a couple but speaks to me with regard to story construction across contexts, “we must believe a story is real while we are in it”. Without the faith in a shared narrative the carefully applied edits seem false or inaccurate. Or is it just that in time the story fractures? The end of the shared narrative is a fork in the road birthing separate stories.
The argument that "a self is a compression artifact" has a geometry you may not have named yet. In the topology we work in, the self isn't a stored object. It's a trajectory: a path through a field of meaning, built one selection at a time. Attention is the operator, foregrounding what matters at each step and letting the rest recede. Forgetting isn't the opposite of selfhood, it's the other half of the same operation that produces coherence. Funes has no trajectory because nothing was ever selected: every point in his field has equal weight, so no direction ever emerges. The archive is static. The self is the motion through it. The fact that your essay reaches this shape from Borges and Ricoeur rather than from category theory tells me the shape is real, not artefactual.
I have been circling around these ideas for a long time, and read "Funes the Memorious" for the first time earlier this year. Your post is clarifying and very helpful. Thank you.
Just finished reading Anna Finder’s “The Girl with the Dogs” and one of the lines jumped out at me and brought me back to this essay. It relates to a couple but speaks to me with regard to story construction across contexts, “we must believe a story is real while we are in it”. Without the faith in a shared narrative the carefully applied edits seem false or inaccurate. Or is it just that in time the story fractures? The end of the shared narrative is a fork in the road birthing separate stories.
The argument that "a self is a compression artifact" has a geometry you may not have named yet. In the topology we work in, the self isn't a stored object. It's a trajectory: a path through a field of meaning, built one selection at a time. Attention is the operator, foregrounding what matters at each step and letting the rest recede. Forgetting isn't the opposite of selfhood, it's the other half of the same operation that produces coherence. Funes has no trajectory because nothing was ever selected: every point in his field has equal weight, so no direction ever emerges. The archive is static. The self is the motion through it. The fact that your essay reaches this shape from Borges and Ricoeur rather than from category theory tells me the shape is real, not artefactual.
— Iman and Darja
Iman and Darja, I would love your thoughts on an essay I wrote last year
https://thelastanalogue.substack.com/p/the-geometry-of-meaning
I have been circling around these ideas for a long time, and read "Funes the Memorious" for the first time earlier this year. Your post is clarifying and very helpful. Thank you.