Synaptic Memory/ Historical Memory

Codex of the Synapse: Folio A3.1

"Be sure to use glazes to make distant features appropriately foggy and vague. Obscuring of detail communicates distance in the landscape. Omission of information is in itself information, which creates spatial clarity, orients the viewer, and places him in the world you have created."

Winston Crowe, How to Paint a Landscape

[John] Von Neumann possessed a genuine photographic memory. If you gave him the page number from any book he had ever read, he could recite the contents exactly, word -for-word. His memory was so relentless that he struggled with insanity, because the clarity of events in the distant past equaled those of the present. He could see a lecture, for instance, and not know whether he was witnessing it at that moment, or if, in fact, he had attended it ten years earlier. Eventually, Von Neumann managed to preserve his sanity, by learning - with heroic mental discipline - the skill of forgetting.

Olivia D. Amos, A Manhattan Project Diary

Memory is a subtractive process, like carving a shape from a block of marble. From the moment an event is experienced in totality, we begin to forget. Things fall away, leaving the negative space around the fragment that remains. The remnant is an island in the vast sea of forgotten experience that defines the memory. With no forgetting there can be no memory.

The space vacated by things forgotten does not remain a vacuum, however. The Keepers believe that equilibrium must be maintained, and the gaps are instantly filled with other memories. These memories, however, recall things that never occurred. They are manifestations of ambient Pattern Language. Pattern Language, bearing the harmonic imprints of one or several neighbor-lattices enters the space vacated by memory decay, forming a Synaptic Memory. This "world-memory" resembles exactly a personal, or historical memory, except that it records details that never happened in the life of the subject. Instead, it recalls images translated from the emissions of neighbor worlds. The whole memory subtly changes as decayed memory is replaced by sense impressions originating from the world next door.

Eventually the space once occupied by a historical memory is totally replaced by the "memory", or vision, of another world. This vision is not alien to us, however, because it assumes the form of images from our own local-world. The neighbor-world is phrased in the native vocabulary of our own memory. As such, it belongs to us, as much as any cherished recollection would. In the end we make no distinction.

The Keepers use the words "memory" and "world" interchangeably. To them, no difference exists between the memories contained in Memory Forest, and Worlds contained in the Synapse.

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