TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070389/07038900.010

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.2 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 74

Disorders of Memory


By Charles Krauthammer


    Washington is in the grip of a memorial epidemic. The
success of the Vietnam Memorial has spawned demand for more.
Memorials are in progress to Korean War vets, to black
Revolutionary War patriots, to women in military service, to
law-enforcement heroes, to women in Vietnam, to Francis Scott
Key, to Kahlil Gibran (!). The hunger for memory etched in
stone is exactly what one would expect from a culture that,
having just now transcended paper and entered the radically
ephemeral world of video, finds itself living in an ever moving
pastless present.

    The first casualty is memory. Every advance in writing, from
stone to clay to paper to electronic blips, is at the same time
an advance in erasing. In the electronic age erasing has become
literally effortless: it takes an act of commission -- you must
command your computer to SAVE -- to retain information. Simple
omission, or an electrical storm, turns computer thoughts to
ether.

    The ultimate instrument for forgetting is television. It is
inherent in the medium. The flickering image is impossible to
retain. Who remembers the once ubiquitous Mike Douglas? Frank
Reynolds? Michael Dukakis? Pastlessness is inherent in video,
with its fast cuts and dissolving shots and rerecord button,
with its moving tape forever recording a vanishing now. For a
television society, every day is Today, This Morning and
Tonight. Television life is a rolling present relieved only by
commercial breaks.

    "To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin,"
wrote Chesterton. Science makes a more severe judgment. It calls
living in the present psychotic. Not happy-go-lucky,
devil-may-care living in the present, but the real thing. Some
individuals by reason of accident or disease (generally
alcoholism) suffer from what is called Korsakoff's psychosis:
they have no memory. Not that they have forgotten their ancient
childhood memories. They often retain these. But they have lost
entirely the capacity to establish new memories. Everything
they see, everything they hear, everything they think, they
forget within seconds. Introduce yourself to a Korsakoffian,
leave the room, and return a minute later. He will have no
recollection of you.

    Not surprisingly, the amnesic society behaves much like the
amnesic individual. The Korsakoffian patient, for example, fills
in his gaps with fiction. He makes up stories, often gigantic
confabulations, to make historical ends meet. The video culture
too fills in the gaps of real life with mountains of fiction.
(The average American absorbs more make-believe drama in a year
than his ancestors did in a lifetime.) And it ties history's
loose ends with a form of fabrication it calls docudrama.

    The Korsakoffian, moreover, has trouble functioning. He is
always getting things wrong. As modern industrial culture
becomes more visual, its images more transient, it has a hard
time learning. It too is constantly surprised. Take the shock
with which news of the Chinese crackdown on the democracy
movement was received. Given Communism's 70-year history,
marked by repeated reigns of repressive terror, only a
forgetting culture could have been so taken by surprise. The
week after the Tiananmen massacre, Hungary, which has a harder
time forgetting, staged a moving reburial of the men executed
for leading the 1956 rebellion. The commemoration reminded us
that Western Communism in its 40th year produced precisely the
same atrocity -- freedom crushed with tanks and terror -- that
Eastern Communism is producing in this, its 40th year.

    But amnesia, the disorder of advanced electronic societies,
is not the only possible derangement of national memory. There
are cultures that remember nothing and cultures that forget
nothing. Forgetting nothing might be worse. Remembering nothing
produces a mere mindless, stumbling insouciance. Forgetting
nothing produces paralysis and death.

    Beirut's warring factions, for example, have a prodigious
capacity for remembering injury. So too the Northern Irish,
whose Protestants celebrate the Battle of the Boyne -- next
year is the 300th anniversary -- as if it took place yesterday.
The inability to forget, to let the slate be wiped clean,
freezes societies in anachronism and turns blood feuds into
endless civil war.

    It is because the inability to relinquish the past can
produce such horror that memory -- what place, what price, what
power to give it -- is a central question in the great
historical transition from dictatorship to democracy. All the
new Latin democracies, for example, are emerging from periods of
brutal dictatorship. What to do with this past? Uruguay chose,
by referendum, a forgetting. It voted to let the brutalities of
military rule be bygone. Argentina did the opposite. It
prosecuted those who gave the orders for torture and execution.
The Argentine experience, however, with its semiannual military
revolts and its reversion to Peronism, seems an argument against
too much remembering.

    Too much remembering. In Funes, the Memorious, Jorge Luis
Borges tells the story of a man who suddenly gains the ability
to remember every iota of information he has ever apprehended.
Every vein of every leaf of every tree, every formation of
every cloud in every sky at every instant of his life he sees.
An avalanche of knowing renders him inaccessible, mystical and
finally defeated. Funes dies young. No mind can apprehend God's
work, or man's, in all its detail and survive. Forgetting, for
men as for nations, is a biological necessity, like sleep, a
respite from consciousness.

    We children of the electronic age, however, suffer
differently. Forgetting is all we do. We so feel ourselves
forgetting that we contrive monuments of stone -- to vets, to
cops, to Kahlil Gibran, to whomever -- to anchor ourselves in
time. That which is written in stone endures, we figure. If the
Ten Commandments were given today, they would be flashed on the
great Diamond Vision screen at Yankee Stadium, and by sunup not a
soul would remember.