New York missive no 73 - Funes el memorioso

How humbling that a tiny seven-week old creature can rule two “adults” lives.

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The pear tree outside our living room had been reminding me of Borges’ short story “Funes el Memoriso” (Funes the Memorious). That’s because I remembered, or thought I remembered, that Funes’ overwhelmingly acute memory meant that he could recall the formation of the leaves on all the trees he had seen. Something about the shapes of the dense pear-tree leaves tremoring in the wind, with little white dots where the sunlight made it through, brought that story to mind. I ran through what I thought I remembered about the story.

Funes, I thought, was an old man, sitting on a bench outside in a dirt courtyard, recounting to the narrator the ways in which his perfect memory manifests itself. He can take a day to re-live a past day in his mind. Then I re-read the story to see whether my memory was true. Only partly. Funes is young, not old, though when the lights come up at the end of the story the narrator sees that despite his nineteen years his features are “more ancient than Egypt”. And he’s sitting in a darkened black room, not in a courtyard. But there was the reference to the trees. "En efecto, Funes no sólo recordaba cada hoja de cada árbol de cada monte, sino cada una de las veces que la había percibido o imaginado" (Funes didn’t only remember every leaf on every tree on every mountain, but also every time that he had seen or imagined it). Funny though, that I had remembered that detail and not some of the even more unusual ones. Like the difficulty Funes had in conceiving of a concept like "dog", given that he had trouble understanding that a dog seen in profile at 3.14pm is the same thing as a dog seen face-on at 3.15.

How selective our memories are. Yet there are so many ways that they come to participate in our present. Perhaps their imperfection is a blessing. For Funes his "perfect" memory was a constraint, crowding out any sense of abstraction, filling space with detail to leave no room for meaning. Long live forgetfulness.