memory place identity

From: Andrew Forster <af@reluctant.ca>

Date: November 13, 2010 10:20:10 PM CST

To: David Morris <davimorr@alcor.concordia.ca>, MEMORY + PLACE <memory-place@concordia.ca>

Subject: to Memory Place: Thresholds

[can't post directly to posterous, here's some comments]

I'm slow brained, so I'm still reacting to Noah's note from prior to last time… some conjecture from that point...

Thresholds

When we think, in crude terms, we are loosing our memory or our ability to keep memory associations accurately ordered, are we in some way only loosing what we recognize as memory? In other words are we loosing our ability to consistently recognize, name and order things (the things of which we have built a world) OR are we, on a deeper level, loosing the ability to distinguish things, to constitute things, at all. These are possibly different thresholds (implicated in different kinds of memory…)

Likewise when we consider the threshold or edge condition of experiencing 'room-ness' there seem to be multiple thresholds at play. There is a threshold of anything contained, of a sense of containment or limit, which allows us to 'be' at a primal level. A turning away from 'no-place' to a sense of place with boundaries which in turn allows us to know we are 'here'. A space for our bodies to be in space. This space and its relation to our body-selves, we are constantly feeling out / constructing by whatever senses are available to us. Take away one sense, the others will step in. Here memory does not seem  to be about things in the usual sense. We are remembering limits, limits without which our own corporeal boundary can't have any sense. In this state we are floating, remembering dimension. The first project.

A higher threshold occurs when we recognize 'things' or when we identify 'rooms' in any particular sense, as part of any directed project (like getting in , or out, or settling down to sleep or work) we have already left this threshold of room-ness far behind.  Big memory seems to reside up here, on a threshold where things come into being. These are the memories we think we forget, because we learned we should remember them. Functional memory, poetic memory, and all the rest of our culture.

Experiments

The experiments so far have provoked near the first threshold by throwing one of our well-understood senses into disarray (hearing, for example--but really it doesn't matter which), and we notice disturbing reverberations up in the second threshold of making sense. (Obviously its not realistic to talk about 2 thresholds in what we should want to be a continuity, but the thought is to point out the distance between them). The ring-walk proposal is likewise an experiment which disturbs on the very primal threshold of space-making but seems to want to observe effects on the higher threshold of thing-making. The I-pod app, or other conscious noting of room/non-room seems to function more on the thing-making plane, with possible interpretive insights into space-making. I wonder what kind of experiment could delve deeper, or in a more isolated way into this first ungraspable threshold. 

Skin

Makes me think of skin, which we typically think of as our boundary. Its not a room. Its our skin. Take a skin-tight suit and gradually expand it. At some point it is a tent. It billows into being a room. Then we are inside it, a world. We are we and it is it. At this point we can get on with being. Puts me in mind of Temple Grandin's squeeze box.

http://www.grandin.com/inc/squeeze.html

There is a connection here I have not thought through. In inversion, as an antidote to unbounded sensing, the enclosing 'tighter-fitting-than-room' of the squeeze box brings calmness, relief from the uninterpretable space-surround. Backing down a passageway away from a room.

andrew