While sorting through records tonight at a friend’s house looking for a hard boogie, the pieces fell into place. Pieces of a thread which I have been tangling and untangling the past few days via semiotics studies, late-era computerism and memory improvement techniques goes something like this.
Take the Roman Room trick, the “memory palace” or “method of loci” memory technique: which is basically like setting a connector - memory peg - between an item you want to memorize and a physical location in a real or imagined world. Then you sequentially locate items to be memorized in each location, and when you want to recall the entire sequence, you mentally walk yourself through that imagined realm. Aborigines in Australia do something similar with a walkabout. I saw somebody talk on the memory sites about “journeying” which made me think astral travel and shamanism. Spiritual energies stored in far off places.
Ariadne’s thread is the Rose Line, the thread of time unraveling at each moment into the past, ancient history, the permanent record, the all-encompassing PATRIOT ACT datawake: the word made flesh. Okay, now I am getting carried away with myself. But luckily I have this thread I can follow back into the world of light from inside my brokedown memory palace. I have a song I’ve been toying with, the lyric of which goes, “Baby, keep a copy of me in your heart, in case my hard drive falls apart.”
Sorting through records, it struck me. Songs, media moments, bits of movies, half-remembered lyrics, a commercial for a toy we remember from our youth. The memory palace most of us inhabit now isn’t pegged to a real physical space. It’s pegged to an emotional augmented reality, which lays at a billion trillion cross-sections against our every day world, stretching backwards into the past like some kind of Ariadne’s thread. To go on a walkabout now is to browse a DVD collection, to leaf through books on a shelf, to dig through records trying to find that one song which will take you back to that girlfriend, the one who’ll never take you back. Ah, memories…
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