#matter and memory

[funeral]

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

[funeral]

Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; in truth, every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future. Consciousness, then, illumines, at each moment of time, that immediate part of the past which, impending over the future, seeks to realize and to associate with it. Solely preoccupied in thus determining an undetermined future, consciousness may shed a little of its light on those of our states, more remote in the past, which can be usefully combined with our present state, that is to say, with our immediate past: the rest remains in the dark. It is in this illuminated part of our history that we remain seated, in virtue of the fundamental law of life, which is a law of action: hence the difficulty we experience in conceiving memories which are preserved in the shadow. Our reluctance to admit the integral survival of the past has its origin, then, in the very bent of our psychical life—an unfolding of states wherein our interest prompts us to look at that which is unrolling, and not at that which is entirely unrolled.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

[vox-ex]

vox! i’d love to hear any backstory or thoughts you have on last year’s superwhumpcorptober if you have any to share please?! :D love seeing you back on the dash!!! 💜

Thanks so much for the ask Sides!! It’s fun to back on Tumblr for me too :) …. I think this is the one…but if you had another in mind let me know

okay…yes…gosh of course, also let me say first I am still writting it and I haven’t forgotten about it.

There is perhaps a longer backstory than the space and time of an answer box affords for both why I started writing it and why I am still in the process of writting it, but I will do my best.

The short of it is, that I had been reading a lot for work and grad school on cognitive science and went down a bit of a scholarly side quest that led me to pick up a copy of Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson. The idea of memory as habit, as something that can seed itself in the body and in our actions, just was so creatively interesting to me based on the kind of sensory heavy writing I have enjoyed recently.

She rearranged herself regardless. Slipping from the rumpled sheets, she wraps herself in the thick fabric of the sweatshirt she fell asleep in. The smell of Kara's soap still clinging to its threads — clinging to Lena's skin. It's one lie she can blame no one else for but herself. She makes her way to the kitchen. She fills the kettle and sets it atop the stove in a practiced motion, pushing up the sleeves that are too long for her, the click of the burner lighting the small flame. She leans back against the counter. The whistle blows, and she moves again in a practiced motion. Hands trained by her mother. Warm the cup. Add the bag. Pour the water. Wait. Strong as you want, but at least strong enough. Just a little milk. Never any sugar. The body works as a habit of memories. She wishes not for the first time to be able to break herself of them. Feet. Hands. Lungs. Heart. To uncouple each part of herself from the past, bit by bit. To forget each person in the same way. But neither her memories nor her body was that kind.

There is also this idea of how the past and present exchange with one and other through observation. This felt like a neat (but potentially confusing I will admit) way to structure a post-rift story. The first chapter is ambigious as an ending or a beginning and what follows are only these small bits of the present constantly interrupted by memory leaning into the intended disorder of their relationship at the moment. I really liked as well the idea of Kara and Lena as interrupters of each other, as catalysts of the observation needed to force the transition between past and present, but also how that mirrors the way their entrance into each others lives created a shift personal perspective for them.

The world had never been a perfect thing. But it had a form. A day divided into two. A year neatly cut into fourths. Even herself. Half her mother. Half her father. Daughter, then orphan, then daughter, then sister. Halves. Fourths. Never perfect. But it had a form. Kara comes as an unexpected fifth.

I liked being able to have Lena and Kara’s POVs continue to shift back and forth offering both symmetry and disruption and that too was just creatively very interesting for me to explore and work through. The decision to add the Mxy “twist” (twist still a bit pending) was very very on the fly, but like the rest of the story very self-indulgent as it gave me an opportunity to add in another character later on which I won’t fully spoil but that I haven’t yet had the chance to write.

So that’s the short of it…well probably more the medium of it…the short short is that I read a book, got overwhelmed with ideas, said to myself…”self you know who this reminds you of?”… duh … Kara and Lena of course …. and then got even more overwhelmed when I started writing because I said to myself …. “self you know what would make this even more fun right?”… duh… let’s add in Mxy so we can finally write that ******* **** story we’ve been putting off for 3 plus years.

[funeral]

Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed . . . The afferent nerves are images, the brain is an image, the disturbance traveling through the sensory nerves and propagated in the brain is an image too . . . To make of the brain the condition on which the whole image depends is in truth a contradiction in terms, since the brain is by hypothesis a part of this image.

Henri Bergson qt. in Bernardo Katsrup, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics

[digital-baf-blog]

Of The Survival of Images: Memory and Mind

To sum up briefly the preceding chapters: we have distinguished three processes, pure memory, memory-image and perception, of which none o f them in fact, occurs apart from the others. Perception is never a mere contact of the mind with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it. The memory-image, in its turn, partakes of the “pure memory,” which it begins to materialize, and of the perception in which it tends to embody itself: regarded from the latter point of view, it might be defined as a nascent perception. Lastly, pure memory, though independent in theory, manifests itself as a rule only in the colored and living image which reveals it. Symbolizing these three terms by the consecutive segments AB, BC, CD, of the same straight line AD, we may say that our thought describes this line in a single movement, which goes from A to D, and that is impossible to say precisely where one of the terms ends and another begins.

In fact, this is just what consciousness bears witness to whenever, in order to analyze memory, it follows the movement of memory at work. Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past -- a work of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropriate attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on color, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots, and if, when once realized, it did not retain something of its original virtuality, if, being a present state, it were not also something which stands out distinct from the present, we should never know it for a memory.

The capital error of associationism is that it substitutes for this continuity of becoming, which is the living reality, a discontinuous multiplicity of elements, inert and juxtaposed. Just because each of the elements so constituted contains, by reason of its origin, something of what precedes and also of what follows, it must take to our eyes the form of a mixed and, so to speak, impure state. But the principle of associationism requires that each psychical state should be a kind of atom, a simple element. Hence the necessity for sacrificing, in each of the phases we have distinguished, the unstable to the stable, that is to say, the beginning to the end. If we are dealing with perception, we are asked to see in it nothing but the agglomerated sensations which color it and to overlook the remembered images which form its dim nucleus. If it is the remembered image that we are considering, we are bidden to take it already made, realized in a weak perception, and to shut our eyes to the pure memory which this image has progressively developed. In the rivalry which associationism thus sets up between the stable and the unstable, perception is bound to expel the memory-image, and the memory-image to expel pure memory. And thus the pure memory disappears altogether. [...] Psychical life, then, is entirely summed up in these two elements, sensation and image. And as, on the one hand, this theory drowns in the image the pure memory, which makes the image into an original state, and, on the other hand, brings the image yet closer to perception by putting into perception, in advance, something of the image itself, it ends up by finding between these two states only a difference of degree, or of intensity. Hence the distinction between strong states and weak states, of which the first are supposed to be set up by us as perceptions of the present, and the second (why, no man knows) as representations of the past. But the truth is that we shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it. Essentially virtual, it cannot be known as something past unless we follow and adopt the movement by which it expands into a present image, thus emerging from obscurity into the light of day. In vain do we seek its trace in anything actual and already realized: we might as well look for darkness beneath the light. This is, in fact, the error of associationism: placed in the actual, it exhausts itself in vain attempts to discover in a realized and present state the mark of its past origin, to distinguish memory from perception, and to erect into a difference in kind that which it condemned in advance to be but a difference of magnitude.

To picture is not to remember. No doubt a recollection, as it beomes actual, tends to live in an image; however, the converse is not true, and the image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the past unless, indeed, it was in the past that I sought it, thus following the continuous progress which brought it from darkness into light. This is what psychologists too often forget when they conclude, from the fact that a remembered sensation becomes more actual the more we dwell upon it, that the memory of the sensation is the sensation itself beginning to be. The fact which they allege is undoubtedly true: the more I strive to recall a past pain, the nearer I come to feeling it in reality. But this is easy to understand, since the progress of a memory precisely consists, as we have said, in its becoming materialized. The question is: was the memory of a pain, when it began, really pain? 

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991. 132-136.

[cyberneticienne]

“because memory -we shall try to prove it in the course of this work- is just the intersection of mind and matter“

[jazbaaati]

Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. All these images act and react upon one another in all their elementary parts according to constant laws which I call laws of nature, and, as a perfect knowledge of these laws would probably allow us to calculate and to foresee what will happen in each of these images, the future of the images must be contained in their present and will add to them nothing new.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.

[jazbaaati]

Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of `images.’ And by ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing; - an existence placed half-way between the `thing’ and the ‘representation.’ This conception of matter is simply that of common sense. It would greatly astonish a man unaware of the speculations of philosophy if we told him that the object before him, which he sees and touches, exists only in his mind and for his mind, or even, more generally, exists only for mind, as Berkeley held. Such a man would always maintain that the object exists independently of the consciousness which perceives it. But, on the other hand, we should astonish him quite as much by telling him that the object is entirely different from that which is perceived in it, that it has neither the colour ascribed to it by the eye, nor the resistance found in it by the hand. The colour, the resistance, are, for him, in the object: they are not states of our mind; they are part and parcel of an existence really independent of our own. For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.