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-title: Ouroboros of Memory
-genre: prose
-
-id: ouroboros_memory
-toc: "Ouroboros of memory"
-
-epigraph:
-    content: |
-        He used his body to remember
-        his body, but in the end could only
-        remember the string.
-    attrib: Jonathan Safran Foer
-    link: 'http://www.bet-tal.com/index.aspx?id=2315'
-
-project:
-    title: Stark Raving
-    class: stark
-    order: 12
-    next:
-    - title: L'appel du vide
-      link: lappel-du-vide
-    - title: Love as God
-      link: love-as-god
-    prev:
-    - title: Table of contents
-      link: table_contents
-    - title: Initial Conditions
-      link: initial-conditions
-...
-
-[He said][] at the beginning, "It's like rolling yarn into a too-small ball.
-Sure, you can roll the memories around for a while, and maybe even use some of them.
-Eventually, though, you'll wind them all the way out and you'll be left with nothing but a small loop.
-You can tie this loop around your finger, and start wrapping your body, but this is an extension of the same problem.
-You'll turn into a mummy of memory.
-There'll be nothing left underneath but a dead body.
-
-"But what does it mean, _To remember the body with the body?_
-I imagine a creature made of memory, putting its feet in its mouth, turning into a ball.
-In this way, it could roll all around the landscape of its memory.
-I've tried explaining this to other people, but it doesn't make any sense to them.
-The task of eating one's feet is, to them, an unsolvable problem.
-They seem to have forgotten that, as babies, they were able to make themselves into loops.
-
-"So I increase the count to two: two snakes eating each other's tales, forming a loop.
-In this way they are able to put two heads on one body.
-This doubles the number of memories, which really only exacerbates the problem.
-It's like trying to roll two different materials up into a ball.
-The people I tell this to don't understand this either, they say using two animals makes sense to them.
-They say there must be different types of memory.
-
-"I disagree with this theory of memory.
-I think there is, at bottom, only one type of anything, with subtypes grouped together along the edge of a loop.
-Color becomes a good metaphor: look how many of them!
-yet they are all consumed by the same part of the body.
-Maybe two different materials are still made of material, and maybe they can be rolled into a ball.
-Maybe there actually never was a problem.
-
-"Or maybe, and this is more likely, I need to restate the problem.
-I think it all boils down to the fact that I have a truly lousy memory.
-I've tried different mnemonic devices, like imagining each thing I need to remember being visited by a bouncing ball.
-I've tried trying string into finger-loops.
-I've even tried writing the things I need to remember on my body.
-If you asked me, 'Do any of these work,' I would have to answer, 'None of them.'
-
-"Sometimes in the morning I realize dumbly I've forgotten my words, all of them.
-They generally come back by around ten o'clock, but the frequency with which this is occurring is becoming a problem.
-I feel that my brain is being separated from my body.
-Is there a place in the universe for a misplaced memory?
-Does it eat its own tail and roll around the universe as it loops?
-Does it shrink down and become lost as a tiny ball?
-
-No matter what happens, eventually _I_ will become _them_ as I lose the last of my memory.
-I won't be able to solve the problem of my being, and my being will become my problem, in an eternal loop.
-I will roll my body into a prenatal ball.
-
-[He said]: joke.html