The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [148]
By now, my interest in the story’s protagonists should be obvious. But for the slow-witted, here is the research pentagram: (1) NB—synaesthesia/ hypermnesia (idiopathic); (2) SB—amnesia (Alzheimer’s); (3) NXB— synaesthesia (drug-induced); (4) SD—amnesia (short-term, antidotal); (5) JJY—nostalgesis/creativity (TMS-induced).
23 See note 15. Ulrich Boner was a fourteenth-century Swiss writer whose collection of fables in verse was the first book to be printed in the German language (1461). It was called Der Edelstein (“The Precious Stone”) because precious stones were said to cast a spell and Boner hoped his tales would do the same.
The French writer mentioned before him, Antoine Galland, published The One Thousand and One Nights, the first translation into any Western language of these ancient Persian-Arabic tales, between 1704 and 1717. One of them, “The Sleeper and the Awakener,” would prove to be an inspirational wellspring for NB.
24 My researchers assure me this is nowhere near a record. A British writer named John Creasey, over a period of seven years, wrote numerous novels for which, by the time he got his first book published in 1925, he had received 743 rejection slips. Two of these books, he claimed, were written in a week, with half-days spent playing cricket.
25 I considered it my moral duty.
26 In psychiatric terms, NXB suffers from satyriasis, or Don Juanism: an excessive preoccupation with sexual gratification or conquest, a chronic pursuit of high-risk behaviour, leading to persistently transient and exploitative relationships. He steadfastly resisted my efforts to refer him to a psychosexologist.
27 The feverish room and that white bed,
The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
The novel flung half-open where
Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints, are spread;
The mirror that has sucked your face
Into its secret deep of deeps,
And there mysteriously keeps
Forgotten memories of grace;
And you, half dressed and half awake,
Your slant eyes strangely watching me,
And I, who watch you drowsily,
With eyes that, having slept not, ache;
This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
Ever again my handkerchief
Is scented with White Heliotrope.
—Arthur Symons, “White Heliotrope” (1895)
28 NB, as usual, is correct: sea lions have the best memory of all nonhuman creatures. Although many other mammals, including the macaque monkey and chimpanzee, have impressive long-term memories, the sea lion outperforms them all. In 2000, a California sea lioness named Rio broke animal memory records by remembering a complicated trick involving letters and numbers—ten years after first learning it. Marine biologists (Kastak and Schusterman, 2001), employing a mnemonic model strangely resembling one I designed for rhesus monkeys in the mideighties (Vorta and Rhéaume, 1986), taught sea lions to relate specific gestural signals to objects (e.g. bats, balls, rings), modifiers (e.g. large, small, black, white), and actions (e.g. fetch, tail-touch, flipper-touch). For example, in the simplest “single object” instruction, the presentation of the signs SMALL/BLACK/ RING/ TAIL-TOUCH would result in the sea lion touching the small black ring with its tail, while ignoring the other objects in the pool. Years ago, when I took my ten-year-old daughter to MarineLand in Niagara Falls, she remarked how “cool” these animals were, and suggested we move to Ontario to study them. Given my current problems in Quebec, I should have listened to her!
29 To finish JJY’s sentence, what I gave him was a memory “escalator” (essentially balm of Gilead and sage) that he himself exhibited at the 2000 Cultiver sa mémoire symposium in Montreal. It improved his memory not one iota.
30 In Muslim legend /Arabian demonology, a jinnı is one of the sprites or spirits able to assume human or animal form and exercise supernatural influence over people. It brings to mind a comment made in 1989 by a Genevan television critic regarding