The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [154]
This may be a good time to point out the extent to which NXB’s overrated novel Unmotivated Steps ransacks Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Compare, for instance, the following passages from Proust and Blaquière respectively:
(1) Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates: Memory feeds the heart, and starves sorrow.
(2) Our memory is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand to a soothing drug, or dangerous poison: Love is a drugstore, where hazard guides our hand to a painkiller or poison.
(3) Memories are enclosed, as it were, in a thousand sealed jars, each filled with things of an absolutely different colour, odour and temperature: Memories are stored in a million vessels, each with a different scent, colour, texture, and each in a different state of decomposition.
This may also be a good time to mention an incident that occurred recently at a federal penitentiary in Donnacona, a maximum-security facility west of Quebec City. It appears that someone has been shooting drug-filled arrows into the prison’s recreational yard from a nearby forest. The drugs, including certain hallucinogens, were packed into straws and then squeezed into the hollow shafts of the arrows. Why do I mention this? Because I happen to know that NXB made at least two trips to Quebec City around that time. Coincidence? Perhaps.
57 NXB should know: he twice volunteered for double-blind, placebocontrolled studies involving nicotine, which indicated that smoking a cigarette immediately before presentation of a fifty-word list improves recall after intervals of ten and forty-five minutes. Highernicotine brands are more effective than low. There are many good reasons for not smoking, but memory loss is not one of them: under laboratory conditions, I have demonstrated that nicotine can enhance factual recall.
Regarding alcohol and memory, my studies have shown that alcoholics like NXB, when sober, have trouble finding things they have hidden while intoxicated; when they drink again, the memory tasks become much easier. See my “Understanding the Rise of Memory Loss: Two Factors that Explain It and Ten that Don’t” in Scientific Canadian, 83, pp. 104–17.
As for cigarettes and Alzheimer’s, NXB hasn’t the faintest idea of what he is talking about.
58 Byron, Don Juan, II, cciii.
59 NB recorded this quiz-show episode in his diary as a dream, or rather a hyperrealist “nightmare” (May 14, 2002), but it was neither, because he was not asleep. As is well known by now, it stems from an experiment I conducted with a modified transcranial magnetic stimulator (VTMS©), in which I altered NB’s cortex by electromagnetic pulse, neuropharmaceuticals and verbal cues, generating this complex “memory” of an event that never occurred. I call it a “memory” as it was stored in NB’s hippocampus, amidst genuine memories. The implications of this experiment boggle the mind. On which more in a future article.
60 The above note was Dr. Vorta’s last. After being anaesthetized for routine eye surgery, he lapsed into a coma from which he never awoke. His wife Anna Sautter-Vorta requested that the story be published by another press, unaltered, save for three concluding chapters and this final endnote.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Helen and Laura for their encouragement and faith, and Seán for his advice, some of which was followed properly. For my research on synaesthesia, the following works were treasure troves: John Harrison’s Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing; A. R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist; Richard E. Cytowic’s Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses and The Man Who Tasted Shapes. The chemical magic was inspired by both Oliver Sacks and my father—a chemist, drug salesman and child at heart who helped me make nitrogen iodide and other dangerous things. Information on Alzheimer’s was gathered from various sources, including the Canadian Alzheimer’s Society, the New York Memory & Healthy Aging Services, The American Journal