The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [2]
Visit the author’s website at www.jeffreymoore.org
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To the memory of my parents,
and to Marlène
The Memory Artists
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn …
—Delmore Schwartz
Foreword
What follows is a true story. For over twenty years I studied a fascinating individual, a hypermnesic synaesthete referred to as “NB” in my numerous monographs and handbooks. Near the end of our relationship, in the winter/spring of 2002, NB and his mother (SB) came into contact with three participants (NXB, SD, JJY) in memory experiments I was conducting or overseeing. This contact proved serendipitous, the pharmacological equivalent of throwing five volatile compounds into a crucible and coming up with a miracle drug.
The professional writer-translator assigned to recount their story has combined “dramatic reconstructions” with interviews, laboratory notes and diary entries. These records have not been altered, even when unflattering to me personally; in the interests of science, and as a matter of historical record, I have considered it my duty to disguise nothing and suppress nothing. Because post-postmodernism is not my “bag” (my slang may not be current) and English not my “strong suit” (my mother tongues are French and German), I have made only minor revisions to the prose, excising weak or superfluous passages when sure that excision would improve, and bolstering the text with brief endnotes (keep a bookmark in page 299!).
And now the obvious question. Why another book on this scientific odyssey, at least the third in the past year? Everyone knows that a ground-breaking discovery in the field of memory was made under my enlightened auspices. Everyone knows that for this I was awarded a prestigious Scandinavian prize. Mere hours after my return from Europe, however, controversy began to swirl like fumes from a poisonous gas. Blinded, it would appear, by the demonry of a mythomaniacal “whistleblower,” three American newspapers, in serpentine fashion, have accused me of taking credit for a discovery I did not make—and of professional conduct tantamount to murder.
Now semi-retired, my glory days behind me, I wish neither to tarnish NB’s reputation (in his way, the young man was a genius) nor burnish my own. Before sinking, however, into that black pit of forgetfulness, the final amnesia, I wish to set the record straight—for my wife, for my daughter, and for the history of medicine.
ÉMILE VORTA, M.Litt., MD, PhD
Neuropsychologist and Professor Emeritus
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Quebec
Editor-in-Chief, Éditions Memento Vivere
writeaprisoner.com
Chapter 1
“NB”
Most people want to learn how to remember more; for Noel Burun, the big task, the most burdensome, was to learn how to forget. Not only the painful things in life, which we all want wiped away, but things in general. For whenever Noel heard a voice or read a word, multicoloured shapes would form inside his head that served as markers or maps, helping him to recollect, in the minutest detail, an emotion, a mood, a tone of voice, the words themselves—of events that happened up to three decades ago.
Back in 1978, for example, when they came to tell him his father was dead, this is what lit up Noel’s nine-year-old brain:
A dry and crumbly voice like kitty litter … [turning into] a pockmarked strip of tarnished brass, which tapered swordlike, seemed to disappear, then reappeared as a blood-red pendulum. It began to sway, in brighter and brighter reds, blindingly, and then a change, another voice, a spongy yolk-yellow blob with throbbing burnt-rose rings. A louder, higher voice interrupted, a cruciform shape, cranberry at its nave, the lightness fading from the centre outwards so that the edges appeared pearl white. Another voice, brassy and belching like a bass trombone, and a streak of lightning,