 
                        20080529.04

                The Verbalization of Memory

     In an of itself, memory is pre-verbal.  What I
remember is a scene , a situation, an intuition, quite
similar to the experience of a vivid dream.  It is the
verbal description, the verbal accounting, the verbal
elaboration of the memory which at one and the same time
solidifies, transforms, enlargess and adulterates it.

     Preverbal memory is the root, and all experience of
the past derives from it.  No verbal elaboration can reach
(attain to) the reality of preverbal memory.

     At the same time, it is important, obvious,
undeniable, that our social, political, economic,
professional existence is based on and grounded in an
interpretation of the past, i.e. in verbalized memory.
This verbalized memory is a web intricate complex and of
such density that we deal with it as if it were "reality",
and for all practical purposes this web of verbalized
memory serves as reality for us.  Perhaps, however, it
should be denominated as a pseudo-reality.

     I believe, as a matter of principle, that the
factitiousness of the pseudo-reality should be understood,
analyzed, described "articulated", although I am not sure,
off-hand what the consequence of such analysis and
description would be.

     It is obvious to me that the institutionalized
verbalized memory that we call "history" has enormous
practical implications and consequences.  And that this
"history" permeates all disciplines except perhaps "pure"
mathematics and "pure" logic.  Whether and in what way
these consequences and implications might be affected my
ones awareness of their contingency I cannot (yet) say. But
it is immediately obvious that the "historical" foundations
of all these disciplines are only as secure, reliable and
trustworthy as the verbalizations of memory on which they
so uncritically rely.

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Copyright 2008, Ernst Jochen Meyer
