Identity and Memory

This week, Helena has come to love books.  Now, she's always enjoyed standing in front of the bookshelf and looking at the spines, and more recently, in trying to pull them out and throw them on the floor, but this week she learned how to turn the pages, look at the pictures and relate them to the story... a book as a book, not as a mere object.

In the process, she's concluded that her favorite book is Little Gorilla, the story of a baby gorilla loved by everyone in the jungle, and his anxiety about growing up, because if Little Gorilla isn't little anymore, will everyone still like him?  I think this deeper theme still escapes Helena Iara, but she loves the pictures of all of the different animals, and thinks that the lion is especially great (she has a stuffed lion, whom I bring into the story with a roar).

Yesterday, with each page that she turned, she reached onto the page to touch Little Gorilla, finding his little black form on almost all of the pages (though not when just a hand or foot represents the character metonymically: that's a hard step intellectual, I imagine).  At first, recognizing the gorilla doesn't seem like that big a deal, but the book represents the little baby in lots of positions, doing many things, and eventually Little Gorilla gets big, and looks almost nothing like himself.  Yet Helena always recognized him.

I told her a story of José Luís Borges, Funes el Memorioso, where the protagonist has perfect memory, and can re-create any day in his life in exact detail.  Soon, he concludes that language is insufficient for his world: "It annoyed him that a dog at 3:14PM (seen from the front) would have the same name as a dog at 3:15 (seen in profile)."  In the end, the perfect detail of his memory made abstraction, generalization, synthesis -- all of what we call thinking -- impossible.  Unable to forget, he was unable to remember, or at least remember as we use the word.

 Helena's recognition of Little Gorilla on many different pages, in many different incarnation, is a kind of forgetting of difference, a recognition of what matters and what doesn't, and as such, something that makes thinking possible.