01 Jun Funes the Memorius

Borges, J.L. (1954) Trans. Kerrigan, A. (1991) Funes the Memorious. in Fictions, London: Calder Publications

Borges’ stories, have a circular sense of time and space. They revere the metaphor and have an almost mathematical nature of construction. The story of Funes the Memorious is particularly relevant to my project. Funes, (his name related to death like my cypress) and (like me) stuck in a dark room remembering and failing to sleep, making needlessly complex symbols to stand in for something that already exists. This story opens up more questions for my project than answers.

Is what I am doing in representing the tree, or my emotional response to the tree, similar to replacing nice organised digits with the whale, the railroad and Napoleon? Or do these existing systems exist only in ignoring the details? Is it in repeating the details that, like Calvino’s cities, the landscape, in this case my tree, can truly begin to exist? Or by remembering every detail is there a danger of multiplying useless gestures, as benumbed the author when meeting with Funes?

This short story of Borges’ also illustrates Nietzsche’s illusion of truth. If all the embellishments of “metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms”, are layered and repeated until we forget that they are illusions, then we are left with what we think of as the unadorned metal of truth. In the context of my own project, if I repeat the metaphors and myths, the reinterpreting and reflection of memories and overlay them – digitally, physically, and conceptually – of a particular landscape does the resultant truth signify the landscape; the landscape reflected in me or myself reflected in the landscape?