I've been working with a recent episode of WNYC's Radiolab on in the background. The subject is memory, which also happens to be the subject of my series of short films, The Souvenir Series.
There was a typical brainy [sic] science segment on how memories are created--and blocked--in the brain, then a kind of random story about Joe Andoe's paintings. The possibility that memory is metaphorically more like creating a work of art than filing a piece of data away is interesting, maybe even persuasive, though our metaphors usually turn out to be more revealing of us at a particular moment in our culture than accurately illuminating of what's actually going on.
But it was the last story, about Clive and Deborah Wearing and an overwhelming amnesia that just stopped me cold. It started out as one more Oliver Sacks bauble before taking a remarkably poignant turn. Just listen to it, I can't tell you how it goes.
Radiolab Show #304: Memory and Forgetting [wnyc.org]
