multiplying superfluous gestures

Errol Morris has a blog! The last two entries are about re-enactment, how we construct coherent narratives of reality, and how these processes in film interrelate with visual attention and memory. They’re pretty cool, albeit general. The first one is more about issues of authenticity in documentary film-making, and the second one has an interview with the dude who did some of the classic research on change blindness (which is good reading if you haven’t read it already).

I especially like this older entry, though. It fleshes out many of the same themes by painstakingly walking us through a detective story, trying to reconstruct which of two versions of the famous war photograph “in the valley of the shadow of death” was staged and which was not. By examining different accounts, he highlights the kinds of evidence and psychological assumptions that people use to make the determination. Reading the comments section is great — he challenges the reader to generate definitive evidence for the “true” placement of the cannonballs, and hundreds of people eagerly attempt to deliver, even though I think it’s supposed to be some sort of Socratic exercise intended to make everyone realize that the endeavor is impossible. (But then again, maybe not, given that he devotes two increasingly pedantic articles to the issue!)

Random quote I am totally stealing: “Experience is not unlike history – just closer to us in time.”

However! Hopefully you all read this far down the page, because the real reason I’m bringing this up is because his blog prompted me to reread Funes, the Memorious.

Oh man, Borges is so fucking good, and I could easily go through this paragraph-by-paragraph because there’s so much there. Here’s something new I noticed this time, something small:

Littérateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I represented these unfortunate categories.

However, he goes on to discuss how the all-encompassing acuity of Funes’ memory prevents him from abstracting categories — because his perceptions are attuned to minute differences between instances of objects, he has trouble even accepting the stable identity of a single object across time, much less grouping sets of (infinitely disparate) entities together into classes. Would Funes really label someone a littérateur, or reduce their personality characteristics to a function of their city of origin? Or is Borges giving us a neat little demonstration of the near-irresistible unconscious tendency to understand others’ mental states and methods of cognition by analogy to our own, even in cases where it leads us awry?

Also, as always, loving the narrator’s commentary on his own memories (which I think require no commentary):

“I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather.”

I am so absentminded that the dialogue which I have just cited would not have penetrated my attention if it had not been repeated by my cousin, who was stimulated, I think, by a certain local pride and by a desire to show himself indifferent to the other’s three-sided reply.

For the entire story has no other point (the reader might as well know it by now) than this dialogue of almost a half-century ago. I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable. I prefer truthfully to make a résumé of the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know that I sacrifice the effectiveness of my narrative; but let my readers imagine the nebulous sentences which coulded that night.

Also, “I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying superfluous gestures” = best penultimate sentence ever?