Per’s Reviews > Remembering: A Phenomenological Study > Status Update

[...] mania is in turn closely related to mantis (seer), and to mantra (counsel, prayer, hymn). To go out of one's mind is to see beyond what there is to see within the confines of the sheerly mental, where everything is nested within a hierarchy of representations. It is to obtain counsel, a special seeing, which might not otherwise be obtainable: excess may be the only means of access.

To be embodied is ipso facto to assume a particular perspective and position; it is to have not just a point of view but a place in which we are situated. It is to occupy a portion of space from out of which we both undergo given experiences and remember them. To be disembodied is not only to be deprived of place, unplaced; it is to be denied the basic stance on which every experience and its memory depend.

The fact that we do not notice ourselves recognizing ourselves is linked to the absence of anything comparable to a flash of recognition: "Aha! that's me!" is a very rare utterance. Nor is there normally anything like a dim or dawning recognition for which the flash would represent a resolution. For we do not misrecognize ourselves except in unusual circumstances […]

[I]f the learning has been thorough, the[ cues of various sorts] are not then consciously needed as they must be at the stage of habituation. It is of interest to note here that New York City taxi drivers report that one of their critical cues is the sense of rapidity with which they pass through a given part of the town: i.e. the rate at which buildings or other landmarks "whiz by"; such cues are strictly kinematic.

Where once Mnemosyne was a venerated Goddess, we have turned over responsibility for remembering to the cult of the computers, which serve as our modern mnemonic idols. The force of the remembered word in oral traditions-as exemplified in feats of bardic recounting that survive only in the most isolated circumstances-has given way to the inarticulate hum of the disk drive.