The nature of time and memory has haunted humankind through the ages. It tempers our conceptions of mortality, permanence and change. The concepts of time and memory are interdisciplinary. Time and memory are fundamental to the study of religion, social organization and economics as well as philosophy, literature, history and more.
Memory is a crew of truffle snuffling and intruding pigs, unearthing my hoards & heaps & hedgerows, but unable to distinguishing what is and what is not their business. Why am I the one who must remember everything, until time catches up, takes it all away and just keeps going like the wind that blows away the sand of my bones?
Porculus, (327 – 291 BC), from The Pigaleian (276 BC).
Ultimately we all grapple with the nature of memory. It is an agent provocateur that manages and mirrors the passage of time. Human intellect is just a garbled collection of scholarship and folklore. It is only made presentable by the destructive nature of memory. By the manipulations of time.
Additional information:
- PIG USB Memory Sticks
- Assessing learning and memory in pigs – using Sus scrofa for cognitive research because of their physiological and anatomical similarity with humans.
- Truffles: Why pigs can sniff them out – Truffles are rare and expensive as it is. They would be far more so, were it not for the remarkable ability of pigs to sniff them out from as deep as three feet underground.
From the Porkopolis Archive:
- Memory Hogs – If there is a struggle with memory, it is a collective trait of humanity – keeping what is interesting or important in existence, and recreating it over and over again through time.
- Carrie Jerrell – ‘Pig Wrestling,’ a poem about memory
- Ross Gay – ‘Song of the Pig Who Gave the Poet, Age 3, Worms‘ – for the lies and smiles, and for your dull memory.
- Dave Smith – ‘Corner Room, Hog-Scald in the Air‘ – where whatever we leaned on is memory.