"Kathleen Ann Goonan - Memory Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

memories as to importance. It bypassed mechanisms that do such things.
It turned up all the signals. So it became the drug of choice for anyone who
could lay hands on it. The possible dangers were trumpeted by the press,
but if you could enhance your doctoral, legal, or high-school pop-quiz
performance, why not? It raised the bar for everyone. Real and counterfeit
pills, injections, and patches were for sale in the third world and in the
school parking lot.

The world was awash in memories.
 They were all imperative. People wrote memoirs, previously the
domain of those obsessed with the past, just to take the pressure off. The
intense numinosity of memories caused constant reruns of oneтАЩs life;
memory overload became a common plea in traffic accidents. The memory
of a grievous wrong sharpened and would not let the wronged one rest until
it was avenged. One way or another, when we are stretched out of our
previous shape, we jostle the status quo in ways we could not have
predicted. So here we all went, our memories stretched and teeming with
visual, audible replays, as if we were all schizophrenics, into a
well-to-be-remembered future.

For someтАФwriters, painters, musicians, those who dealt in
emotionsтАФthe memory drug was a boon. It produced a heightening of
affect. The present always led to the past; the past was therefore always
present, layered and linked and resonant with longing, love, and
resolutionтАФor hate, revenge, plots laid and hatched and brought to fruition
and the results lived with. And lived with. Inescapably. Christian churches,
with their confession and absolution, experienced a resurgence. We were
all evil, deeply evil, and could not forget it; we could only hand over the guilt
to an almighty being. Or we remembered joyous, pagan
interconnectedness with nature, danced in circles, and our minds floated
into a golden ether of faeries, dwarves, witches, tree-gods, and druids.
Whatever. IтАЩm telling you, the whole thing was a godawful mess.

It was not all bad. Some learned to control their memories. The visual
used pictures or objects to set off links of associations.

Meditation, emptying oneтАЩs mind, became big. Our minds and
memories tortured us. Forgetting was a blessing.

Many people had permanent memory-release modules implanted in
their bodies, and some, like myself, were genetically engineered to
produce the necessary enhancing chemicals.

I will never forget the whole of ElizabethтАЩs being after Wendy, our
three-year-old, died.

That, and my own grief, and JollyтАЩs, is the key that I hold.

****