A large part of our brains is devoted to making sense of the world. Visual perception is of no use without object recognition. Object recognition is of no use unless objects can be categorized as animate or inanimate, food or poison. Our brains constantly pour meaning into the world.
I’m sure we do this as we percieve our own thoughts and intentions. We are each the hero of our own personal narrative. That story provides ego strength and reasons to make decisions that move the story along toward the next desired event.
But what if that story is denied us? We know that short term memory loss leads to confabulation- without access to memory of events the brain is often happy to make up a plausible tale from available facts. How about a whole world?
In a Tiny Universe,
Room to Heal – At Home With Mark Hogancamp – NYTimes.com: ” Feeling shunned by the outside world, he created his own world, a tiny society called Marwencol.
Made from scraps of plywood and peopled with a tribe of Barbies and World War II action figures, Marwencol grew along the side of his trailer home near Kingston. (Mr. Hogancamp named his new world after himself and Wendy and Colleen, two women he had crushes on.) Narratives surrounding a downed American fighter pilot rescued by Marwencol’s all-female population began unfurling against a backdrop that was nominally a World War II setting, in Belgium. The themes, however, were Mr. Hogancamp’s own: the brutality of men, the safe haven of a town of women, the twin demons of rage and fear. Mr. Hogancamp captured his stories with thousands of photographs, shooting on an old Pentax with a broken light meter. The noirish images, complete with blood flecks in the snow, are riveting and emotional.”
We always say that soap opera amnesia, forgetting personal identity, never happens. But its clear that sections of memory for personal history can be lost. Hogancamp seems to have a complex situation combining alcoholism, traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress.
Resulting in story telling. Resulting in art.
