Mnemograph is a classic greek/latin construction: “mnemo” referring to Mnemosyne, the ancient muse of memory; “graph”, as we know, from the greek graphikos, relating to written words and pictures. In ancient (Greek and other cultures’) understanding, memory was understood to be something like a river in the spirit world — a resource to which people had access in varying degrees, something we either navigated or got lost in. It was understood to be something very different from our current notion: a cellular data retrieval mechanism housed mainly in the brain. Mnemosyne was the divine personification of memory, and it was she who mediated the human relationship to this “river”.
The poets were those who were spiritually the most well connected to the muses, Mnemosyne being the mother of them all. Clearly this explained how they could so accurately remember hours and hours of stories — and what they remembered, and told, was history itself. We now call this history “myth” — history as it became condensed and fermented in thousands of years of retellings/rememberings of the epic stories. The memories of the epic poets (Homer et al.) did not belong to them: It belonged to culture. It was generally understood that poets kept the memory of the culture. There was no other “history”.
I’m interested in bridging what is considered to be “natural” memory with “mnemonic” or artificial memory (i.e. memory imposed with a kind of delibarate associative technique) — and connecting this individual capacity for memory to our enormous potential for cultural memory. Redundant collective stupidity — environmental devastation, the retardation of democracy by money, and other sad hindrances — can only be overcome if humanity perceives it for what it is, in real time. Mnemograph, I hope, will be a key tool in cultivating an accurate and accessible cultural memory.