In collective memory of history, whether oral or written, amnesia is manifested by voids which give rise to fables, myths, and legends.  Enrique Pupo-Walker, the well known researcher of early Latin American history, speaks of "intercalated narratives" which bridge and illuminate the chronology of history.  He notes that these "digressions," a habitual practice of world historiography in its incipient stages, become pervasive in the chronicles of the Indies.  The New World chroniclers, attempting to express the immensity of a novel and surprising world, intercalated and juxtaposed novelistic, and sometimes mythological, discourses.  Yet "these fables do not transmit the descriptive coherence which the historian pretends to give to the stable flow of his narrative... Seen as a whole, those fables constitute a system of codificaitons which makes possible the diachronic pronouncement in the discourse of history." (Enrique Pupo-Walker, Historia, Creacion y Profecia en los Textos del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Madrid: Jose Porrua Turanzas, S.A. 1982, p.168).

     The intercalated narratives in history are "irregularities" of Chaos which, nonetheless signal a persistent reality, a theme the Cuban-born writer Antonio Benitez-Rojo treats in a forthcoming book on Caribbean history.  These narratives also imply the presence of amnesia which, upon disrupting the flow of memory, induces a process of fabling.  Facing the lacunae in recorded memory, the chroniclers invented stories and their inventions created a dynamic collective memory unanchored from empirical reality.  

    Amnesis aesthetics, through its notion of fabulation and of time as being multiple, fragmentary, and coexistent in all its parts (past, present, and imagined future) introduces a new understanding of the geometry of memory which the tradition of ars memoriae, originated by Simonides of Ceos, depicted as coherent, stable, and Euclidean.  

    In years to come, most likely the science of Chaos will determine a correspondence between the interaction of synapses in the human brain and that of components of phenomena of external reality.  Yet the mystery of the relationship between remembering and amnesia will, nonetheless, continue to be apprehended by our imagination and will be made concrete to our senses through artistic practice.  That relationship will still tease us with seemingly impending epiphanies about our dynamic and fictive sense of selfhood.