Human amnesia - our propensity to forget particulars of the past - is nothing less than our freedom to create.  It is exactly because we cannot remember the details of the full moon of Last Friday (to resuscitate Suárez's example) in color, size, texture, or intensity, that we are liberated to construct it. Whether out of of "cartilage and glass, wire and papier-mâché," ot oil paint and canvas, color and illusion - the creative process is called into play to fill this lacuna, and the artist is thus made legitimate. 

      The creative process is not an amassing of data - if it were, the computer would reign in our kunsthalle - but of abstraction, a reductive process which imposes a shape to the material that embodies its meaning.  This imposition of the design and will of the artist upon the stuff of reality, known as the creative art, is directly related to the loss of memory.  Shape-giving would be impossible without the loss of particulars, the tyranny of infinite data.  So much of the lauded sense of "perspective" and "vision" found in our artists and savants is dependent on creative amnesia - their ability to decipher patterns and discard dross.  At base, to abstract, in its primary sense, means to concentrate on the essential qualities, to find the essence, and present it in an intelligible manner.

  To the extent that the past is largely a creation of the present - molded, modeled; given form from this point of vision, amnesia is the cause, the license, the will to create.  Yes, Mnemosyne (Memory) is the other mother of the Muses (including Clio), but by this we must not forget that memory is our human process of creating the past.  Amnesia is not "anti-Mnemosyne"; nor does it necessarily "crumble the geometry of things and create a world of strange relationships and dissociations in space and time".  It is exactly the force of power of amnesia which liberates the mind and sensibilities, which allows us to create the geometry of things and find through the process of abstraction exactly those relationships in space and time where meaning resides. 

      In effect, our very process of thought is grounded in the manipulation of inputs, of grabbing on to this and throwing out that - of unconsciously and consciously forgetting the inconsequential. 

     Most important to the literary and visual arts is the manner in which this inventive, plastic process augments the creation of myths, stories of man's existence embodying the most basic human motivations: pity, pride, fear, love, et cetera.  These, in turn, have so often and for so long become the subject of painting, sculpture, and literature. 

      Much of the strength in the vision of creative amnesia is its inherent life-enhancing quality.  The process of abstraction and ideation is thoroughly an affirmation of the human condition - the power of human assertion in the face of infinite chaos; the search for salvation through the affirmation of self. .  Ultimately we become our own creation.
 

BARRY KATZ
Virginia Commonwealth University