An Excerpt from Michael Palmer's Autobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment

     The confession form occurs when there is an apparent refusal of displacement from the first-person, when the "I" is everywhere present to reveal itself not in the semidarkness of the confessional booth but in the full light act of reading elicits. I want to look briefly at a couple of books which in somewhat different ways offer themselves as work of this kind, Augustine's Confessions and Hedy Lamarr's Ecstasy and Me.

     . . . Augustine's underlying assumption throughout the work is the inadequacy of words (as opposed to the Word) not only in approaching the sacred but also in attempting to describe human events and human emotions. "Fear," "pleasure," "pity," etc., are concepts supposedly "understood by all" and as such veil those emotions they pretend to represent. In moving to examine the central mechanism of the book, Augustine finds that memory is as illusive as experience. What is remembered? What is a mental image? What is the image of an image? What is memory as distinct from mind? How does one "search one's memory"? What is it to remember forgetfulness?:

I can mention forgetfulness and recognize what the word means, but how can I recognize the thing itself unless I remember it? I am not speaking of the sound of the word but of the thing which it signifies. If I had forgotten the thing itself, I should be utterly unable to recognize what the sound implied. When I remember memory, my memory is present to itself by its own power; but when I remember forgetfulness, two things are present, memory, by which I remember it, and forgetfulness, which is what I remember. Yet what is forgetfulness but the absence of memory? When it is present I cannot remember. Then how can it be present in such a way that I can remember it? . . . etc. (Book X.16)

The anxiety expressed by the self-interrogation is similar to that of both Wittgenstein and Saussure (and of course the Confessions were a favorite text of Wittgenstein). Book XI contains a parallel questioning of the nature of time, in particular of duration vs. present time. How does time exist? How do past and future exist if time can only be measured in passing? His conclusion is that they exist by being present through words. The past is present through words grounded in memory; and when we "foresee" the future we are actually seeing present signs of future events. The three times then might be described as: 1) a present of past things, 2) a present of present things, and 3) a present of future things. He concludes, "Some such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see. . . It is in my own mind then that I measure time. I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective." This may derive from Plato's notion of time in the Timaeus or a neo-Platonic version of same. Plato states, "For we say of time that it was and shall be, but on a true reckoning we should only say is, reserving was and shall be for the process of change in time . . ." Both memory and time, then, are grounded in the present and its language. Events recalled are present acts, are events in language but in a language which by its nature resists the activity of revelation and naming even as it is spoken. The present, the presence of the speaker, both is and is not, and finally Augustine laments, "If only men's minds could be seized and held still." Augustine investigates both the subject-object relationship in discourse and the structural relationships that constitute the linguistic sign in order to reveal what he is doing, to confess the nature of his activity. It is also to confess the identity of self as memory, a "storehouse of the images of material things." And finally it is to confess the mediated and mediational character of all speech. Memory has no memory of the Logos and no being of its own. The relationship between signifier and signified must be reconstituted at each moment of the act of telling, in a constant state of uncertainty. From one point of view this is in fact Augustine's confession--that of the concealedness of language, even that of confessional revelation.