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i would echo art's initial post (and applaud the second as a borges fan)--your ability to limit information is as or more important than your capacity to take it in. one of the defining features of psychosis is an inability to limit information in a way that enables an individual to write him or herself into a field of data as a causal center. say a visual field--if you walk through a space of any visual complexity, you do not and cannot take it all in consciously--you organize elements of that field, depending upon where you direct your attention, and knit yourself into is as the focal point--how you move, what you look at, etc.... you do it all the time, if you are functional. if you cannot do it, your relation to the world collapses and your sense of yourself as a unified subject does along with it.
this is not to say that everything does not register at some level--there is a psychoanalytic description of this kind of process developed around the treatment of psychotics, actually--piera aulagnier did it--i dont think much of her stuff is in english other than her major book, "the violence of interpretation"--which is fascinating and gives an overview of what i am talking about here--she argues that repression accounts for the ability to limit information (repression is a metphor more than anything else) and that the material excluded turns up as dream material. which would explain why it is not something immediately available to memory. it is interesting to think about.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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