Arun Sharma( Coll Wyk Ed 24-25) and a tale of language, physics, Kant and Weetabix
The Wykehamist
Memory: Mind-Matter and Nostalgia
Arun Sharma( Coll Wyk Ed 24-25) and a tale of language, physics, Kant and Weetabix
Being a little late for breakfast, as one ought to be on exam leave, I regrettably find most of the eggs ended and make myself a bowl of Weetabix in cold milk. The first notion here, of waking up a little later than I should, is sure to cause upset in its apparent disobedience of the Commandments of the Corridor, and is one to which we will return, albeit in a wayward and not faux-maverick way, but it is not where we should begin. Instead, I would like to hold up to you the name of the pleasant oat object; what should the plural of Weetabix be? Following the convention with-ix nouns, instinctively, it is Weetabices— or perhaps Weetabix is already in the plural, as the fact that there are two bricks drawn by the name on the packet would suggest, and perhaps it is the singular for which we should be searching, the Weetabick. Both of these suggestions seem to make sense, but we can combine them to create more sensible content still; the singular and plural form may both be Weetabix, or, more interestingly, the singular may be Weetabick and the plural,-ices. Given that all four propositions make sense(-ix /-ices,-ick /-ix,-ix /-ix,-ick /-ices), we are in a state of maximum uncertainty, but we always know, somehow, that whatever combination we choose, we are still referring to the abstract quality of the Weetabix, even though, most interestingly, in the final-ick /-ices pair there is no mention of the original word at all. Weetabix, the abstract quality, is retained because it is one of the many, many impressions on our memory.
* When I was first asked to write for The Wykehamist last term, I was unsure as to whether to write something of a nostalgia, both for when I was editor of this publication under Thomas Dunn( H, 21-) and, in that drably unoriginal way, for my time, now ended, at the College, or whether to write a certainly more original but perhaps less meaningful technical article summarising my work in the intersection of particle physics and( sometimes-artificial) intelligence. It was in the consideration of the emergence of the abstract
Weetabix from the disordered state of Weetabucks,-bicks, and-ices that I realised, as I seem to have a habit of doing, that I did not need to choose which way to lean at all.
Memory is a strange thing. The OED defines its most contemporary use as‘[ s ] enses relating to the faculty of recalling to mind’, but I find that this loses both the sentimentality and technical function that I attribute to it, and surprisingly, not in a distinct way. A stone by the river in a rich Romantic landscape, for example, has the memory of the river in its shape and the memory of the weather in the coarseness( or not) of its surface. A pendulum swinging without losing energy, similarly, has the memory of how far it was first swung, remembering that memory at every beat, ad infinitum.
These examples seem, of course, very distant from that human experience of‘ recalling’, but this experience is, even in the brain, a specific instance of this much broader memory-foam( like the pillow) event. That is, even the regions not associated with‘ recall’ of course still possess memory, though we may label them differently depending on timescale and consequence—‘ impulse’,
A representation of the plurality of choices concerning Weetabix pluralisation.
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