Word: korsakoffian
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...called Korsakoff's psychosis: they have no memory. Not that they have forgotten their ancient childhood memories. They often retain these. But they have lost entirely the capacity to establish new memories. Everything they see, everything they hear, everything they think, they forget within seconds. Introduce yourself to a Korsakoffian, leave the room, and return a minute later. He will have no recollection...
...surprisingly, the amnesic society behaves much like the amnesic individual. The Korsakoffian patient, for example, fills in his gaps with fiction. He makes up stories, often gigantic confabulations, to make historical ends meet. The video culture too fills in the gaps of real life with mountains of fiction. (The average American absorbs more make-believe drama in a year than his ancestors did in a lifetime.) And it ties history's loose ends with a form of fabrication it calls docudrama...
...Korsakoffian, moreover, has trouble functioning. He is always getting things wrong. As modern industrial culture becomes more visual, its images more transient, it has a hard time learning. It too is constantly surprised. Take the shock with which news of the Chinese crackdown on the democracy movement was received. Given Communism's 70-year history, marked by repeated reigns of repressive terror, only a forgetting culture could have been so taken by surprise. The week after the Tiananmen massacre, Hungary, which has a harder time forgetting, staged a moving reburial of the men executed for leading the 1956 rebellion...
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