Three-Dimensional Dementia 5
___by Carolyn Guertin

An archive is born of forgetfulness (Derrida 11), for it is in the drive to remember that collections are made for posterity. Califia's archival system, however, is not interested so much in posterity as in immediacy. It is both temporal and spatial and embraces contradictions, privileging emotional and sensory information as the most important 'knowledge' to be stored. The key piece of intelligence in the text is the experience of transcendence that comes with the acquisition of the treasure of emotional connection, as when Violet's footprints appear in the sand or when Calvin learns who his parents were. Hypertext's associational logic makes it a mnemonic form, but, as an inclusive archival space, it also allows just such a proliferation of contradictions as the alignment of emotion and sensation with 'knowledge.' Being rooted in short term memory as it is, hypertext is by extension also rooted in memory loss. Without a hierarchy to govern the many plots, a reader must decide what is important in the text and, working with an associational structure, many details are bound to be forgotten. However, in Califia the sensory information is encoded--not in the text as such--but in the archival structure.

Dispersing information into the three-dimensional plot architecture with its family trees, StarMaps, Kit Bag and 800 screens, the text plays with memory loss as an asset (not a bug) by using a reader's limited short term memory against herself, and making the recall of the overwhelming mass of specifics difficult. A tri-part narrative structure foregrounds the immersive, sensual experience of connection through reading in the moment and part of the joy in the text is experienced through the physical fact of navigation. Plot still exists, but because it is abstract and spatial--being the very structure and interface of the work as animated by the nomadic act of reading--it is difficult to recreate in the mind except as an emotional and sensory response.

Forgetfulness, one aspect of information overload, is enacted by the lack of hierarchy in the hypertext form itself [2]. Creating a sense of loss and of being lost, a reader jumps through Califia's many layers of text, image, and sound, anticipating the future and being surprised by returns to past spaces, like Paradise Home or Nellie's Deeds--made new and significant in revisits. The text privileges forgetting and the rediscovery of what has been forgotten through the use of Alzheimer's Disease as a structural and aesthetic trope for the restlessness, nomadism and the obsessive moving and re-moving of stashes of gold. This kind of dementia encourages the reader to assemble the visual and textual clues of the text into coherent stories in her own memory; the only hierarchy established emanates from the reader's valuing of particulars in her stash of clues. In the process of navigating the spaces of the "cosmic pattern" (Kaye's message) of the history of the families, no 'progress' is discernable. The disorientation of navigating an unfamiliar nomadic world requires a reader, just like Violet, to rely on senses and emotions, rather than on logic. This is associational memory rather than simple recall. It is the reader who forges the many connections lying dormant in the text, and the reader who must reconcile the contradictions in her own version of the story.

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