The apocalypse, whether it arises from human action or from natural causes, means the total erasure of collective memory.  Such obliterations have already been perpetrated on a smaller scale in the form of genocide.  The murder of a people - whether American Indians, Jews, Russian or Chinese peasants, Cambodians, the Romanies, or the indigenous peoples of Brazil or Guatemala - is always the attempt to eliminate from human memory any trace of a national, ethnic or religious culture.  The lost cultures of this world, together with their languages, literatures and art, would make a whole compendium.  We refer to languages such as Latin and ancient Greek as "dead", yet the truly dead languages and cultures are those that have existed but are now utterly lost.  Thus history is like a much-damaged parchment, only fragments of which are still legible.  Furthermore, what remains of history is gleaned from the often unreliable memories and memoirs of chroniclers; is usually the record of the victors, not the losers, of the powerful, not the powerless; is predominantly the history of men written by men; and is frequently distorted intentionally by ideologists of various persuasions.  History, like our own individual memories, is an unreliable witness, a blend of fact and fiction, of memory and amnesia. 
   
       The first section of this book noted the continual effect of amnesia on our thinking processes and on our consciousness of time.  Our lifetimes are composed of memory, projections of the future and forgetfulness.  Our sense of identity is shaped by what we recall from the past, yet what we remember is in turn molded and subverted by amnesia.  Memory and forgetfulness coexist in any one of our verbal or visual expressions, and our personal awareness of our lives persists as a leaf tenuously floating.  Our verbal and visual languages always point to this underlying oblivion, this absence beneath presence, for which Mallarmé and Beckett adopted silence as a metaphor.  Verbal and visual languages have always been our primary dikes against the sea of amnesia and our primary means of preserving memory.  At the same time it is memory on which they depend, and if memory is lost, our languages dissolve into nothingness, and the signs that were meaningful to us become absurd. 

   Yet, as Jacques Derrida implies in his theory of deconstruction, and as Amnesis art suggests through its portraiture of lost objects, we have always lived with a lack of definite connection between language and the world it means to denote, and between ourselves and that which appears exterior to us.  For we have always been confronted, as an amnesiac is faced with his surrounding reality, with ambivalent clues as to the meaning of the universe we live in and our position within its scheme.  

   As amnesiacs we look out at an indeterminate universe with the wonder of Safc's man at the window, or with the existential joy and terror described by Camus and Sartre.  like the heroes and antiheroes of their novels and plays, we tend increasingly to find meaning in immediate actions and to re-create ourselves by means of fables covering the gaps in our fragmentary memories.

    Amnesis does not represent an effort to forget history, but rather to see it so clearly that we can build on its incompleteness and create imaginative paradigms that better represent our spirit and our longings.  By centering on an intrahistory, Amnesis brings forth the plight of oppressed social groups, such as women and minorities, of races and nations, whose story has been omitted, or whose story depends on the parchments of a willed and distorted vision.  Before such voids and warped narratives, Amnesis proposes the creation of imaginative realities, which freed from the lies and fictions of official histories, can spur a greater fulfillment of our potential.  Thus, in Amnesis, poetry and art meet history.