Memories never exist as fixed stories. Our memories’ susceptibility to change depends upon the circumstances that call them to mind.  Subsequent rememberings are colored by previous rememberings, and conjuring up personal histories in the service of pictorial narrative is an act of simultaneously recalling past images, accounting for one’s present state, and directing the hand in search of some revelatory exposition.  This drawing out one’s history presents a future past:  the image of the past conjured up in the present provides a tableau for reconsidering the present, envisioning the future.  And the illustration born of one’s memories transcends the verbal narrative in its ability to entirely eschew any references to duration or completion of an action.  In this, the temporality of the image is aorist—eternally occurring in the past.  

The Art of Memory, by Francis Yates, describes various forms of memorization employed throughout history by the great orators.  The method described by Quintillian in Institutio Oratoria (printed in full in this piece) involves locating concepts, arguments, and precise words within a mental architecture.  One imagines a building, and having sited the points of a discourse on various features of that structure in advance, delivering a lecture becomes as simple as leading a tour and describing those selected mnemonic devices.  Having reread this book in various places, and stages of my life, the text which speaks of mnemonic devices also serves as one, triggering memories of past moments spent reading specific passages. I consider nostalgia for things not yet happened, mastering mnemonic techniques for yet attained  knowledge, and inverting mnemonic relationships.  

Aorist gris-gris: (Instututio Oratoria, anise, bearberry, mugwort) is a collage of temporal referents.  The text, translated from the original Latin is printed in iron filament ink and will eventually, slowly rust to orange.  The overlaid cut-out herbal mixture is composed of the ingredients in a Psychic Vision Mojo Hand, over-printed with the same text and ink, and oxidized.  The aorist gris-gris mixture promises visions of the future, built entirely of the individual’s past and present.