Yes, but the archaic ability to
apprehend words as 'bodies' has
been saved only in certain cases.
Russian psychiatrist A.R.Luria described
'absolut' memory (The mind of a mnemonist.
Cambridge, Massachusets and London, 1987) of
his patient, mnemonist Sh. (Shereshevsky) who,
like Funes in Borges story, can remember
everything. Sh. had eidetic memory. When
Sh. had to recall something (words, numbers,
formulas) he reconstructed 'syllabic' route by
replacement words, syllables for the
images which he arranged along streets.
The road of mnemonist always took him to the
house of his childhood.
>To speak the space of words in their
> interior movement, to shudder at their inner desire, to let the space
> between them filter through to us in their inter-subjectivity and
tension.
> Then their auras, their halos will join us, and be one more piece
> carrying us on our adventure to a new world.
> "All words are restless grains and gods waiting to be opened."
Yes, but the mechanism of substitution,
in a case of mnemonist Sh., for example,
in a case of eidetic memory, based on
random correspondence between words
and things. The coomon is a notion of
space (or a metaphor of space), articulated
as a differnce and similarity between
readable and visible world.
Olesya Turkina