Joseph Lappie

A Game Of “Telephone”

The Roman historian and philosopher Pliny the Elder finished writing Natural History in 77 CE. This series of encyclopedic knowledge contained a travelogue describing foreign lands and the people inhabiting them. The descriptions of indigenous populations in this book resulted in fantastical, and often horrific, parodies. Over 1400 years later, the Nuremberg Chronicle was published, becoming the first printed history book. It contains Biblical stories, family trees, tales of battles, European geography, and two pages describing the strange people Pliny claims to have encountered in his travels. The two pages include images created by artists using truncated information edited from an ancient document. The resulting images were cultivated much like a game of “telephone” passed down over the course of fifteen centuries, falling victim to cultural ignorance, personal bias and misinterpretation.

Memory And The Truth

Memory is important in the game of “telephone”. What, how, and why do we remember? French writer Marcel Proust states “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” Memory is not a process of recall but of reconstruction. The reconstruction of memory is a way to create our afterlife. As long as someone remembers you, you are alive. Depending on circumstances this may be a type of heaven or a place in hell or somewhere along those paths. Thoughts are fluid. They change. They are manipulated. Memory pushes and pulls due to time and emotion, slightly changing with each retelling, its strength or fragility based on one’s time commitment to it. Eventually, people become legend, myth, tale or, often, nothing. Some characters in The Procession are references to the images of creatures printed in the Nuremberg Chronicle, reconstructed from false memories, from a long dead source and susceptible to human failings. Others explore personal narratives of longing, guilt, and transformation. Like the figures in this piece, we are simply marching through a process of forgetting, burying, or exalting. Memory isn’t “The Truth”… simply a shade of it.

We move slowly forward. We move step by step. There’s spinning. There’s longing. There’s hope. There’s suffering. Through all these things, there is love.