On the long-term poetry of snails
One of my most prized possessions is this decade-old clipping from the NZ Listener of a news item about a scientific study on memory. It's entitled "Lest we remember" and goes like this: "Will it be possible for people to have their unwanted memories erased, or at least weakened? Who knows, but scientists at UCLA have reported in the Journal of Neuroscience that they have been able to erase the long-term memories of marine snails..." "The long-term memories of marine snails"! I was -- still am -- irremediably fascinated by the idea. Take the conch. The conch, according to the marine biologist featured in Stanford University's "microdoc" video on conch , spends its life "cruising around" (changed to "wander" for the written version) in the deep waters near the reef, eating seagrass. What could a conch's long-term memories be? So here I am, years later, reading about Shelley in Italy, the long afternoon