🎧 Listen to Mnemonic Fish below. Composition by Jenn E Norton, performed by Kim Heron

excerpts from chapter 4

In October 2022, I traced a buried river in Athens using GPS and the Echoes app, which uses Google Maps to play audio in specific locations. As part of the non-commercial Platforms Art Fair, curated by Julie René de Cotret, I exhibited the public audio piece Mnemonic Fish, which draws upon two of the five mythical rivers of the underworld of Hades, The River of Unmindfulness, known as Lethe, where the dead drink from its waters to forget their previous lives before rebirth, and The River of Memory, known as Mnemosyne. To drink from the pools of Mnemosyne would restore memory and spare the soul from transmigration. The actual underground river that I map out in Echoes, River Ilissos, is an ancient river that runs through Athens that was buried in a tunnel beneath the city of WWII in an effort to modernize the city.  Formed by the convergence of several seasonal creeks, Ilissos drains into the Athenian mountain range region of Attica, specifically the western flank of Mount Hymettus. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the river was overcome with pollution as the city of Athens expanded. It was then buried, designated as a conduit for rainwater runoff along the streets that were built over its original path. Flowing beneath Mesogesion Avenue, the river runs under the suburban avenues of Michalakopoulou and Vasileos Konstantinou along the Panathinaiko Stadium, where it then seeps into the southeastern ruins of the Columns of Olympian Zeus, where a small portion of the river can be seen to this day. The ancient banks of River Ilissos, where Socrates and the Cynics would teach their philosophies, were written about by Plato. Named after the demigod son of Poseidon and Demeter, the river is described idyllically in Plato’s text, Phaedrus.

The goddess Mnemosyne was the daughter of Uranus and Gaea, Heaven and Earth, and the mother of the nine muses, all fathered by her nephew Zeus. It is said that although Plato used myth as a teaching tool rather than a belief system, he was known to call upon Mnemosyne to remember his narratives, as the titan’s importance was understood by a society built upon oral culture:  

“But besides the gods and goddesses whom you have mentioned, I would specially invoke Mnemosyne (Memory); for all the important part of my discourse is dependent on her favour, and if I can recollect and recite enough of what was said by the priests and brought hither by Solon, I doubt not that I shall satisfy the requirements of this theatre.”

-Plato, Critias (trans. Bury)

Perhaps the oppositional counterpart of Mnemosyne is Lethe, the goddess of Oblivion, daughter of Eris, Goddess of Strife, who was described as dull, inhabiting the role of guard to the court of Hypnos, where the River of Unmindfulness encircled. Though the mythological rivers are said to be located at the archeological site of Eleusis, where the ceremonies of the Eleusinian Mysteries were performed by the cult of Demeter and Persephone, I use the metaphoric and formal aspects of forgotten rivers buried underground as thematics within Mnemonic Fish. 

When listening to Mnemonic Fish as we enter the activated zone, the sounds of water softly trickle into our ears as though we are nearing a cool, burbling spring. As the trickling swells, we hear synthesized instrumental tones that gently and slowly ascend. The binaural sounds of the water create the auditory illusion that we share the environment with a peacefully flowing river. We then hear a woman speak in low tones, as though we are privy to her pensive remembrances. She speaks as though observing a memory unfold in real-time, a memory of a river and the sensation of staring into it, falling deeper and deeper into contemplation as ideas spring forth. As she speaks, her voice enmeshes with the melodic drone and the water’s current, evoking a sense of being swept along with her thoughts and sensations.

The fish in the title refers to another geographically displaced poetic, in which thought and the inception of ideas are like fish that swim away when disrupted, as Virginia Woolf described in A Room of One’s Own. 

Thought – to call it by a prouder name than it deserved – had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until – you know the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass, how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind – put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a beadle, I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the fellows and scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path, the arms of the beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the fellows and scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that, in protection of their turf, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

Once disturbed from thought, the fish (or idea) swims away in the currents of consciousness, forgotten, perhaps to be retrieved in time. The tie between Woolf’s fish and the waters of forgetfulness and remembrance, Lethe and Mnemosyne, speak to the actual waters that run below the fore of Athenian thought - its fate yet to be determined. 

To view Mnemonic Waters in Echoes, click here.