I did write a post in 2023, but never published it. It will become something later, I promise, and then maybe I will retroactively publish that post. For all of you who were so starved of content last year.
Now, here is something. A story about memory.
I woke on Thursday morning, about 7am, thinking: "Hecatompylos".
This word was repeating in my head. My wife had woken me up, sent me, as on most weekend mornings, to go sleep with the 3 year old while she gets the almost-8-year-old ready to catch the bus. I kept thinking, "Hecatompylos - what is Hecatompylos? Somebody? Some place? Hecatompylos.. Hecatompylos.."
This word repeated in my mind until I slept, and then, I think, it kept repeating. I think I dreamed of wondering what "Hecatompylos" could be. "Hecatompylos, Hecatompylos"..
When I woke up for good, about 8am, it was repeating, repeating, a one-word earworm. I'm not sure I've had this experience before - I'm sure I've awoken with a tune in my head, but a word?
As I ate my breakfast, I looked up the word on wikipedia, which told me that Hecatompylos was an ancient greek name for the Persian city of Qumis, in northern Iran. What? The wikipedia article mentioned that Alexander the Great had visited there.. I did skim the Alexander the Great page a couple of weeks ago. I had come across his name - mentioned not as "the Great", but as "Alexander III" - in an encyclopedia of ancient science I had been reading, and I had thought, who were Alexanders I and II? So I knew I had perused his wikipedia entry. I rechecked it, to see if maybe I had come across his significant visit to Hecatompylos in Persia, but.. no mention of it.
It was still repeating! Like a word-beacon, repeating, "Hecatompylos, Hecatompylos". I think I spoke Hecatompylos under my breath a hundred times. I can still feel it in my tongue, I have to resist mouthing the word now. It's so strange.
I went to the lab and did some things, but pretty soon I was googling "Hecatompylos". I came back to the wikipedia page, and now I saw that 'Hecatompylos" could also direct to Thebes, the famous temple city of Egypt. This felt more right than Persia. And, I realized, just last night, before bed, I had read with the 5-year-old a chapter of the Buildings Book on the monumental temple and pyramid of the Pharoah Djoser. Was it in Thebes? I couldn't remember.
Now I read about Djoser, but found that no, Djoser lived hundreds of miles north, close to Egyptian Memphis (as a Tennesseean I have to distinguish Memphises), and that during his time Thebes was a mere fishing village, no Hecatompylos - no city of a "Hundred Gates". I gave up again and tried to work.
A little while later, I tried once again: "Hecatompylos", into Google - but this time, I felt, I should try "He*k*atompylos". This time, a web page comes up, a page from an online Encyclopedia of Borges - Hekatompylos was mentioned in Borges' "The Immortal".
That was it! I had indeed read The Immortal a few nights earlier, Sunday or Monday night. Maybe I had read two pages on Sunday, then the rest on Monday (I have to squeeze in Borges between bedtime reading for the little ones, who alas do not enjoy my reading The Immortal or The Library of Babel aloud). I don't recall lingering on "Thebes Hekatompylos". Maybe I did? But I've read the story dozens of times before. The last time must have refreshed some habitual circuits familiar with the words and phrases of the story, and then again, as dozens of times before, they were dormant.
Then, on Thursday morning, dreaming, one of those circuits was randomly touched - maybe it was the previous night's reading about Djoser and other Egyptian temples and tombs - and the word "Hecatompylos" popped into a dream, without any context or explanation. So free of context that it followed me from one dream into another, into waking, back into dreams, and back into waking life, until I reconnected it with its origin. Once I understood why the word was there, it dissolved back into unconscious memory and the compulsion to repeat it was ended.
***
After an introduction, Borges story begins:
"As far as I can recall, my labors began in a garden in Thebes Hekatompylos, when Diocletian was emperor."
https://www.borges.pitt.edu/i/tebas-hekatompylos
