How do you recover your past if you have retrograde amnesia? -- Write down, blindly, everything that comes into your head, check it back for clues? How do you hold onto the present if you have retrograde amnesia? List the things that strike you link them up to preserve your train of thought

If you forgot everything you did as soon as you'd finished it, it'd be almost impossible to write a book. Of course you could resort to automatic writing, recording things at random, checking them back for clues.

Alternatively, you could keep a scrapbook of pictures and quotations, indexing and annotating them to preserve the associations you -- once -- saw between them.

What if you chose to do both? Or, rather, if you happened to open your notebook one way, it told you to do the first. If you opened it the other way, it told you to do the second. All the things you really wanted to say would be hidden under a mask of random words. You and the reader would be, to all intents and purposes, equal -- digging into the mask of a culture to uncover the repressed, the collective memories concealed beneath.