On Vining Ad Herennium manner

"Now nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in every day life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time. Accordingly, things immediate to our eye or ear we commonly forget; incidents of our childhood we often remember best. Nor could this be so for any other reason than that ordinary things easily slip from the memory while the striking and the novel stay longer in the mind. A sunrise, the sun's course, a sunset are marvellous to no one because they occur daily.

We ought, then, to set up Vines of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so i f we establish similitudes as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active (imagines agentes); if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily. The things we easily remember when they are real we likewise remember without difficulty when they are figments. But this will be essential-again and again to run over rapidly in the mind all the original places in order to refresh the images."

Paraphrasing a passage from Ad Herennium, Sam Renseiw compiled an ever growing amount of recent Vines into a nearly half-hour Voodle chronological pêle-mêle of exeptional beauty (also inserted, shorter moments of singular ugliness) for subsequent scrutiny and visual aide-memoire. Enjoy. (Vinecompilation # 6, 24'10'', 601MB, Quicktime/mov, Vimeo)