Reversing Dementia

First you forgot as you went,
Thousands of generations,
Then you remembered a bit,

Having invented language,
The first multiskullular
Memory technology.

Hundreds more generations,
And the balance inverted—
What you destroyed and forgot

Slowly, stepwise, some decades,
Might be overtopped by what
Information you stored up,

Before that was sacked and burned,
Obliterated, conquered,
Then painfully built back up.

For a century or two,
You’ve hovered near tipping points
At which you’ve been acquiring

More memory than you lose,
Plus excavating the lost
And reconstructing the gone.

It’s an interesting question,
For you, for us and in us,
Will one whole ever wake up?