About
Are our brains fixed in the present, or can we radically change our outlook through an internal conversation with moments from our past? The Onion, a new opera by Eric Sawyer and Ron Bashford, poses this question through a story about an AI machine that allows users to re-live the past, illuminating their younger selves.
Magistra, the Onion’s inventor, imagines a wide use of her machine across psychology, law, and historical research. But she also has a personal agenda: to use The Onion to prove that she was justified in separating Miranda from her father, when Miranda was just a little girl. Magistra’s young assistant, Octavian is caught in the middle, afraid of The Onion’s increasing potential to force its users to confront painful secrets, including his own.
The Onion dramatizes the threatening and the healing potential of memories. The metaphor of memory as an onion is common in literature and human imagination. Our story revisits the onion metaphor in light of modern technology. Memory is, after all, a set of neural connections that may be altered or reconditioned in what might be considered a creative act.
Our memories, whether recovered, re-imagined, or invented, profoundly shape our identities, destinies, and, perhaps most importantly, our relationships.