Straightforward Recital

Artistically written recursions of Joseph Smith’s first vision also began to appear in the 1880s, particularly through George Cannon and Andrew Jenson. These stories, while not intended to be historical representations, reflected and contributed to the recursion of collective memory and its transmission to the next generation. Distortion, while inevitable with retellings, occurs as the remembering entity favors coherence over accuracy. Forging collective memory from art, music, and print created by a shared memory and a multitude of individual ones, each inevitably distorted compared to Joseph Smith’s own memories of his first vision. But for all that, the collective memory the saints forged became incredibly strong, resilient, and extremely well known to them.