Black Boxes
After a particularly traumatic break-up a few years ago, I spent some time deconstructing, interrogating, analyzing, and sharing the texts of the affair: love letters and emails. In addition to being vituperative, the end of our relationship was quite communicative; both being language-obsessed, we’d corresponded more than is customary and, after things changed, we’d argued and pleaded and insulted and accused in text, at length. There was a lot to examine.
In love, and in love’s end, I encountered the problem of black boxes. What I recalled and I recorded both seem to present everything but the core of the experience; that is, I have thousands of words from her and from me, hundreds of exchanges, small tangential discourses on our affection, rambling tirades about our betrayals, essays and quotes and allusions. But in the ocean of detail, I find that what happened isn’t there.
I am obsessed with plane crashes, and am often amazed by how little one learns from black boxes. Add up the flight data recorder and the voice recorder and you feel no closer to understanding, say, what it was like to lose your life after plunging 30,000 ft., than you did before. Sometimes, you still can’t even figure out what brought the plane down.
Memory is a black box, whatever the resolution or comprehensiveness of its capture; it is, as I’ve quoted before, merely “a form of forgetting.” Of the most critical moments in our life, we retain only abstractions. And in the digital age, the superabundance of details does little to mitigate this basic problem. The photos, the movies, the correspondence…
In it all, I recognize neither myself nor her nor anything between us. So many people say of catastrophically failed relationships: “Well, I see now that I never really loved them…” But that’s not true: redacting the record of emotion because of the incomprehensibility of the partial memories is a doubled self-deception.
I think this problem extends to virtually all areas of inquiry: from the fascinating quantum experiments indicating the effects of observation to the endless explosion of obsessive work on events like JFK’s death, it is almost as though reality resists analysis, as though the harder we look the less we see, the further we penetrate the forest the more obscured it is by its trees, so to speak.
It bothers me; why should everything scatter and diffuse as if frightened of being understood, as though comprehension is oblivion?