mills

The Fugue of The Twentieth Century

I happened onto Butterfly Effect’s comments about Skylab and later saw Unburying the Lead’s photo of Europa and wound up, as we do here in the inter-ether, reading article after hyperlinked article in a cascade of tabs, each more interesting then the last.

Space exploration is fascinating in an ordinary sense, of course, but it is also serves as a kind of nexus for the intersection of the forces that defined the last sixty years. Indeed, in its colossal synthesis of military culture and technology, the tension between pure science and economically-driven “research and development,” and the shifting relations between Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the US, space exploration is almost a fugue of the themes of the 20th century. So dense is its history with the reverberations of our modernism, our utopianism, our bloodiness, our nationalism, our ideological exceptionalism, and the color, texture, sound, and inner sense of our experiences after WWI that it’s almost as though it were created to encapsulate the period: it is an incidental monument.

There were Operations Paperclip and Overcast, in which the US secreted from defeated Germany the scientists, some Nazis, who engineered the V2 and who would go on to direct our own weapons and space programs (already competing with the USSR): a perfect distillation of the decline of nationalism and the rise of the post-nationalist technocracy, the bureaucratization of the world, the utilitarian half-morality of foreign policy.

There were the anonymous and grisly deaths of an unknown number of cosmonauts, which constituted an unacceptable flaw to the perfect dogmatists who controlled their society and were thus hidden away. We wiped the blood off of the machines so that they would shine in the flashbulb photographs. And our own astronauts: ideal men of the military placed into a superstructure of scientism and archetypal heroism working for reformed National Socialists to beat the Russians and make space safe in billion-dollar rockets built by Lockheed.

There is above all the arc of our interests and habits  in the passing years: the unalloyed idealism of early NASA missions and the Apollo program with its Kennedy associations leading to indirection in the 1970s, with muddles like Skylab, to the more contemporary world of the newscycle: tragedy (and science vs. government), triumph, repeat, evolve.

Novels written with this much symbolic resonance are rare (I think of Vollman’s Europe Central).

(Note: I’m not even mentioning the absurd biographies of ordinary astronauts like this man, who’s already lived more than I would in ten lifetimes; or the intersection of the space and atomic programs; or the way that the deeds of governments and militaries and corporations take place high above us, rotating and repeating and shimmering, forever in view and out of reach; or anything else that would further prolong this drivel, for which I now apologize).

In Defense of Memory

Superfluidity made some excellent points in defense of memorization, an intellectual function made less broadly necessary by technology but perhaps not less beneficial. The post, which you should read, reminded me a bit of this quote from Nicholas Carr. Some excerpts I thought particularly good:

To take the last question first, I think that when we survey the great artistic achievements of humans, we often cannot see the history that lies hidden behind those monuments. That is to say, I believe (admittedly without tangible evidence) that much of the great poetry and painting and sculpture and music are indebted to some degree to rote memorization or rigorous work of some sort that instilled themes and patterns which became manifest in creative expression.

But, furthermore, a poem that lives in our brains will affect us differently than a poem that merely visits us from time to time. Our minds will play with that poem even when we are not watching, and it will seep deeply into us and come out in unexpected places. If you ask parents, or maybe grandparents, I think that many of them will still be able to recite a poem that they were asked to learn by heart in gradeschool. And I suspect that such a memory has been more influential than they themselves can realize.

There is no question in my mind that what we adore about the polymathic textual density of David Foster Wallace or the almost synesthesic interweaving of art forms and themes in Milan Kundera’s later works or the fearsome saturation of historical experience in William Vollmann’s novels requires easy access to massive quantities of information.

The outsourced memory relies on the interface of the database, whether it’s Google’s search form or your graduate assistant’s personality or your library’s selection. This is problematic in at least two obvious ways:

• Creativity is as much about establishing novel or under-explored connections between phenomena as it is about constructing thought or art ex nihilo. Such connections are easier to establish if -pardon the metaphor- you have a fast, locally-hosted memorial database. To rapidly transact on facts, creative works, themes, ideas, and feelings, and form new links between them, you need to have them in your mind, not simply “available” for laborious searching online or on shelves.
• If you depend on others for recording, compiling, selecting, and storing information, you are deferring to their editorial vision of what is important and reducing the likelihood of finding novel connections yourself; essentially, you are sharing a cultural database with many others.

I agree with Superfluidity about memory: it is undervalued both as a sort of cognitive function on part with analysis and as a means for embedding meaning deep within yourself. Aside from the perhaps dramatic point that -until age robs you of it- your memory is all you truly have, there are practical reasons why the decline of memorization is a creatively and intellectually impoverishing trend.

(Also, I like the memorize the lyrics to all the most ridiculous music in the world and feel that this is my true talent; if you would like a spoken rendition of Thirstin Howl III’s “Polo Rican,” please let me know).