mills

A Minor Theme

It has already gown so hot here that streets and outdoor patios empty of life by noon, a fact which suits me well; I am fond of the extremity of heat, which reminds me of mind-breaking exercise; particularly when combined with bright light over lidded eyes, it so overwhelms my perception that my conscious internal monologue abates at last and gives way to an impressionistic, even dream-like stupor: the stupor of summer, of half-awake hours on a towel on the sand.

This morning, I walked to the coffee shop near my house to read and sweat and listen to my dogs pant themselves into exhaustion. After arriving and ordering, I realized that -as usual- I’d forgotten my wallet, and -as usual- the girl behind the counter offered to let me pay later, but -as usual- I declined, hoping that with enough walking back and forth my mind would learn to remember.

But there is little one can do to consciously direct the memory, which in its refusal to absorb work details, the concerns of lovers, the conversations we share with scarcely-tolerated office-mates, the dates of empty ceremonies, is probably the most honest part of the mind. It works according to its own dark set of rules, a hierarchy of prioritization to which you do not have access; it chooses what to retain, often to your embarrassment or detriment, and it chooses what to recall, sometimes in a rush of associated visions that seem to have come from nowhere at all.

My memory is exceptionally indolent, as am I. Last night, Yumwatch mentioned Steely Dan, which called to mind the amusing fact that they attended my college (and wrote disapprovingly of it); I also heard their song ‘My Old School’ last night, as part of difficult-to-explain set of circumstances which I noted in a comment on her blog at idiotic length. Last night, after seeing her post, I decided to look up several old professors and see how they compared to my highly unreliable memories of them. I spent perhaps half-an-hour reading about them, and when I went to sleep my recollective apparatus, which behaves as a rusty, complexly malfunctioning antique machine, must have decided to keep Bard in its short-term cache.

So when, hot and spent, I returned from the labor of acquiring coffee this morning and entered the cool, dark house, I was not merely surprised to hear Will playing Neil Young’s ‘Dead Man’ but actually taken aback by this modest confluence of themes, all directing my attention to that final year at Bard, when I walked endlessly in the heat peculiar to the North, less humid but perhaps more intense, intently listening to ‘Dead Man’ and despite my distressed state occasionally thinking of how wise Donald Fagen was to say: “I’m never going back to my old school.”

Remembering Snow

1. I walked in a sea of snow: waves frozen in heaves and troughs, a still white ocean of ceased surging over the land, like a flood soon to abate with the morning’s sun.

2. As I came down the hill, bits of dirt speckled the snow; it became cookie-dough ice cream, and despite the cold I wanted to stop and scoop it into my hands.

Forgive my Southern obsession with snow, but in Oregon I was stunned by its beauty and caught myself constantly metamorphosing it as I walked through it, sank in it, raced across it, tasted it, fell into it shirtless and gasping.

Langer and I are reading a book together which discusses at length the essentially metaphorical quality of language and how metaphor thus acts as the fundamental process of linguistic cognition (and perhaps consciousness).

Language is in some sense itself pure metaphor: “snow” isn’t snow, but as it is our least reducible signifier for snow (or shall we propose that visualization is even more basic than this?) it serves as a reality-replacing sign. We come to think snow is just “snow.” Language becomes reality.

But like all that humans traffic in -from cocaine to comfort, sex to security, lust to love- language wears, and once familiarized through use it is dulled. “Snow” as a sign for snow no longer excites our sense of snow as a phenomenon; it is a word: short, small, inert. Language obscures reality.

Literary metaphor is a means -not the only one- for combating this familiarization, for re-sensitizing us to what has been obscured through use. A potent, amusing, striking metaphor, if well-made, resets our reaction to something, making us take note again, as though in our first love or inhaling our first line.

(That repetition dulls experience is amazing to me; it needn’t be so, one must admit, but is merely a fact of how our acquisitive and apprehensive minds process reality and learn its ways. It is also frustrating: as the decades pass, how much of the universe simply wears off! And we need more and more to feel vital in our reactions: more sex, more travel, more drugs, more venom, more passion, more and more and more. This is the most fundamental element of aging and thus of life-through-time: the attenuation of all experiences to silence).

Metaphor reintroduces you to the world. Whether the metaphors that occur to us resonate with others is impossible to know without asking, and often they don’t. Is this a matter of metaphors which fail to capture the hidden elements of what they describe, or is this personal taste?

But how powerful the right metaphors can be! We see again and again in literature how words can suddenly forces us into contact with reality. In one tired phrase, a worn-out word or a cliche, they hide the world; in the vivid metaphor, they smash us into it:

“And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

Orphaned Memories

There are many posts circulating today concerning memory and forgetting, topics of significant personal interest to me; most seem to stem from the NYT’s recent obituary of HM, a man who –like many of Oliver Sacks’ most notable patients- illuminated in his dysfunction an aspect of how our minds work. Benjamin Hilts’ father, it emerges, actually wrote what sound like a compelling book on HM and the problems of memory.

The problem of forgetting is the most commonly contemplated aspect of recollective anomaly: why we don’t remember some event, some person, some period of life, some set of feelings we had for someone, some fact. That our identities rely on the aggregation of memories is demonstrable in cases like that of HM, and movies like Memento aptly portray how horrifying the prospect of generalized forgetting is: without that stable ground, who would we be?

(Note that the totalitarian assault on memory in the form of the revision and denial of history has a similarly destructive and demoralizing effect on nations).

But another problem interests me, too: the problem of orphaned memories. These occur with greater and greater frequency as I age, but I don’t know who else has them.

I recall a stone plaza before a dull, dark church; across the narrow streets on either side are old buildings. There are perpendicular commercial signs above the doors, but I don’t see what they say. It looks to be Europe, and I think I am with my friend Chris. But is this a memory of a place we were, or a memory of a dream?

I was at a darkened restaurant with checkered red tablecloths; I think there were other children there, perhaps after a field trip, although there were parents, too. We are eating crawfish. The parking lot is dusty. It is on the outskirts of town. Is this the recollection of a passage in a novel? I seem to think it is my memory, but how can I verify this?

These memories without contexts are usually visual, but since I tend to remember dreams sometimes years later, I am never able to pin down whether they are real; that I might lose the memory entirely frightens me, so I revisit them over and over, hoping to edify them and, perhaps, accidentally spark some connection to a narrative place-marker.

It is worth reflecting on the implications forgetting has for our identities, our selves; but it is also worth wondering what misplaced memories might mean. If I cannot remember an event, do I avoid the effects of the experience? If I cannot place a memory, is it still part of the tapestry of my personality?

Memory, the basis for everything we are and so many of our quarrels and despairs, is remarkably fallible.

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).

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?

Music and Memory and Graceland

I was in love and purchased my first CD, Paul Simon’s Graceland.  Ever since then, my music collection has grown to become a huge part of my life, mentally AND physically.

From Katydid’s post.

My mother, my sister, and I evacuated New Orleans for a hurricane in the early 1990s; it must have been Andrew. My dad’s decision to stay wasn’t something I interrogated at the time; back then, no one had yet realized what would happen to New Orleans if a major hurricane cut through it.

My mother is a deeply creative person, not simply in her various hobbies and crafts but also in an existential sense: she creates experiences where most see void. As an example: it is from her that I learned how wonderful a road trip can be, whereas for many driving is radically devalued time spent crossing radically devalued space, the stark highways connecting implicitly significant As and Bs. Not for her. Road trips with her are richly experiential.

Even in daily life, she doesn’t wait in lines; she makes friends in lines.

And she didn’t just leave New Orleans; she took us somewhere. As with much of what she does, she undertook our evacuation in a tongue-in-cheek way, deciding to turn it into a vacation of sorts; we didn’t fly to Cannes while Rome burned, though: we drove to Graceland, in Memphis.

By that age, I was already obsessed with Paul Simon. While I was still in the womb, my mother sang “Loves Me Like a Rock“ to me, and I’d taken very strongly to his music at my first conscious exposure; my parents were kind enough to immerse me in excellent music at a young age, my dad sharing with me Coltrane, Davis, and what classical I could handle. But it was Simon’s music, so percussive and complex, that sent me down the path to being a musician.

We listened to our little tape of Graceland on that trip so much that I am startled my mother didn’t go insane; we listened to it the way you listen to albums when you’re a teenager and can hear the same record twenty times in a night, the repetition making the music deeper, not shallower, more resonant, not less.

I’m going to Graceland, Graceland,
Memphis, Tennessee
I’m going to Graceland.
Poor-boys and pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland
And my traveling companions
Are ghosts and empty sockets:
I’m looking at ghosts and empties.
But I’ve reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland.

Naturally, the metaphor has grown more and more significant to me as I’ve aged, and I think the song is one of the most beautiful I know. I live in what Simon calls “the national guitar,” the Mississippi delta, and whenever someone slanders New Orleans and asks why we should bother rebuilding I think again of what we’ve given: of the birth of jazz and its fusion with blues and the Afro-Caribbean music of Congo Square, and I think of how Simon is a quintessential American, synthesizing so much of our national musical experience in such a simple way.

Andrew missed us and devastated parts Florida, although we certainly got our due thirteen years later. I can barely remember what the real Graceland looked like on the inside, only that I thought it was rather ugly. But I think Simon is right: we are all received there, in Graceland, the silly sprawling symbol of rock music, that nexus of mass consumption and obscure historical happenstance which came from slaves and jazz musicians as surely as from Berry and Presley; indeed, that music contains all the wandering poor-boys and pilgrims of America’s history.

That’s what’s so beautiful about great popular art: it isn’t elitist, and it receives us all.