by Joshua Cohen
Error msgs. Fails.
It got so that I was typing into void: Stuff I’d typed seconds ago, one two three four seconds ago, still hadn’t appeared onscreen.
The flicker was mutual; the hum was in my hands.
I was still typing when it crashed.
* * *
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A FANTASY, A DREAM—OR whatever you call a dream when you’re not sleeping. Such are the moments—the moments just before sleep when you’re occupied by a notion you’d like to accompany you into your proper somatic oneiric peace; and it will if you try, or only if you don’t try, though if it does, you might not remember that it has, or you might not yet remember that it did, meaning that it’s stored but accessible only to a future computer that can read everything stored but not humanly retrievable (you’ve never been the user approved); or else it might be accessible, perhaps, but only under the influence of a future medication that would remove such limitations within yourself (repression/suppression, senescence); or else it might be accessible, perhaps, but only to a future computer that must be administered its own version of this future medication to compensate for your initial storage or transmission having been faulty, degraded.
The idyll, the reverie. Our attentions have only as much in common as our dreams do.
Science has proposed attention as the purview of an enormous organ, an organon—a system with functions of reflection, projection, and even reasoning; while philosophy has proposed attention as a metonymic presumption whose evolution has conditioned scientists—in an age in which attention has been declared endangered, or nearly extinct—to use the term to link more than any analogy can “handle”: the visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile perception of objects, and the apperception of everyone’s favorite nodding subject, the self. The most pressing concern is not that such things aren’t connected—no one would claim that they weren’t—neither is it that they shouldn’t be—no one would claim that either—rather it’s that their connection will lead to further medications and technologies that will mediate us and our mutual experience.
It should be no consolation that though we can never become conscious of our own attention, we can become conscious of each other’s. Science’s model of a totally integrated attention system enduringly monitoring and tracking, remembering, and expecting is as much a description of our hopes for ourselves as it is of our anxieties about the vigilant global sensorium surrounding.
TEST
1. According to her own diary, had Alice James (1848–92), sister of William and Henry, and victim of “hysteria,” contemplated: a.) parricide, b.) suicide, c.) parricide and suicide, or, d.) fratricide, parricide, and suicide?
b. If Deuteronomy 25:19 instructs us to “blot out the remembrance of [the people] Amalek,” why does it also instruct us: “thou shalt not forget it,” or even mention Amalek in the first place?
3. Jesus is mentioned as writing only once, in John 8:6: “He stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground.” Below, paraphrase his message.
d. Avicenna (ca. 980–1037) claimed the existence of five internal senses, to complement the five external senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Below, match the five internals to their functions:
COLLECTS THE ATTENTION
VIS COGITANS
MEMORY OF ATTENTION
VIS MEMORALIS
COLLECTS THE INTENTIONS
VIS AESTIMATIONIS
MEMORY OF INTENTIONS
IMAGINATIO
COMPOUNDS/DIVIDES THE
FANTASIA/SENSUS COMMUNIS
ATTENTION/INTENTIONS
5. “Homer” mentions writing only once, in The Iliad. Bellerophon, son of Glaucus, is exiled from Ephyra for having killed—possibly his brother, possibly his own shadow. He arrives in the Argives, dominion of King Proteus, where the queen, Antea, offers to have sex with him. He, being honorable, refuses—only to be accused by her of attempted rape. But Proteus is honorable too, at least in context, and refuses to kill his guest. Instead, he dispatches Bellerophon to his father-in-law, King Iobates of Lycia, bearing a sealed message the hero does not open. Bellerophon is banqueted by night; the next morning King Iobates asks to read the message from his son-in-law. King Iobates, despite being convinced by the message that Bellerophon is a rapist, is also reluctant to murder a guest—once again, violence deferred, or deflected. The king sends the hero to slay the goat-bodied, lion-headed, snake-tailed, fire-breathing, and female, Chimera. Bellerophon is successful at this, as he is at every test that follows: the conquering of the Solymi, and of the Amazons (helped along by his pet project, the horse Pegasus), and this success indicates to the king that Bellerophon is an offspring of the gods. With this intelligence, the content of the concealed message is nullified, and the king even offers Bellerophon his daughter in marriage. Concealed messages become important plot devices in subsequent—written—literature. Give another example of a communication that is never disclosed, and yet another of a text that contains no subtext.
f. Explain the Cartesian theater and/or the entertainment preferences of the homunculus.
7. Demonstrate Sitzfleisch.
h. Fill in the blanks: Contrary to the evolutionary monogenism of , the creationary polygenism of American ethnographer and Swiss paleontologist and glaciologist posited the different races of humans as separately created species. But the theories of German biologist and naturalist , derived from the ideas of German, Proto-Indo-European linguist , accommodated their polygenism within an evolutionary system. proposed that several diverse language families had emerged, separately, from speechless prehominid Urmenschen, who were, themselves, the direct descendants of simians. It was those languages that effected the transition from animal to human, as each language family, under the influence of its tongue, evolved its respective race traits—with the languages with the largest vocabularies forming the races, the species, with the greatest economic/political/cultural/military might.
Arrange those languages, according to the schema of , in order from most to least evolved: Semitic, Indo-Germanic, Greco-Roman, Berber, Jewish, German.
9. Average shot length in Hollywood movies: 1930 (advent of “talkies”)–60 approx. 9.5 seconds; 1960–70 approx. 7.5 seconds; 1970–80 approx. 6.5 seconds; 1980–90 approx. 5.5 seconds; 1990–2000 approx. 5 seconds; 2000–10 approx. 4 seconds.
At the average rate of acceleration, calculate the expected average shot length in films of the present decade.
j. Graphology, the study of the individual stamp in handwriting, involves having a person write freely, then subjecting that sample—in content and appearance—to analyses both objective (how large or small are the letterforms?) and subjective (how schizoid or angry is this word shape?). The laws of graphology are the rules of writing: There aren’t any. Being foremost a margin of interpretation—is this writing rushed or leisurely? dominant or submissive?—graphology exercises taste, not diagnosis, and the graphologist must always entertain the suspicion that the writer is disguising his hand.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems have survived; their manuscripts have not. The only specimens of his writing are signatures, of which six exist. One is appended to Will’s will, his final testament of 1616, in which he left his second-best bed as his sole bequest to his wife. All the signatures are somewhat different in appearance, and even somewhat differently spelled—disparities that have ludicrously encouraged the Shakespeare Did Not Write Shakespeare Industry. The signature is the writer’s outer expression or face (tellingly, there is only one confirmed likeness of Shakespeare), and it remains—from job applications to credit-card receipts—the primary representation of human accountability, even with the availability of retinal/
thumbprint scanners and other biometric devices. At the time of Shakespeare’s death, however, common law held that a testator’s signature was not vital to the validity of a will, nor were signatures required, or even admissible, on business contracts and marriage agreements—a provision due to both pervasive illiteracy and ease of forgery. Only in 1677, when English Parliament passed an Act for the Prevention of Frauds and Perjuries (also called the Statute of Frauds), did the signature become the official formal gesture, though it was popularly regarded as flawed.
Perhaps the most infamous failure of graphology was the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935). The handwriting on a confidential dispatch, a bordereau, offering to pass French military intel to Germany was found to have matched a snatch of writing willingly provided by a detained Dreyfus, despite the fact that his slanted, modified Copperplate script was taught and required at every lycée and école. Lieutenant Colonel Armand Mercier du Paty de Clam, lead investigator into l’affaire, and an amateur graphologist (preferable to a professional), testified to a general staff tribunal that the two writing samples were identical, and Dreyfus, convicted by his own hand as much as by dint of his race, was branded a traitor to France.
Identify whether the writing below is Dreyfus’s, or that of the forgery that convicted him. Analyze it, separately, as both.
11. Can the margin, fringe, and focus model of sight be reconciled with the focal (fovea)/ambient (peripheral) model? If no, is this because the former doesn’t distinguish between object distinction and orientation? The two photoreceptors of the eye are rods and cones, and each of the three types of cone is geared to a different range of light. Pick one best description of trichromacy and explain your selection: Red, Green-Yellow, Blue (the human application), or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow (the standard of digital printing). Since a single type of cone isn’t capable of perceiving the full spectrum, the cones interact to signal the primary visual cortex, which effectually mixes them to determine intensity/color. Rods, though, are achromatic, and don’t allow us to distinguish poisonous berries, or blushing. Explain the nostalgia inherent in black-and-white media. Explain that innate sentimentality physiologically. Finally, why is the musical scale called “chromatic”? Is synaesthesia purely psychological? Why is it that Western pigments have many names, but Western sounds no more than twelve, given well-tempered tuning? If black noise is equally silent at all frequencies, and white noise equally loud at all frequencies, what is gray noise: the psychoacoustic experience of a sound’s equality of silence or loudness at all frequencies, or both black noise and white noise inexperienced, tickling the ear hairs at inaccessible frequencies?
l. Explain why humans don’t have lidded auricles (ears). How might we acquire them? Shut your eyes, consider “blue,” note whatever substance you conceive of. Would you judge yourself by it?
13. The American psychologist Julian Jaynes (1920–97) proposed a split in the brains of primitive man: a preliterate bicamerality. The dominant L practical hemisphere of the brain dealt with the subsistence tasks of early civilization. When a trickier circumstance arose that did not elicit an immediate response, the recessive R creative hemisphere would activate, sending strange messages that were not understood and so attributed to higher, or lower, forces—God, or demons.
Refute this.
n. Confirm/denyboth statements: To become conscious of attention is to create attention. To become conscious of attention is to destroy attention.
(SHORT) NOTES ON
A (SHORT) HISTORY
TEXTS ORIGINALLY IN ENGLISH ARE presented as written. All translations, however, are my own, especially their faults. A list of books consulted would be a book unto itself. Of the texts not cited or hopefully evident, there’s one in particular I’d like to mention as being free of charge, universally available, and indispensable: “The Prehistory of the Concept of ‘Attention,’ ” Ciarán McMahon, doctoral thesis, University College, Dublin, 2007, books.google.com/books/about/ The_Prehistory_of_the_Concept_of_Attenti.html?id=83dMREnwWB8C.
Acknowledgments are due to Sam Frank and Alexander Provan, editors at Triple Canopy (canopycanopycanopy.com), where an excerpt of this essay first appeared, in different form.
But then even my gratitude first appeared in different form:
Two studies examined the role of self-focused attention on gratitude and indebtedness. In Study 1, higher dispositional levels of indebtedness were associated with lower dispositional levels of gratitude. Moreover, individuals prone to greater public self-consciousness and social anxiety reported more indebtedness and, to a lesser extent, less gratitude. Social anxiety and public self-consciousness were unique predictors of indebtedness, though only social anxiety was a unique predictor of gratitude. In Study 2, we induced self-focus via the presence of a mirror. Under high self-focus conditions, people reported more indebtedness when recalling a recent benefit; gratitude was not significantly affected by the self-focus induction. Thus, the findings from these studies suggest that self-focused attention can play an important role in how people recall benefits received. (“Looking at me, appreciating you: Self-focused attention distinguishes between gratitude and indebtedness,” M. Mathews, J. Green, Cognition & Emotion, Vol. 24, Issue 4, 2010.)
BY JOSHUA COHEN
Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction
Moving Kings
Book of Numbers
Four New Messages
Witz
A Heaven of Others
Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSHUA COHEN was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Moving Kings, Book of Numbers), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, London Review of Books, The New Republic, and others. From 2001 to 2007, he worked as a journalist throughout Europe. In 2017 he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.
joshuacohen.org
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