• • • • •
When I was twenty-one—a third-year English major—I was asked for the first time to accomplish the stultifying job of memorizing a stretch of poetry. To my parents, it was shocking that I’d made it that far without learning by heart a few lines of Shakespeare or Browning. (My mother can still, at sixty-six, recite Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush.”) But my peers and I—the first to use calculators in class, the first to think digitally—never needed to bother.
That changed when I took Dr. Danielson’s seminar on Paradise Lost. On day one, and much to our horror, we were tasked with learning by heart the first twenty-six lines of Milton’s epic. Each week, Dr. Danielson had us stand and recite the labyrinthine lines en masse. He told us, “This will give you something to run over in your head when you’re standing at a bus stop. You’ll always have a poem.” A dozen years later, my remembrance of those lines is spotty, sure, and cuts off after line sixteen, but it’s more clear than any other piece of literature I read at school, or since. Here’s what’s still coded in the synapses that know to fire:
Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, Whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the world, and all our Woe,
. . . [something] . . . Till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing heavenly muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
. . . [something] . . . who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heavens and Earth
Rose out of Chaos. Or, if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flowed
Fast by the Oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.
[something something . . . ]
This patchwork of poetry is embarrassing, is meager, but it is mine. In less time than it took to tap out those lines, I might have called up the entire ten-thousand-line epic on my laptop—and without the errors. So why do I nonetheless love having it there, broken and resting in the attic of my head?
I wanted to know why my old professor had placed it in my brain in the first place. So I tracked down Dr. Danielson and invited him out for coffee. I recognized him immediately when he entered the café, but he walked up to a different man, a younger one, thinking it was I. (Teachers will usually remember only the first couple of classes they teach with any clarity; the rest of us blur into a mass of personalities, no matter how distinctive we may feel and no matter how large an impact that teacher may have had on us.)
Dr. Danielson has been teaching Paradise Lost for more than thirty years now, and every class has been made to memorize the epic’s opening. I am only one of hundreds, then, walking around with snatches of Milton because of Dr. Danielson. I asked him whether he’d seen a difference in students’ reactions to the task over the course of the Internet’s advent.
“If only I’d taken notes on that. . . .” He smiled. “I do think my students today are just as capable of memorizing those lines, but the difference is that they feel they’re less capable of memorizing now. It doesn’t occur to them that they’re able to do something like that, in the same way that a person who’s never trained for a marathon can’t imagine running one. But every year I get the same comments from students at the end of the term—they’ll say they didn’t want to do the memory work and that they are so glad they were forced to do it. They will tell me that the memorization was the most empowering part of the course. This is never done anymore, I suppose. It’s become very typical that, like you, a student will never be asked to memorize poetry.”
“What is it that you think it does?”
“It’s this idea of ‘formation,’” he began. “Memorizing something literally informs your mind. It creates neural pathways, yes? You literally internalize it, download something into your brain. You are programming yourself.”
It’s telling, I think, that when justifying the exercise of the human mind, we so often resort to computer terms such as “download” and “program.” I asked him about the moral behind such programming; if we’re programming our minds, then the question becomes with what, after all. And here Danielson turned away from technological metaphors and toward a religious one that he learned from an old pastor:
There’s a slightly corny saying that has a lot to it: Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny. And I believe that memorizing something is the sowing of a thought.
Here my professor’s conversation seemed to be marrying a certain moralism to the work of neuroplasticity researchers (you are what you do). He told me memorization was the act of making something “a property of yourself,” and he meant this in both senses: The memorized content is owned by the memorizer and also becomes a component of that person’s makeup. “It makes it part of my lived experience in an ongoing way.”
It is this notion of internalizing the memorized thing, of digesting it, that so differentiates older notions of memory from newer interests in externalized memory. Previous generations may have had memory aids like writing, but those tools worked only to boost (never replace) a deep commitment to brain storage.
The memorized, internalized work can even achieve the status of a kind of swallowed pill. In Manguel’s A History of Reading, we learn that the second-century Roman doctor Antyllus felt those who didn’t digest poetry suffered “pains in eliminating, through abundant perspiration, the noxious fluids that those with a keen memory of texts eliminate merely through breathing.”
• • • • •
Marcel Proust, who maybe thought more intelligently about memory than anyone else in history, knew something about the way our strange brains might heal us. He set out to describe the act of reconstructing one’s own past in his greatest work, In Search of Lost Time, which was given its title (À la recherche du temps perdu) not because the past is a misplaced and retrievable thing, but because it is wasted and gone; searching for lost time (temps perdu) is an exercise in fiction itself (it is the anti-Timehop). The work is a kind of hopeless, four-thousand-page salvation mission wherein the “rescued” past self is always a work of art. Reading Proust can inspire us to salvage our own pasts from the obliterating winds of negligence, build some creative self from the available material. When we commit ourselves to considering our own past with even a fraction of the care that Proust brings to the table, we ennoble ourselves.
A century later, Proust’s work is a powerful lesson in the mutability and creativity of memory that Nader and Cowan speak about. Personal memories like the ones Proust is dealing with are curated. When we tell stories about ourselves, we select the scraps of identity that will live on in an enduring self. And these memories are strung together by sometimes bizarre and precarious means. Consider Proust’s most famous description of personal recall, the madeleine scene. His Narrator finds that a single, idiosyncratic sensory experience can be the key that unlocks a lifetime of observations.
The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which . . . my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays of pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because, of those memories so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered. . . . But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised
a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
Proust’s remembrance is not a cool accounting of one thing after another, but a polynomial, multidirectional experience; we could even call it symphonic in that several voices and understandings emerge to make a single four-dimensional impression. When the madeleine touches his lips, a world of associations, coexistent in several times (“from morning to night and in all weathers”), rises up “like a stage set.” It all “sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.” But all this world is itself only a fraction of the objective world Proust’s Narrator must have lived in; a screened vision of the actual past, with each element of the memory tied in some mysterious way to the taste-memory housed in the crumbs of that famous little cake.
Human memory was never meant to call up all things, after all, but rather to explore the richness of exclusion, of absence. It creates a meaningful, contextualized, curated assemblage particular to the brain’s singular experience and habits. Valuable memories, like great music, are as much about the things that drop away—the rests—as they are about what stays and sounds.
• • • • •
My own earliest memory always returns to me through the senses. For Proust’s Narrator, the past sprang forth, pop-up-book style, when he tasted that simple madeleine dipped in tea. For me, there’s a certain weight that, if held in my hands, calls forward a landscape inhabited by my four-year-old self.
What is that weight? Or is it a density, instead? Imagine holding a small box of sand, eight cubic inches, and you’ll be close. It does no good to have you imagine the weight of a person’s cremated remains, though that’s what we’re talking about. The memory is not concerned with facts. Think of an eight-inch box of sand. That’s the weight that brings this memory back. I pick up a melon or a small stack of books and suddenly the memory reveals itself.
I am four years old, standing in a wild yard above the stone shore of Pender Island. That morning, I was happy to take a short ferry ride from the suburb where I grew up, happy to feel big wind tousling my sandy hair as I leaned up against the railing on the deck with my dad. Now the air is mysteriously still and I can hear even dragonflies quite a distance from me in the grass. Enormous cedars lean over me, and the cedar planks of the family cabin make a red brown box on the far side of the yard. It is summer in my memory, and the rubber tire swing is too hot to use (though what season it actually was, I cannot say). The overgrown grass tickles my exposed legs as I move. I am small, but the slugs in the grass are smaller. I’ve been stalking them with a glass saltshaker I stole from the kitchen. I am killing them all, dousing them in crystals and watching their bodies turn. The adults on the deck, perhaps twenty of them, are busy in their obscure adult world. I am separate from them.
Then an aunt calls me over and I hide the saltshaker in the grass, unsure whether I’ve been helping or doing evil. I walk silently over to my aunt, who holds a white cardboard box in her hands. She leans over, without stepping down from the raised deck, and places the box in my hands. She says, “It’s heavy, isn’t it?” And I nod up at her, holding the box above my head, waiting for her to take it back. My aunt lifts the white box from my grip and turns away; I return to my massacre.
I know now what happened next. The adults convened at the opposite end of the deck and scattered my grandfather’s ashes at the base of a young arbutus. But that isn’t part of the memory. In the memory, I only retrieve my hidden saltshaker and stalk farther into the grasses. I hold the salt in front of me, like a talisman, while I look for more victims.
Perhaps I’ll build myself a clever memory palace one day. It seems we all want such palaces—and we’ll probably build them far from the quicksand, the vicissitude of lived memory. We’ll build them instead with the 1s and 0s of our devices—spires and spires of perfect digital storage. But for now I have that rough-hewn cabin and shaking field of grass.
CHAPTER 8
Hooking Up
All the boys I have ever loved have been digital . . .
I write his name in nothing, he whispers to the author . . .
—Owen Pallett, “He Poos Clouds”
MY friend Dan often spends his evenings searching for sex through the screen on his phone. Like many gay guys I know, he’s unencumbered by debilitating prudery or a boyfriend (whereas I suffer from both conditions). He is charming and handsome enough to procure a little action in “the real world” if he wanted to, but the fact is that Dan, like plenty of others, is permanently logged on to one online tool or another designed to help him get laid.
This new frontier may be inhabited by everyone—gay and straight, men and women—but gay guys are the vanguard. Gay men have always looked for sex through a filter. In the past, our hunting ground was limited almost exclusively to designated bars, bathhouses, and vacant parks. Today, that collection of filters includes the windows on our laptops and the chilled display of our phones. Neighborhood pubs—with their cheap beers and costly glowers—are steadily being replaced by chattering arenas in the cloud.
A little while ago, Dan was talking with a guy on a Web site called Manhunt; he’d known this guy (through his online avatar, at least) for two years. Driven to action at last, Dan asked him out for dinner. “Sorry,” came the reply, “only interested in hookups.” Fair enough, thought Dan, and he moved along. A few weeks later, though, he noticed the fellow had changed his profile so it now read, “Looking for a long-term relationship.” Dan rallied and asked him out again. This time the guy said he was interested in getting together only if Dan could provide an additional player; he’d always wanted to try a threesome.
Dan related this to me while frowning into a cup of Earl Grey. He might have encountered such erotic flippancy in any number of offline venues. But as we export more of our sex lives online, it seems there’s been a correspondent crowding of casual sexual availability (and sexual rejection, too). Since Web sites like dudesnude and Manhunt gained steam in the early 2000s, men like Dan have been able to order in their sex (or be ordered in themselves) as easily as pizza. We are permanently ready.
Nobody who searched for sex in 1994 and then again in 2014 could help noticing the change. But when I sat down to brunch recently with a group of gay men, it seemed especially clear. A wide-eyed description of some rugby player’s physique would give way to an image on a Samsung Galaxy, hurriedly passed around the table. Fussing over whether an encounter was a one-night stand or not would devolve into a critical analysis of next-morning text messages. In fact, the entire appraisal of our sexual behavior seemed quite dematerialized—scrubbed clean of pheromone stink, denuded of flushed skin. And in their place: the scentless rationality of a plastic phone.
Another friend, Jack, is so taken by the promise of online hookups that he interacts with apps like Grindr or the “Casual Encounters” section of Craigslist pretty much 24/7. Even at work. We went out to karaoke the other night and, two pitchers in, I got to asking him about the draw. His smile was a strange mixture of unabashed and contrite: “As much as these sites can be racist, ignorant, and sooooooo full of snobs, liars, and jerks, it’s fun to give in to the utter superficiality—just have several sexting conversations on the go at once. The pictures are often lies, and the bullshit of it all can be overwhelming. But I got into it because it still felt better than being alone, you know? Sometimes you have to overdose on something, I guess. And it’s all been much more successful than any of my bar outings. . . .” He laughs. “I mean, it leads to more actual sex.”
Yet the abstracting force of the technology at play, its ability to distance us from our desires even as it promises their fulfillment, always seems to assert itself. There was the time Jack agreed to meet up with a “hot, hung, superfit, dominant top” whom he’d met online. The man turned out to be a frail and elderly fellow wearing cowboy boots, jogging pants, and a grad jack
et from several decades prior. (Jack declined their engagement at the door.)
Jack tells me a story like that and I laugh at his misadventure. But then, when the night is through and the dark walk home is chilling my thoughts, I wonder what became of that old man in the cowboy boots. Had he pulled on that outfit thinking the accoutrements of youthful vigor would be enough to continue his online pretense? Did he go back to his computer that night and doggedly entice others to his door? And when those young men arrived, did they walk away as Jack had done? Or did they shrug at the difference between slick online promises and damaged warm-blooded reality, kick off their shoes, and make the gray-haired cowboy happy?
• • • • •
Back in 1999, the lustful hero of Cruel Intentions, Sebastian Valmont, spoke for the majority when he muttered that Internet romance “is for geeks and pedophiles.” But the Valmonts of the gay world are now among the most ardent supporters of online connections. Prudes and libertines both love, for example, that smartphone application Grindr (launched in 2009). The app alerts men to the proximity (and sexual inclination) of other men, not while they’re in a seedy bar, but while they’re walking their rottweiler or chatting with their mom at a nice café. It’s convenience itself: A person’s phone is constantly replenished with a dozen miniature photos of smiling faces (or other body parts), and a fellow can click and chat with other guys, note that they’re only 110 yards away, and then arrange what was once called “a discreet encounter.” This is hardly a fringe activity: More than six million men have the app on their phones, and it’s now used in nearly two hundred countries. On a single Sunday in the fall of 2012, for example, Grindr users sent 37,435,829 messages of love, lust, and denial.
The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection Page 16
