On Direct & Indirect Experience: Memory

I. Photographs Lost

I am still formulating my thoughts on the promised Walter Benjamin installment of "On Direct & Indirect Experience." Rereading Benjamin is both challenging and stimulating; his theories on the effect of mechanical reproduction on the work of art are not as black-and-white as some readers are tempted to make them out to be. Here is a taste of my contributions to come. We the viewers of art now wield in our hands the technology—the digital cameras, the camera phones, even video phones—that can reproduce art. What is the effect on the work of art when we ourselves are the reproducer? What are the new politics and values birthed thusly?

There is much to be said. But, in the meantime, I would like to share the rather unhappy logical extension of my discussion on experience and memory in Scotland.

To review briefly, I carved up my trip to Scotland into two parts. The first comprises so-called direct experiences, which includes time I did not spend behind the lens of a camera and the unmediated memories I can evoke as such. The second comprises so-called indirect experiences, which constitutes time I did spend behind a digital camera and memories I recall through the actual photographs I took. 

Now, let's suppose I lost these photographs and their negatives—to a fire, to a flood, during a move, or what have you. What have I, as the photographer, lost? At their best, I conceive of these photographs as portals or triggers: seeing them can transport me back to the site and sight. At their worst, I can conceive of those photographs as archives or time capsules: seeing them can remind me of I place I found worthy of a photograph but that I do not remember experiencing directly. My idea here is, "I know I was at this place, but I have no memory of being at this place." 

A vigilant gargoyle perched on pyramidal stones somewhere in Scotland. I do not remember where, but I do remember taking the photograph.

In the first case,  if I lose the photographs, I lose a means to return potentially to a direct experience through a document or artifact of indirect experience. In the second case—and this I find haunting—I may forget all knowledge of ever having been at a certain somewhere or having seen a certain something. In a sense, perhaps stronger than I want to admit, it would be as if I never had actually been at X or seen X at all.  

What, then, am I left with? I am left with a means without an end. I am left with the memory of taking photographs. I am left with the memory of using technology. A pen without ink and paper with no words on it. 

A castle window overlooks a gardened courtyard somewhere in Scotland. I do not remember where, but I do remember taking the photograph.

Before I move on to a more general discussion of memory, here's a short experiment I would like to conduct or that, perchance, has already been conducted. The subject is I) a person who went on a major vacation/trip (parameters need more definition) at least one year ago; and II) the person primarily responsible for photographically documenting that vacation/trip. The experimenter first conducts an interview, asking the subject to recall and describe significant episodes, places, and experiences from the trip. The experimenter next presents the subject with all the photographs the subject captured while on that vacation/trip. A second interview follows. The experimenter thereafter compares the quality and quantity of what the subject remembered during the first, without-photograph interview and the second, with-photograph interview.  

II. Memories Lost

These considerations compel me to ask the questions: what is memory and what is it for? Clearly we need to account for evolutionary neurology. Simplistically, in terms of prehistory, memory prevents us from making the same mistake twice: "This fruit made me ill; don't eat it again." Memory aids us in the location and re-location of nutrition and shelter: "Past this ridge is a cave by a watering hole." Memory enables us to learn and apply critical skills: "Strike the flint like so." Memory helps us identify kin or enemy: "I am related to this person; that person is competing with my resources." Memory thus serves the purpose of our navigation through life and our fulfillment of essential needs. We can abundantly adapt these scenarios for modern analogs: skill acquisition, education, professional development, trial and error; object, location, and person identification; and so on. All build towards effective socialization, shelter, provisions, income, general welfare.

But what about non-survivalistic memory? What are my direct and indirect experiences in, say, Scotland for? Or why do I remember so vividly, as I do, a tattered, rain-soaked, dirt-smudged copy of P.D. Eastman's children's classic Are You My Mother? lying in the middle of row-housed street of a once-factory-thriving section of Cincinnati?

And what about the nature of memory itself? Oftentimes we think of memory as a kind of discrete databank. Cached somewhere among the labyrinthine file folders and file pathways are memories, like objects, retrievable with a click of the neurological mouse. It is easy, it is tempting to see the brain as a magnificent supercomputer. But what are the ramifications of our understanding of memory if we view it more phenomenologically? Maybe memory is kind of sedimentation—whether or not we can conjure up a specific image or sensation, whether or not we can conjure up a specific name or word, all of our experiences, direct and indirect, all the lessons and facts we have learned, stick to us, become indelibly embedded into us, absorbed by us, taken in, sometimes transmuted in a way where memory alters truth and thereby becomes the truth, the reality, the actuality.    

Lastly, how has memory changed during the digital, information age? When we upload digital photographs onto our computers, is the machine doing the work of memory for us? When a quick Google search—and the inevitable query result of Wikipedia—can tell us how to tie a necktie, provide us a list of all the US state capitals, or break down the events of World War II, is the machine doing the work of memory for us? In some sense, I do think this is the case. Perhaps out of necessity, as I believe the modern person faces an overwhelming amount of and access to "fact." But it seems to me that these memories—personal, historic, collective, utilitarian, emotional—are fundamentally different if the machine does the work. They are preserved in a level of unimaginable detail, yes. Yet, they are, perhaps, no longer ours. They are "outside" of us; we do not carry them within us. It is as if we have surmounted a level of biological necessity, have evolved a kind of post-memory. For we no longer need to remember the specifics if the machine remembers for us. No, we simply need to remember how to use the machine: to transfer memory to the machine, access memory on the machine, navigate its menus, exploit its functionalities. Is this any different than the storage and preservation of memory—knowledge, history in all their forms—in books? I am not sure, but I want to say yes.

Memory is a portal. Someone spray-painted an apt memento mori somewhere in Scotland. I do not remember where, but I remember taking the photograph.

I opened this discussion of memory with the question: "What do I lose if I lose photographs?" I will end with this one: "What would we lose if we lose computers?"

Past the Edges (Eclogue 1)

for Jon G.

At the edges of all sound: soft

clatter of cups, saucers, a bowl

for blackberries, just picked, after

the table is cleared, by a fair girl

who bunches her white linen skirt with her 

free hand as she bends into 

the bush. There is a slight smudge of purple

on her lace hem. She cannot see it.

At the edges, sound: light

taps from a hammer in the hand 

of a farmer's son, hands that will bear

calluses, in time. He is building a ladder

in the stable, from the branches of a

willow, fallen from last rainy season.

He nicks his thumb. The wood takes in his

blood. He does not notice but he is not at work.

Edges, sound: No longer

do you need to know how far away the

edges are. When you wake

you are past the edges, still, still

among the meadow grasses, wildflowers, 

untouched but for bees, birds, wind, sun,

or the hands of a fair girl receiving

a farmer's son's gift. You can close your eyes again.

No more edges when you wake again.

Only light, for it is still,

still day. Keep your eyes 

closed. You can  tell  the passage 

of time by where the sun falls

on your face. A sun whose warmth

you can measure in the terms of a woman's body

still wet from bath water,

or still slow from sleep 

in the morning. Time, whose passage you

can feel in the direction of wind, the song it brings.

The crickets begin early. A young moon.

And beyond, the silence of knowing

there is nothing else—no more chores,

no more words. And beyond,

the silence of being at perfect rest. 

John K., 8/24/2009, 7-8PM

Two Poems, with Some Words on Poetics

I normally don't care to expound my poems for the reader. But lately, I have been rereading The House That Jack Built, as magnificently edited by the estimable poet and scholar Peter Gizzi.  Spicer's poetics, as outlined in his Vancouver lectures, is sublimely enigmatic, to say the least, but replete with advice for the (young) poet. In revisiting this work, I have been revisiting some of my own work. And since Spicer is something of a muse more than just titularly in this blog (I wonder what his take on poetry blogging would be!), I thought I would post two poems that allude not only to Spicer's poetry and poetics, but also, loosely, to a phenomenon or process which he explores (sometimes contradictorily) in his lectures. 

I wrote these poems during a period in which I struggled with drought and doubt, during a creative warfare with whether poetry need be dictated, arise spontaneously, from outside, or whether poetry necessarily entail labor, concerted effort, from the poet himself.  Both are valid; perhaps some kind of happy medium, if aesthetically possible, is optimal. To me, poetry is not about taking positions, not about settling on any extreme; rather, it is about ambiguities not just of words but of the world. Anyhow, during this time, I felt I was "forcing" the words, that I had nothing heroically good to say. So, in an experiment, I decided simply to address Spicer, not as much to apostrophize him, but as to "take the pressure off" of me as the poem's agent. Even today, when I feel I am pounding my hammer on the anvil unable to generate enough force for sparks, or when I feel my fingers lack the finesse to thread the needle, I address Another. (Capital "A" intended.) Sometimes for a companion, sometimes for a fictional other. Often it works, though it is no formula, for I am certain poetry has no formulas. Are these good poems? I am not to say, but I believe they offer a worthwhile glimpse into a creative process. Without further ado:

Arrangements

Upstairs they are moving

furniture, Jack.

Sounds. Like thunder.

Then I learn it is

thunder. All

is rearranged.

John K., 12/6/2007

Capture Effect

Maybe they don't make radios

like they used to, Jack.

Maybe it's a weak signal,

corroded wires.

Or maybe it's bad reception,

because my dial

is stuck

between two frequencies,

and I hear words

I can speak

and words

I can write

but they mean nothing

to me, Jack,

because I am not

looking for words.

I am looking for

the music of the brazen drum,

for the valves 

of the heart

as they close

to let in blood,

for the moment when 

the body does not know it's dead.

John K., 12/10/2007

Passion

Maybe it is just me, but today the word passion lacks the potency and gravity that it etymologically deserves.

I often encounter the word, in its adjectival form, bedecking classifieds for jobs: "...seeking passionate employee...." The word subsequently peppers the applicant's cover letter and résumé. Guiltily, I have done so myself. But to my ears, neither usage of passionate reveals anything substantial about the desired employee or the aspiring applicant. The word also commonly modifies the amatory, as in "passionate lover" or "passionate sex." Love better approximates the etymological passion, to be sure, but our usage seems to emphasize its carnal aspects. Then there is the empty question: "What are your passions?" This question usually implies activities, perhaps even hobbies, one enjoys outside of his or her professional identity. Call me curmudgeonly, but I think passion has greater depth. 

There is one usage, however, that does retain the original sense of the word, and this usage has become sedimented in a few related terms: "The Passion of Christ," "Christ's Passion," "The Passion Narratives," or simply, "The Passion." The Passion, in Christian tradition, refers to the episodes culminating in Jesus Christ's crucifixion, from his betrayal to his trial to his actual suffering on the cross. It is the suffering throughout these events that needs the greatest stress. And it is the word suffer itself that needs most etymological emphasis.

Passion derives from the Latin verb patior, pati, passus sum, meaning "to suffer, endure, undergo, experience, allow, put up with, and (sexually) to submit." (I could find no intermediating Classical Latin noun, which is perhaps an entry for another day. Passio as a noun emerges in Late Latin.) The verb is akin to the Greek paskhein, "to suffer, endure," which itself is akin to pathos, "suffering, feeling, emotion," and more literally, "what befalls one." The Proto-Indo-European root of pati is *pei- /*pi-, "to hurt, shame, scold." (The English word fiend also comes from this root.) The Proto-Indo-European root of paskhein is *kwenth-, "to suffer, endure." I suspect there is an interesting history of cross-linguistic renderings here, but I will leave that to the professional linguists. 

Let's spend a little time with pati. 

First, we recognize two important cognates, patient and patience, which come from the present participle of pati—patiens, which has the sense of "one who is suffering." A "patient" at a doctor's office and the capacity for "patience" are thusly illuminated. 

Second, the form of pati warrants notice. This kind of verb is known as a "deponent" or "middle voice" verb. These oddball verbs, found in Latin and Greek, among other languages, are passive in inflection but active in meaning. 

I enter into the murky territory of speculation here, but I detect a certain pattern in this class of verbs. Very many of these verbs are stative, experiential, intransitive, existential. A few examples: nascor, "to be born"; dominor, "to be master"; ancillor, "to be a servant"; aquor, "to water," in the sense of "it is watered"; assellor, "to void," in the sense of "I am voided"; aborior, "to pass away"; irascor, "to be angry," in the sense of "I am enraged." The list continues. 

Two related phenomena intrigue me about these verbs. The first phenomenon: many of them appear to be formed from root nouns, as if a kind of back formation. For instance, irascor is formed from its root noun, ira, "anger"; aquor from its root noun aqua, "water." 

The second phenomenon is the fascinating interplay inherent in their active meaning and passive construction. Since these active verbs have passive construction, they grammatically can have no passive meaning. And, for many of these verbs, that makes perfect sense. What would the passive meaning of the active "to be born" possibly be? And that brings me to my main point. These verbal hybrids possess a strong sense of passivity precisely in their activity. They exhibit a simultaneous agency and receptivity, a "doer" who has been "done to," a "moved mover." I think this plays out compellingly in the case of pati, especially since we know its Greek companion pathos denotes "what befalls one." To suffer, to endure, to undergo, the very activity of the agent is a kind of willed passivity, receptivity, a kind of taking on, in, or into—of hardship, of harm, of pain, of opposition.

And here we have it: the very word passive comes from—you guessed it—the Latin pati. 

Now, let's go back to passion. Passion could so powerfully signify something in which we so believe and which we so love that we actually suffer, endure, undergo, even permit our "being wronged," "being blamed or scorned," to use a sort of middle-voice. (We can understand why the word was used to refer to Jesus Christ's death.) This signification speaks to me of a way of life, of moral purpose, of ethical conviction, of spiritual essence, born out of rigorous reflection, woven into the sinews of the heart. And this signification, to me, surpasses any sense of "uncontrollable emotion" or "strong enthusiasm." Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Galileo, Socrates, Sojourner Truth, to name only a few—passion.  

For love, we do suffer. For our professions, especially when they are driven by a larger telos, we do endure. As for art, music, literature, and their multifarious kin, we put up with a lot of hell. As the descriptivist that I am, of course I believe language is an ever-evolving edifice, always adding on new rooms, renovating old rooms, revealing rooms that appear different each time we enter them. That is its beauty. But another part of the beauty of language is its ability to be at once flexible and precise. A word with the etymological richness of passion has that potential for an exquisite precision. What is it that you so believe in that you suffer for it? That's passion.             

For some of the details, thanks to my second edition Amsco Latin dictionary, etymonline.com, and the University of Texas' Linguistics Research Center's Indo-European Lexicon, which I exhort you to explore at: http://bit.ly/2HDcgC.  

On Direct & Indirect Experience: The Informal Overture

Earlier this month during a trip to Chicago, I, along with a few close friends, made a point to spend several hours touring the recently debuted new home of the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing. The impressively designed and sized edifice exhibits a breathtaking and comprehensive collection of modern and contemporary art. Indeed, these well-spent few hours did neither the building nor its collection due justice.

I stand before Salvador Dalí's Invention of the Monsters (1937; oil canvas) beside an equally captivated viewer. To our right is Joan Miró's spectacular Personages with Star (1933; oil on canvas). Photo by Matt Bauman.

At the museum, I was struck by the pervasiveness of a certain phenomenon which I know you have witnessed and which I am most certain we have all engaged in ourselves: snapping photographs of art on digital cameras and camera phones. Now, what most struck me was not just such photography itself; rather, it was the behavior of most of the photographers. I did not observe many of what I will dub the "phone-photographers"—in order to distinguish them from professional photographers, though I am aware that there exists legitimate cellphone photography—stopping to consider and contemplate the artwork. Instead, I observed them quickly pointing-and-shooting artwork before moving on to point-and-shoot another work.  

I admit that such behavior is to be expected in a digital age, visual culture, and perpetually plugged-in period. Further, I believe the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones in our lives is of colossal value, as it enables us to document our lives and experiences in ways, both creative and ordinary, heretofore unimagined. Thus, I urge you to know that I seek to judge neither the phone-photographer nor the technology itself. No, my intention is only to tease out and reflect on the ramifications of such technological usage, as many before me have done, most noticeably, though in a different capacity, by Walter Benjamin in his groundbreaking "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." I will return to this important essay in the next installment.

My initial reaction was one of annoyed distraction. I have a difficult enough time viewing art in the first place. I don't want to spend too much time reading plaques, but I need the information to digest a work of art historically, which need often compels me to believe I am missing much of the point of the art itself. The result is that I feel my eyes moving over the words without really absorbing them and feel my mind working too deliberately to allow the work to speak to me viscerally. I move on to the next painting or sculpture uncertain about what I just beheld or what I was being asked, solicited to behold. At this new work, I then hear the voice: "I am here before X. Take it in, remember it. Remember that you saw it." This directive immediately obliterates any direct experience with the art I hope to have. And then there is the whole issue of what to do with my hands. Fold them behind my back? Cross them on my chest? Place them contemplatively under my chin? Anyhow, the intervening layers of concept, context, and social code eventually do weaken, and the artwork does receive me and I it—prepredicatively. This most frequently and memorably occurs when I stand before works by Mark Rothko. His fields of color are to me sublime, hypnotic; the boundaries draw me into a space beyond their horizons, as did this painting in the Art Institute...

Mark Rothko's Untitled (Purple, White, and Red) (1953; oil on canvas).

...until there materialized before me the arms of a man lifting a camera armed with a flash. He snapped his photograph and moved on. The aura, the trance was lost.

My second reaction was more reflective and self-critical. I recalled a vacation to Scotland I took with my father and eldest brother a few years back. I spent most of the trip documenting the trip behind a digital camera. This, to me, is not entirely different than the phone-photographers I observed at the Art Institute, as most of them, like me, were tourists who wished to document their vacations. (In the next installments, I will be discussing more specifically, however, the ramifications of photographing art, as I think it warrants more attention.) I'm glad that I did so in Scotland, as such a major and splendid trip as that deserved a chronicling, but, in many ways, I'm sad that I did. For, when I think back to those travels and experiences, I summon two distinct sets of images and memories. The first is the memory of directly being there. In these images, in these memories, I wield no camera. In these, for example, I am in a bar having robust local ales over hearty local fare in the company of my father and brother, all of us stumbling happily into the afternoon sun back down the cobblestone hills. These images and memories are of what I will now refer throughout as "direct experience." The second set of images and memories are themselves twofold and are what I call "indirect experience." The first fold comprises images and memories as framed by the digital camera's eyepiece, as framed by the digital camera's display of what I captured, as framed by me framing the sites of Scotland. (Perhaps as opposed to Scotland framing my experience.) The second fold comprises all the developed photographs I took. Yes, I took some great ones, but I find it very surreal that my images and memories of the significant monuments, architecture, landscapes, castles, etc. are constituted by the very photographs of those sites, objects, places, things. In other words, I remember the Edinburgh Castle, for example, indirectly through my photographs of it more than I remember my directly being there.   

Through these two reactions to the phone-photographers, I arrive at my principal concern. We live in a "hyper-now" where we can document our lives, chronicle ourselves and others, and record our world so directly, immediately, so rapidly, and so diversely in such forms as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, especially through the photography of our digital cameras and camera phones. Yet, now more than ever, we are, it appears to me, farther away from our lives, ourselves, others and our world because our experience of them is indirect. Our existences are preoccupied with our documentation of them. 

Await the next installment where I explore direct and indirect experience in greater depth, including a discussion of Walter Benjamin and photographing art.  

Peculiar

Our next etymology takes us to the politics of ownership. The word peculiar bears, well,—and please do pardon my obvious pun—a rather peculiar origin.

The core of peculiar is the Latin pecū, an old noun meaning "flock" or "herd" in its seldom used singular. In its in most often used plural, pecua, it signifies "farm animals," "sheep," "pastures," and, most importantly, "cattle." The emphasis is clearly on the plurality, the collective, the "more-than-one-ness." 

Pecū originates from the Proto-Indo-European *peku-, a mere orthographic skip away and meaning the same.

As any basic lesson in history will reveal, cattle, and more broadly, livestock, became at certain point in (geographic regions suited to grazing) civilization private property. And therefore became, part and parcel, a measure, means, and material of wealth. This, too, must have existed in the ancient Roman's worldview, as we see a family of derivatives birthed from the root. Pecūnia is "money," "property"; pecūniārius is the adjective, from which we get pecuniary. Then there is the rather obscure verb, in my opinion, pecūliāre, or "to supply with private property." Pecūlator is a fun form meaning "embezzler." Finally, among other variations, we have the adjective pecūliāris, denoting "one's own," "as one's own private property," and, secondarily, "exceptional" and "singular."  

Before a few brief meditations, I'd like to note that the nouns cattle, flock, et alia assume two other forms in Latin, differentiated only by their inflections, their endings. The first is pecus, a later, more regularized third declension noun (neuter) meaning essentially the same as pecū. (The difference, in case you do not know, is all in the stress of the u.) The second is pecudis, another third declension noun (feminine), signifying a "single head of cattle," "sheep," or any kind of beast, in contrast to the fauna of sky or sea. Here, I will highlight that we don't see variations on pecudis, as in pecudiārius, in Latin. In fact, we don't see any (that I have found) adjectives modifying a cow in the singular at all. This further emphasizes to me that the consciousness and conception of this bovine in Latin, and even in English, is entirely about the collective, the plural, the herd. 

But I find this notion of the collective ironic in that the derivatives of pecū relate very much to the individual. It is no big leap from a sense of "one's own" to "singular." Yet even here the connotation of singular as "unusual" and peculiar as "strange" or "odd" doesn't come until a few centuries after the Middle Ages. (I'd like to know exactly when and how, but that is outside the scope of this current entry.) Whatever the case, there underlies the evolution of the word the connection between that which one owns and that which distinguishes oneself. This idea, of course, is far from foreign in the modern capitalistic imagination. Our status is largely marked by our property. And our individuality is marked by our personality, or what is peculiar to us. Interestingly, only the "peculiar to" construction retains the sense of "one's own," while the construction "x is peculiar" holds the more qualitative connotation. 

A few questions arise. Are there differences that emerge in the use and form of *peku- between nomadic and agrarian Indo-European peoples? And if so, what are the different ideas of property therein? 

And more specifically, what was the context and politics of the first use of peculiar after the Middle Ages? Was there any kind of challenge to the hegemony of the day? 

These questions, of course, are largely unanswerable, but even their contemplation can open up fascinating thoughts about man, his world, and his ideas all through the seemingly innocuous word peculiar. 

Thanks to my handy-dandy Amsco Latin Dictionary (Second Edition) and the ever accessible and fabulous etymonline.com for some help in the specifics.