Friday, November 5, 2010

what in our brains invest memories with emotion?


What in our brains invest memories with emotion? / granneblog
From Steven Pinker’s “What the F***?” (The New Republic: 9 Octobert 2007):

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.
A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

proust was a neuroscientist


Amazon Significant Seven, December 2007:

Proust may have been more neurasthenic than neuroscientist, but Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that he (and many of his fellow artists) made discoveries about the brain that it took science decades to catch up with (in Proust's case, that memory is a process, not a repository). Lehrer weaves back and forth between art and science in eight graceful portraits of artists (mostly writers, along with a chef, a painter, and a composer) who understood, better at times than atomizing scientists, that truth can begin with "what reality feels like." Sometimes it's the art that's most evocative in his tales, sometimes the science: Lehrer writes about them with equal ease and clarity, and with a youthful confidence that art and science, long divided, may yet be reconciled. --Tom Nissley

jorge luis borges' short story, funes the memorious


the frontal cortex

In Jorge Luis Borges' short story, Funes the Memorious, which may or may not have been based on Luria's patient, Borges invents a character (Ireneo Funes) whose "perception and memory are infallible...the present to him was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness." Like D.C., Funes is driven mad by his boundless memory. He invents a nonsensical language where every object in the universe correlates to his private sign: "He then applied this absurd principle to numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Maximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins...In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark, the last in the series were very complicated...I tried to explain to him that this rhapsody of incoherent terms was precisely the opposite of a system of numbers..." For Funes though, his "language" was the only way he could encode reality. Unable to forget anything, Funes needed a dictionary as infinite as life itself: "Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence...Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of congestion of the lungs."

a russian man with perfect memory


A Russian man with perfect memory /granneblog

From Jonah Lehrer’s “Hell is a Perfect Memory” (The Frontal Cortex: 2 December 2008):

This isn’t the first case report of a person with perfect memory. In the masterful The Mind of A Mnemonist, the Soviet neurologist A.R. Luria documented the story of a Russian newspaper reporter, D.C. Shereshevskii, who was incapable of forgetting. For example, D.C. would be bound by his brain to memorize the entire Divine Comedy of Dante after a single reading. Audiences would scream out random numbers 100 digits long and he would effortlessly recount them. The only requirement of this man’s insatiable memory was that he be given 3 or 4 seconds to visualize each item during the learning process. These images came to D.C. automatically.

Eventually, D.C.’s memory overwhelmed him. He. struggled with mental tasks normal people find easy. When he read a novel, he would instantly memorize every word by heart, but miss the entire plot. Metaphors and poetry – though they clung to his brain like Velcro – were incomprehensible. He couldn’t even use the phone because he found it hard to recognize a person’s voice “when it changes its intonation…and it does that 20 or 30 times a day.”

a woman who never forgets anything


A woman who never forgets anything / granneblog

From Samiha Shafy’s “An Infinite Loop in the Brain” (Der Spiegel: 21 November 2008):

Price can rattle off, without hesitation, what she saw and heard on almost any given date. She remembers many early childhood experiences and most of the days between the ages of 9 and 15. After that, there are virtually no gaps in her memory. “Starting on Feb. 5, 1980, I remember everything. That was a Tuesday.”

“People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory,” she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. “But it’s also agonizing.”

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance. It’s more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It’s like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button.”

She’s constantly bombarded with fragments of memories, exposed to an automatic and uncontrollable process that behaves like an infinite loop in a computer. Sometimes there are external triggers, like a certain smell, song or word. But often her memories return by themselves. Beautiful, horrific, important or banal scenes rush across her wildly chaotic “internal monitor,” sometimes displacing the present. “All of this is incredibly exhausting,” says Price.

The scientists were able to verify her autobiographical data because she has meticulously kept a diary since the age of 10. She has filled more than 50,000 pages with tiny writing, documenting every occurrence, no matter how insignificant. Writing things down helps Price organize the thoughts and images shimmering in her head.

In fact, she feels a strong need to document her life. This includes hoarding every possible memento from childhood, including dolls, stuffed animals, cassette tapes, books, a drawer from dresser she had when she was five. “I have to be able to touch my memories,” Price explains.

[James McGaugh, founder of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California in Irvine,] and his colleagues concluded that Price’s episodic memory, her recollection of personal experiences and the emotions associated with them, is virtually perfect. A case like this has never been described in the history of memory research, according to McGaugh. He explains that Price differs substantially from other people with special powers of recall, such as autistic savants, because she uses no strategies to help her remember and even does a surprisingly poor job on some memory tests.
It’s difficult for her to memorize poems or series of numbers — which helps explain why she never stood out in school. Her semantic memory, the ability to remember facts not directly related to everyday life, is only average.

Two years ago, the scientists published their first conclusions in a professional journal without revealing the identity of their subject. Since then, more than 200 people have contacted McGaugh, all claiming to have an equally perfect episodic memory. Most of them were exposed as fakes. Three did appear to have similarly astonishing abilities. “Their personalities are very different. The others are not as anxious as Jill. But they achieve comparable results in the tests,” McGaugh reports.

The subjects do have certain compulsive traits in common, says McGaugh, especially compulsive hoarding. The three others are left-handed, and Price also showed a tendency toward left-handedness in tests.

In neurobiological terms, a memory is a stored pattern of links between nerve cells in the brain. It is created when synapses in a network of neurons are activated for a short time. The more often the memory is recalled afterwards, the more likely it is that permanent links develop between the nerve cells — and the pattern will be stored as a long-term memory. In theory there are so many possible links that an almost unlimited number of memories can be permanently stored.

So why don’t all people have the same powers of recollection as Jill Price? “If we could remember everything equally well, the brain would be hopelessly overburdened and would operate more slowly,” says McGaugh. He says forgetting is a necessary condition of having a viable memory — except in the case of Price and the other three memory superstars.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

wordsworth: spots of time


Storm Clouds / Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 - 1851) / British Museum, London, UK / Bridgeman Art Library


From Wordsworth’s The Prelude 12.208-218 (1805 edition):

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.


Sspots of Time
by Phillip Barron


Sweet are those moments when all your skills converge and you clear a technical section with more grace than you thought possible. That's what I call flow. Others call it groovin' or dialed-in. " 'Spots of time' was the phrase Wordsworth used for such moments," says writer Ron Rash, "but the poet's words were no better than mine because what I felt was beyond any words that had ever been used before. You need a new language." I hope you've experienced what I'm talking about. It's a rush like no other. In the mountain bike community, there are as many reasons to ride as there are riders. It took 15 years of mountain biking and the experience of single-speed mountain biking for me to realize explicitly what I'd known only implicitly all along: to me, finding flow is my reason to ride.

For Wordsworth, spots were key moments in his life; they formed remarkably vivid memories. He talks about the compression of time, the heightened senses, the feeling of being inside something important. He experienced spots most consistently in nature, and although many call his experiences mystical Wordsworth denied any supernatural element to these moments. Rather, they are about as grounded in this earth as you can get.

I ride to find that state of flow in the woods. This doesn't mean that I ride slowly or on flat trails. There is a state of grace that a rider can achieve while riding over roots and rocks, through rollercoasters and bowls, over logs and logstacks, and all the while maintain speed. Flow is possible on a technical trail -- it's just harder to find. But, the difficulty reaching it is what makes it so rewarding. It's about dabbing less, stepping out of the pedals as little as possible. It's about accepting what comes around the corner. It's about loving the challenge of the trail laid out before me.

In a state of flow I briefly forget that my bike and I are two separate things. I forget that I am a clumsy bi-ped who can't move gracefully down a mountain without help. I forget that it shouldn't be possible to travel this fast over roots, rocks, twists, and turns. I move so smoothly, so instinctively that it is difficult to say that I am responsible for my movements, since no deliberate act of will could fit so harmoniously into the environment. When in flow, I'm not totally in control of my actions. There's something else going on, something more than me, a bike, and a path. It's as though the three merge temporarily. Flow never lasts long -- usually no longer than a few seconds at a time. But these moments, scattered throughout a two hour ride, convey a lifetime of experience.

The lifetime, the wisdom of these moments is what interests me most. Nietzsche took moments like these as evidence that the there is no end-point at which history is aiming. He knew, because he experienced moments of clarity where all the wisdom of eternity seemed within reach, that the present contains within it everything we need to find meaning in the world. "The world is complete and reaches its finality at each and every moment. What could ten more years teach that the past ten were unable to teach!" I don't know about history's aims or universal meanings, but I do know that the compression of time in these moments is something special.

These moments are wise in the sense that every spot of time or moment of flow has taught me something. I've learned some new skill or that I'm capable of something I'd not experienced before. Compressed time isn't the same as time slowed down. Time slows down when you fall. You know you've lost your balance, you know you're past that critical point where you could have caught yourself, you know you're going to slam your shoulder into that rock. It all happens in slow motion, maybe because your mind is working twice as fast as normal.

Compressed time isn't slow -- if anything, it's sped up. Maybe this is where we recover the time that slows down when we fall. Nor are spots of time or sessions of flow inevitable. When you fall, the crunch of the shoulder to the rock is inevitable; every thought that races through your mind before the crunch just delays what is guaranteed. Falling, no matter how drawn out, has a clear end. You see it coming.

But a spot of time is different; experiencing one is not guaranteed. Nor is it clear, while you're in one, how long it will last or even whether it will end. When you're in a spot of time, you aren't conscious of anything else -- not even the fact that you're in it. You realize what just happened only when it's all over.

More than irregular, spots of time are also elusive. I never experience one when I try to. I know I'm more likely to experience one in the saddle of my single-speed than in front of a glowing computer monitor, but that's about it.

Before going single, I had my own ideas what to expect: tougher climbs; more cautious, thoughtful riding; keeping the momentum. What I wasn't prepared for was how quickly I felt freed from thinking about speeds and gears. My first few single-speed rides were experiences in liberation. I was focusing on the trail, not on the bike. I'm very comfortable with my bike -- I've had it for four years, I have 6,000+ off-road miles on it, and I've ridden it up and down the East Coast. But as a single-speed is the first time that the bike moves like it is an extension of me and not just a machine I manipulate. As a geared bike, at best, I just manipulated it well. Now, before turns or hills, I spend my time picking my lines, not my gears. Keeping momentum on climbs is a challenge of a different sort, though not as difficult as I expected.

Some people insist that a spot of time is something experienced in stillness. That clarity is something you achieve through meditation, cross-legged on the floor staring at a candle flame. Maybe. Like Wordsworth and Rash, I meditate in motion. There is a stillness, a calm, within flow, but it is more spiritual than physical. The urge to mountain bike comes from the soul. Riding in the woods is a spiritual experience, but not a religious or even a mystical one. Like Wordsworth, I've found greater solace in staying firmly planted on dirt.

Standing on dirt with me, Norman Maclean says of the elusive nature of these moments that "poets talk about 'spots of time,' but it is really [fly] fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone."

Notes
Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Edited by Charles Taylor, Texts in German Philosophy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Rash, Ron. Saints at the River. New York : H. Holt, 2004.

Phillip Barron is a freelance columnist for The Herald Sun, in Durham, North Carolina. He also teaches Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.



Wordsworth's Spots of Time in the 'Two-Part Prelude'
Apr 30, 2010 Alicia Rudd

The power of nature as an awe inspiring fear in William Wordsworth's poem, the 'Two-Part Prelude'.

The connection made between the poet’s mind and his or her sensory interpretation of the wider natural world, is compared by William Wordsworth in the 'Two- Part Prelude', to a musical composition created by nature’s celestial spirits who intervene in human destiny to create their ‘favoured being’ (69).

The impact of their ‘gentle’ powers he explains, is however not always recognised by most people and therefore requires ‘severer interventions’ (79) which may help to guide them on their way. As a result, this describes nature as a force inhabited by beings that use the sights and sounds of nature to inspire fear in the people who live among them.

Spots of Time
Wordsworth explains his own rationale for spirits who inhabit the natural world, by describing them as aids to the recovery of past human memory in his theory about ‘spots of time’. These time spots, or places in which a strong reminiscence from the past is recaptured and used to channel the creative mind is often achieved according to Wordsworth by drawing on past, traumatic experiences in a person’s life.

There are in our existence spots of time

Which with distinct pre-eminence retain

A fructifying virtue, whence depressed

By trivial occupations…

Are nourished, and invisibly repaired. 1799 Edition (288-96)

These ‘spots of time’ are explained as a withdrawal into nature as opposed to the society of people. However, it also illustrates the imagination existing in time and not arising from an existence in nature alone, since the classification of a 'spot in time' is a social construction used to allocate segments of human history.

Therefore, Wordsworth expresses the Pantheistic lifestyle which must be experienced alongside an ability to maintain some personal identity with the outside world by drawing on a poet’s memories of the past.

One such incident referred to as a spot in time, occurs when Wordsworth recalls a particular childhood experience when nature assumes an overwhelming presence in his mind on a solitary journey one evening in a stolen boat.

Here, the natural world is personified in human form and acts to inspire fear and respect in the child due to the awesome images of the mountain and moon light:

As if with voluntary power instinct,

Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,

And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff

Rose up between me and the stars, and still,

With measured motion, like a living thing

Strode after me. (9-14)

In Awe of Nature
In this example it appears to the child’s mind that nature is punishing him for the act he has committed in stealing the boat. This is perceived in his reaction towards the majesty and magnitude of the cliff when he experiences a sensation of fear over nature’s apparently all-seeing presence.

As a result, Wordsworth chooses to reclaim a distinct memory from childhood which first taught him to concede to a power beyond himself so that he might gain an insight into a power that he can never truly understand. As Edmund Burke explains in A Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and Beautiful:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible …is a source of the sublime; that is it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (Section VII)

This is the point Wordsworth highlights when he describes the thoughts and feelings of humans who must be purged of impurity by the chastisement of ‘Both pain and fear, until we recognize/ A grandeur in the beatings of the heart (140-41).

Consequently, it articulates Wordsworth’s belief that it is good to experience discomfort and pain since then it will lead to a greater commitment of personal discipline in the purity of creative thought, which develops into a higher plane of imaginative consciousness for the poet.

References
Abrams, M.H, et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. 7th Edition. New York: W.W Norton, (2001)

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry,Oxford University Press, (1998).

Copyright Alicia Rudd. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication

literary memory quotes: 1


"There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side."
George Eliot / Daniel Deronda

The memories which peaceful country scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the graves of those we loved: may purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.
Charles Dickens / Oliver Twist

Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief itself arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain.
Charles Dickens / Oliver Twist

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.
Gilbert Parker / Romany of the Snows

"There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance."
Gilbert Parker / Mrs. Falchion

"Lord keep my memory green!"
Charles Dickens / The Haunted Man

Recollections of the past and visions of the present come to bear me company; the meanest man to whom I have ever given alms appears, to add his mite of peace and comfort to my stock; and whenever the fire within me shall grow cold, to light my path upon this earth no more, I pray that it may be at such an hour as this, and when I love the world as well as I do now. Charles Dickens / Master Humphrey's Clock

Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. / The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

Grace Stepney's mind was like a kind of moral fly-paper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn by a fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an inexorable memory.
Edith Wharton / The House of Mirth

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
George Eliot

At a single strain of music, the scent of a flower, or even one glimpse of a path of moonlight lying fair upon a Summer sea, the barriers crumble and fall. Through the long corridors the ghosts of the past walk unforbidden, hindered only by broken promises, dead hopes, and dream-dust.
Myrtle Reed / Old Rose and Silver

"Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us."
Oscar Wilde / The Importance of Being Earnest

And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea.
Charles Dickens / Little Dorrit

Anne always remembered the silvery, peaceful beauty and fragrant calm of that night. It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it.
Lucy Maud Montgomery / Anne of Green Gables

The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!
Herman Melville / Moby Dick

"If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly. If you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world's end without fear. I can give up nothing for you - I have nothing to resign, and no one to forsake; but all my love and life shall be devoted to you, and with my last breath I will breathe your name to God if I have sense and memory left."
Charles Dickens / Dombey and Son

My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope and anticipations of joy. Mary Shelley Frankenstein

"I remember a mass of things, but nothing distinctly; a quarrel, but nothing wherefore. O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!"
William Shakespeare / Othello

"There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences."
Jane Austen / Mansfield Park

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
George Eliot / The Mill on the Floss

"Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory . . . "
Joseph Conrad / Lord Jim

Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food.
Charles Dickens / Nicholas Nickleby

"If our affections be tried, our affections are our consolation and comfort; and memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better."
Charles Dickens / Nicholas Nickleby

"It's in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present."
Charles Dickens / David Copperfield

It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.
Charles Dickens / David Copperfield

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
Edward de Bono

Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley

We do not remember days; we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese / The Burning Brand

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde / The Importance of Being Earnest

The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Emily Dickinson / Time and Eternity

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.
Hortense Calisher / Queenie, 1971

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Saul Bellow


Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana / The Life of Reason

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?
Lord Byron

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. Cynthia Ozick

The past is never dead, it is not even past.
William Faulkner

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them. Friedrich Nietzsche

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
T.S. Eliot

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.
John Updike



Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
Diane Ackerman / A Natural History of the Senses


The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind.
Thalassa Cruso / To Everything There is a Season, 1973

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
Samuel Johnson

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
Salvador Dali

The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected.
Stephen Lacey / Scent in Your Garden, 1991

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.
Frank Deford

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara Kingsolver / Animal Dreams

"From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers."
William Shakespeare / Henry V

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.
Albert Einstein

The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Samuel Johnson

In literature and art memory is a synonyme for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.
Robert Aris Willmott


No canvas absorbs color like memory.
Robert Aris Willmott

Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience and the council-chamber of thought. Giambattista Basile

and in the shadows lies a brother


my brother arrives back from thailand full of cancer, sickness and arrogance. i think of last night and the devastating effects that our family has had on him personally. in front of me i see what happens with no fight, no therapy, no realisation of the devastation of our mother and father's actions. i am so full of love, loathing and sadness with him. i wonder was art and beauty my only escape from those horrors. i will not be beaten, i know this - there will be no victims here! only a world of love, compassion, non-attachment and impermanence.

posted by Bob Percival @ 2:31 AM

the demons of bleakhurst


well the time finally came to meet the demons with john and leslie. i was terrified in that calm kind of way and it took at least half of the session to start breaking through. my body was shaking, my stomach palpitating and body getting tense and hot. i very much felt like linda blair in the exorcist as it was all i could relate to. working though the images of having to physically have sex with ............, mainly through teenage fumbling, fighting and resentful attempts to bring her to ..........; full of loathing, hatred, fear and total confusion i finally worked my memories through to the other side where surprisingly the pain really lay. this side was my withdrawal, flight to my own bed and lying there terrified and ashamed knowing that i could never share this moment and act with any other person in the world. the pain lay in this knowledge that i would forever have to keep this terrible secret and be totally alone with my guilt and shame and confusion. i wept with sorrow, relief and sadness. leslie brought me safely back to reality and safety sharing with me the knowledge that this pain can now be shared with her and john. i walked out into the daylight to meet v with a feeling of utter relief knowing that even though there will surely be more pain the secret is at last out of its very dark corner.

posted by Bob Percival @ 2:29 AM

drive by thoughts: madeleine


FRIDAY, JANUARY 28, 2005

drive by thoughts

drive up to byron and hear great life matters program on RN about objects and memories and the powerful and emotional stories that are attached. i immediately thought of the noddy record that i kept from very early childhood. i loved that record. the fact that noddy had been falsly accused of letting the animals out of the ark, taken to court with all the asociated guilt and ulimately rjoyously rekeased with a triumphant affirmation of innocence. i know now why i so emotionally connected the guilt of and betrayal of being sexually assulted and the instinctive desire to be found innocent and totally relieved of the guilt that the burden bore. that i took 40 years to be realized is a miracle and an indictment on collective responsiblity and memory as a whole. i think this may have contributed to the total anxiety attack i suffered on the sunday return journey. the stay in taree hospital was a safe refuge as hospitals always were when i was young. i rember the one week stay in st george hospital with an appendectimy was a total relief as an escape from the dysfunctional household. it may have been in fact the first time i had seen a normal functional social environmnet outside the home.

posted by Bob Percival @ 9:30 AM

memory & literature IV : memory, remembrance and literature


Memory, Remembrance and Literature [blog]

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2009

Welcome

Hello all and welcome to the student blog for the Memory and Literature in a Globalised Culture course at UCL and Aarhus University.

Hopefully the invitations to participate in this blog got through - if you haven't received an email, please contact me or write in the forum on Moodle.

The conference this monday was very interesting and thankfully Jakob and Elena fought their way through the snow so we were able to engage in some enlightening discussions on sites of memory.

One of the examples from mondays discussion was 'Den Gamle By' (The Old City) in Århus, which I think displays some of the ideas also found in 'England, England'. A lot of other examples were mentioned in the discussion and I can't 'remember' them all, so feel free to post them in this forum, to help us all create our own collective memory and to help us remember the inspiring spring semester spent online.


MONDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2009

Major literary works we will study in the 2010 session
We are now in the final stages of preparing the Memory course for the 2010 session. It looks like we will have groups of about 5 students from each of our three partner programmes at University College London, University of Aarhus and University of Lisbon. During the coming term, starting January 11, we will be discussing Julian Barnes' novel England, England and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. As in last year's session we shall introduce the study of cultural memory with the Chicago World Exhibition, and we will also be discussing the film, Babel, and the relationship between new media and new conceptions of media by looking at digital sites of memory in Second Life. An exciting 10 week term is ahead of us.

memory & literature III : from rousseau to neuroscience


Memory in literature: from Rousseau to neuroscience
By Suzanne Nalbantian


Synopsis: This book is the first to discover and probe in depth memory phenomena captured in literary works. Using literature as a laboratory for the workings of the mind, this comparative study of writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Octavio Paz, Proust to Faulkner, and others, uncovers valuable material for the classification of the memory process. Nalbantian's daring interdisciplinary work, involving literature, science, and art, forges a new model for dialogue between the disciplines.

Review
'In this book, Suzanne Nalbantian boldly ushers in a new way of writing about literature. She bridges the gap between literary criticism and the neurosciences by focusing on the phenomenon of memory as a site of interdisciplinary interaction. Fully informed about the recent developments of neurosciences, this book reopens a debate initiated at the turn of the last century with James and Bergson...' - Professor Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania 'Suzanne Nalbantian's Memory in Literature is a remarkable contribution to the voluminous literature on this most popular of subjects. Her range of reference, which includes not only a dozen major novelists and poets but painters as well along with all the major players from psychology and neuroscience, is most impressive. As she moves easily between languages she achieves an overview of the subject that is linguistically unconfined' - Professor James Olney, Louisiana State University 'There is much of interest here and much to learn from this sophisticated book.' - Brain: A Journal of Neurology 'well-informed and readable book' - Michael Eskin, Arcadia

Review: Language & Literature Magazine

memory & literature II : top 10 books about memory in literature


Top 5 Books About Memory in Literature
By Esther Lombardi
About.com Guide

Memory is the act of remembering or recollecting events from the past. Past events come back to haunt us, or happy remembrances help to brighten our days. As the story line weaves in and out of time, memories play an important role in character development and the progression of the plot. Cultural memory also plays a role in literature. Read more about memory and literature.

1. Memory in Literature
by Suzanne Nalbantian. Palgrave Macmillan. In "Memory in Literature," Nalbantian looks at literature as a laboratory for the workings of the mind, exploring writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Octavio Paz. Nalbantian makes connections between the memories of literary subjects and neuroscientific theories.

2. Memory and Desire: Representations of Passion in the Novella
by Peter Mudford. Gerald Duckworth & Co. "Memory and Desire" discusses the ways 12 novellas (from English, French, German and Russian writers) represent passion and sexual obsession.

3. Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870
by Nicholas Dames. Oxford University Press. In "Amnesiac Selves," Dames discusses authors from Jane Austen to Wilkie Collins. This book "evokes a novelistic world and a culture engaged in forming a modern nostalgia whose origins our own time has largely forgotten."

4. Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory
by Vera Schwarcz. Yale University Press. Here, Schwarcz explores the cultural memory in the Chinese and Jewish traditions. How does metaphor become an aid to memory? And, how are the wounds healed?

5. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis
by Richard Terdiman. Cornell University Press.

memory & literature I : the anatomy of memory, an anthology


Look back in wonder

What is the nature of memory? And can it be captured in literature? Craig Raine considers the most successful attempts at doing so, from Wordsworth's 'spots of time' to Proust's tea-soaked madeleines

Craig Raine
The Guardian, Saturday 5 January 2008

In A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust says many acute things about memory - about physical memory in the body, for instance, in Du cote de chez Swann . One thinks of Robert Frost's "After Apple-Picking": "My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round."

Proust is good, too, on memory's inaccuracy and its arbitrariness. Think of Albertine's wandering beauty spot in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs or Marcel's observation in Le temps retrouve that one forgets the duel one nearly fought but remembers the yellow gaiters one's opponent wore as a child in the Champs-Elysees. A strikingly dramatic but implausible illustration, this, where sartorial details, revers and darts and flares, are given a Wodehousian precedence over world events. Less good, though, than Henry V's prediction that soldiers at Agincourt will remember their part in the battle "with advantages".

I prefer, too, TS Eliot's more sober sense of arbitrariness in the "Conclusion" to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism:

Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction, where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.

They are, then, these memories, super-charged with sensation. Can we describe this sensation - of significance, of occluded feeling? Can we say what it means?

Proust is interested in the particular sensation that accompanies remembering. The tea-soaked madeleine loses its force when it is repeatedly tasted. Tom Stoppard recorded something similar in the first issue of Talk magazine when he wrote "On Turning Out to be Jewish" (September 1999). He meets in Czechoslovakia a woman whose cut has been stitched decades before by Dr Straussler, the father he never knew: "Zaria holds out her hand, which still shows the mark. I touch it. In that moment I am surprised by grief, a small catching-up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing that came from my father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar." A moving moment. But Stoppard has recorded unsentimentally that its power to move diminishes every time he tells the story.

Is the sensation simply nostalgia - like the nostalgic regret of Nicholas Bulstrode in Middlemarch for the time when he was an effective methodist preacher in Islington's Upper Row with an ambition to be a missionary? Or is it something more profound - like Proust's meditation, in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, on his Aunt Leonie's sofa in the brothel? On that same sofa, Marcel has first experienced love with a girl cousin. Proust gives us a stereoscopic irony as the seedy and the pre-sexual amalgamate. There seems to be a hidden message in the coincidence. Is the coincidence merely a coincidence? Or has the coincidence been arranged? Elements of this supernatural innuendo emerge repeatedly in Nabokov's Speak, Memory . General Kuropatkin is showing the young Nabokov tricks with matches on a sofa, when he is summoned away: "the loose matches jumping up on the divan as his weight left it." Fifteen years later, the disguised, fugitive general asks Nabokov's father for a light ... Nabokov says the true purpose of autobiography is "the following of such thematic designs through one's life".

In Book II of The Prelude, Wordsworth writes about significant yet insignificant memories as "spots of time":

There are in our existence spots of time

Which with distinct pre-eminence retain

A vivifying Virtue, whence, depress'd

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repair'd ...

This is not so much an explanation as a statement of intrigued bafflement: "the hiding places of my power / Seem open; I approach and then they close." And the example that Wordsworth gives is interestingly drab. It has a few meagre components - a "naked Pool, / The Beacon on the lonely Eminence, / The Woman and her garments vex'd and toss'd" - and its power is largely retrospective. It is "in truth, / An ordinary sight". Looked back on, though, the dreariness becomes a "visionary dreariness" that Wordsworth would need colours and words unknown to man to paint. The discrepancy here, in Eliot, and in Proust, is between the original experience and that experience when it is hallowed by remembrance.

The effect is something like cropping in photography. At the beginning of The Waves, Virginia Woolf gives us the childhood memories of Rhoda, Louis, Bernard, Susan and Neville as highlights, ordinary epiphanies: Mrs Constable pulling up her black stockings; a flash of birds like a handful of broadcast seed; bubbles forming a silver chain at the bottom of a saucepan; air warping over a chimney; light going blue in the morning window. These mnemonic pungencies are different from the bildungsroman of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as that novel gets into its stride. They resemble rather the unforgettable anthology of snapshots Joyce gives us at the novel's beginning - a snatch of baby-talk; the sensation of wetting the bed; covering and uncovering your ears at refectory. Or Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, when Augie is a kind of ship-board unofficial counsellor, the recipient of emotional swarf: "Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of the stove factory"; "He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it comes out a fiver". Cropped for charisma.

Of course, memory itself is naturally cropped, as Stendhal records in Chapter 13 of Vie de Henry Brulard, where he notes that some memories are undated, vivid as fragmented frescoes, but surrounded by the blank brickwork of oblivion. Actually, anything fragmented, as the romantics knew from Percy's Reliques, is granted a penumbra of suggestion that we mistake and read as vividness of outline.

Memories are more effective than memoirs. Isolation counts for more than continuity. The Paris of Hemingway's memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) is less vivid than the same material telescoped in the earlier "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1961).

This is A Moveable Feast:

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine had died, where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

It isn't just the clumsiness of the triple "where". It's the automatic, sentimental cliche that poisons A Moveable Feast - the flyblown yellowed poster, the unknown girl at the cafe "with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek". Nostalgia, as Kundera redefines it in Ignorance, is "the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return". In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway fails to return to his past, he is exiled from his memories, because his prose is writing itself and he is having a hard time keeping up.

In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", on the other hand, the detail is seen and hand-picked:

There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard. The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tyres, with the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died.

By 1964, Hemingway has forgotten the flower dye and the round square. His memory fails. So his memories fail.

Nostalgia, of course, has a meaning less connected with suffering and more with emotional indulgence. As in, "they wallowed in nostalgia". Here the territory is thick with shared memories, with mnemonic solidarity. For example, Ursula in Women in Love remembers "the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar". In one of Edna O'Brien's novels, the heroine sits on the step of the back door, eating sugar on bread.

In Le temps retrouve, Marcel floats a theory of involuntary memory which he opposes to the willed act of memory. The theory is founded on three rapidly consecutive examples less famous than the madeleine in Du cote de chez Swann

Two uneven paving stones outside the Princesse de Guermantes's mansion recall two particular paving stones in the baptistry of San Marco in Venice. The " ting" of a teaspoon against a plate recalls the noise of a railway man's hammer testing the wheels of the Paris train as it stood outside a wood - when Marcel (20 pages earlier) reflected on his lack of talent for literature, a verdict based on his apparent indifference to nature. "I am in the midst of nature. Well, it is with indifference, with boredom that my eyes register the line which separates your radiant foreheads from your shadowy trunks." Now the formerly tedious scene dazes Marcel with its previously unmentioned specifics - opening a bottle of beer, hearing the tapped wheels. The experience is experienced with its accessories. And, lastly, the texture of a napkin brings back the very texture of Marcel's bathing towel at Balbec. The napkin contains the towel, which contains an ocean green and blue as a peacock's tail - the ocean since involuntary memory never recalls the indefinite article.

Involuntary memory, in this account, restores reality in its entirety, and is therefore a form of resurrection. It is, further, a kind of "immortality". Marcel, accordingly, feels joy that makes death a matter of indifference to him. His faith in his literary talent is restored by the intensity with which he recalls these essentially banal experiences.

The idea is shared, or perhaps borrowed, by Nabokov, a much greater writer, in Speak, Memory:

I see again my class-room, the blue roses of the wall-paper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

In Nabokov's account, memory is complete, beyond process, exempt from change. The reasoning here is coherent.

Proust's exposition of "fragments of existence withdrawn from Time" is somewhat muzzy by comparison:

The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time.

In any case, Proust's laborious explanation is partial. He has not elucidated the mechanism of memory properly. The mystery that needs explanation is why the recalled experience should bring such acute pleasure when the actual, original experience was "tedious", and therefore unapprehended.

Proust's "answer" is that we experience intimations of immortality. It is possible, though, that we simply enjoy the act of remembrance - and that this requires no explanation. It is a fact, the way we are, part of any human being's hard-wiring.

On the other hand, the pleasure is extraordinary. It is comparable to "the constant readiness to discern the halo round the frying pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier". That simile from Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a clue to the true nature of memory's mechanism.

Memory is like metaphor in its operations. Memory is sexual in its operations. In English we speak of "coming" when we speak of orgasm. "I'm coming" means that the sexual partner is arriving at the predestined place, the site of pleasure. The journey can be long or short but the elusive destination is known in advance.

The words Marcel uses to describe the pleasure that accompanies his three involuntary memories are "a shudder of happiness" (" avec un tel fremissement de bonheur "). Not that this is explicitly or exclusively sexual. The word fremissement can be applied to fear, anger, as well as pleasure. It is, too, according to my Petit Robert, a light ( leger ) sensation, rather than Eliot's "blood shaking the heart". The other word Marcel uses is une joie . In French, another word for joy, jouissance, is also the word for coming, for plaisir sexuel . Jouissance seems less pedestrian than "coming". But having an orgasm - or orgasme - is parvenir a la jouissance . And parvenir means to arrive at a predetermined point.

In English we use the French word "parvenue" to suggest someone who is socially ambitious, someone who has only recently achieved social prominence, social heights - an assiduous social corkscrew, someone who isn't a someone, but someone who is a nobody. "One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire."

Our other word, also French, for such a person is an arriviste - someone who has just arrived at the desired destination.

I suggest that the pleasure, the joy really experienced by Marcel, and by the rest of us, is bound up with the sensation of imminence, suspense and arrival - common to sex and simile.

The pleasure experienced by Marcel is primarily the actual act of remembrance, and only secondarily in the recovered detail of what is remembered. In each of these three involuntary memories, Marcel experiences a delay. The paving stones are like ... what? The teaspoon is like ... what? The texture of the napkin is exactly like ... what? Marcel claims the recall is instant, but it isn't. As he tests the uneven paving stones, he has to repeat the initial movement exactly:

Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as to say: "Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness I set you."

The pleasure of memory is the pleasure we experience when we read a good simile - the pleasure of difference between the two things being compared, the pleasure we take in the justice of the comparison and the sensation of comprehension. Every good simile is a kind of riddle: X is like Y. Why is X like Y? The mind sifts the evidence for and against, seeking the evidence for. Marcel solves the riddle of what the paving stones remind him of. He arrives at a solution, he comes to the destination, to the only conclusion retrospectively possible.

At its most banal, this process is what Bloom experiences in the "Lestrygonians" episode of Ulysses when he tries to remember a name across 20 or so pages. Finally, it comes to him: "Pen. Pen. Penrose." The itch is scratched. The search has come to a conclusion.

At its most complex, it is Molly's recollection at the end of Ulysses of losing her virginity to Bloom on Howth Head. Whereas in Proust, the present provokes a specific memory of the past, Molly's memory of Howth is underlaid with an earlier memory, and, surrendering to Bloom, she surrenders also to an earlier lover:

yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another ...

Molly's first proper kiss and her first full act of intercourse are conflated. Lieutenant Jack or Joe or Harry Mulvey (Molly can't remember his Christian name) is twinned with Leopold Bloom. Memory as multiple orgasm, so to speak.

Nabokov began Speak, Memory with a phrase that was later lifted by Samuel Beckett and vulgarised in Waiting for Godot : "The cradle rocks above the abyss." (In Beckett, "we give birth astride the grave". Twice.) The word "remember" is itself an implicit rejoinder to death. Its etymology counters dismemberment. It is very rare therefore to encounter a flat rejection of memory such as Ursula Brangwen's in Women in Love

She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have rolled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree that she should 'remember'! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollection or blemish of past life.

Of course, Lawrence had a low opinion of Proust: "too much jelly-water: I can't read him." As did Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to Nancy Mitford (March 16 1948):

I am reading Proust for the first time - in English of course - and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely no sense of time. He can't remember anyone's age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble & Francoise takes him to a public lavatory in the Champs-Elysees, Bloch takes him to a brothel.

Nor was Joyce keen to be matched against Proust. On October 24 1920, Joyce wrote to Frank Budgen:

I observe a furtive attempt to run a certain M Marcel Proust of here against the signatory of this letter. I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic.

On the whole, though, Proust's influence makes itself felt wherever memory is important.

In spite of his confession in 1948 that he hadn't read A la recherche, Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945) is clearly influenced by an idea of Proust's novel. Not only is there a reference to Charlus - the toady don Mr Samgrass spends "a cosy afternoon with the incomparable Charlus" - but there are several uncharacteristic extended metaphors stretching for a paragraph at a time. Uncharacteristic of Waugh - and though a famously Proustian trope, one less frequent, it is my impression, in the later volumes of A la recherche, where the sentences themselves are pithier, more Waugh-like. And Charles Ryder, Waugh's narrator, encapsulates his theme at the beginning of Book 3: "My theme is memory ... These memories, which are my life - for we possess nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark's ..." An extended metaphor ensues. Is it a coincidence or a Freudian slip that the pigeons are situated in San Marco, a locus central to Le temps retrouve

I should say, too, that Virginia Woolf's The Years - with its time range from 1880 to 1937, its repeated motifs, its chronological gaps during which characters alter dramatically - was an attempt to emulate Proust in English. Delia's party at the end of The Years gathers all the narrative's aged sur- vivors in one place, just as Proust assembles his survivors at the Princesse de Guermantes's, where their aged appearances are ironically and famously described as fancy dress - an extended conceit that begins brilliantly but soon shows signs of strain, like a man with asthma holding his breath.

Of course, Virginia Woolf idolised Proust: on May 6 1922 she wrote to Roger Fry:

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly get out a sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification he procures - theres [sic] something sexual in it - that I feel I can write like that and seize my pen and then I can't write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.

Fulsome praise, though in October she is still on volume one. Three years later, on February 9 1925, Woolf tells Margaret Llewelyn Davies that she's only read three volumes. No obstacle to her claim on April 21 1927 to her sister Vanessa that Proust is "far the greatest novelist".

She seems, however, never to have actually finished reading A la recherche . In a 1928 newspaper piece, "Preferences", she writes: "I have also bought and propose to read should my life last long enough the final volumes of Proust's masterpiece." ( Le temps retrouve was published in 1927.) On April 27 1934, she tells Ethel Smyth she's reading Sodom et Gomorrhe . And on May 21 1934, again to Ethel Smyth: "I cant [sic] write myself within its arc; that's true; for years I've put off finishing it."

And yet in April, May, June of 1929, her three-part essay "Phases of Fiction" claims that Proustian psychology is an advance on Henry James, while adding the qualification that the "expansion of sympathy" is almost self-defeating. Everything in Proust, however trivial, provokes an extended meditation. "Proust is determined to bring before the reader every piece of evidence upon which any state of mind is founded." The risk is that the commentary is surplus to requirements, that there is no hierarchy of importance - that the footnotes bury the trickle of text, as it were. "We lose the sense of outline."

How do we account for Woolf's high opinion of Proust if it is so precariously founded? It is partially explained by this hyperventilating assessment to Fry on October 3 1922:

One has to put the book down with a gasp. The pleasure becomes physical - like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses : to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished - My martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for pounds 4.10.

For Virginia Woolf, Proust was a way of putting her rival Joyce in his place - and a way, too, of acceding easily to the preferential judgments of homosexual Bloomsbury.

One is queasy, however, at her little litany of praise - grapes, Evian water, pinot noir and the seafront at Cannes! - because its blowsy imprecision suggests impeccable ignorance. And although her essays refer often to Proust, one sometimes wonders if she had read as little as Waugh.

Beckett wrote a brief (and intermittently unreadable) monograph about Proust and Krapp's Last Tape is a kind of dwarf A la recherche, shrunk in the wash. On the one hand, there is the unforgettable (but ironically forgotten) physical memory of the black ball in the dog's mouth: "a small, old, black, hard. Solid rubber ball. (Pause.) I shall feel it, in my hand, until my dying day." On the other hand, there is the hypnotic memory of the punt and the girl. Ruth Miller, an early Bellow biographer, remembered Bellow reading to her the passage in Le temps retrouve when Marcel is stuck in his train in a field. In Herzog, Herzog persecutes his friend Nachman with "the engine of his memory". And The Adventures of Augie March owes a debt to Proust as well as a more obvious debt to Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the American vernacular. When Augie announces that he "will go at things" in his "own way", "free-style", and that his memories will be set down as they arrive, "first to knock, first admitted", he is not in fact going at things entirely in his own way. It is also the Guermantes' way, Swann's way, and Proust's way - the way of involuntary memory.

From Memory: An Anthology, edited by Harriet Harvey Wood & AS Byatt (Chatto & Windus, pounds 25).


Review:The Independent

Memory: an anthology, Edited by Harriet Harvey Wood & AS Byatt
Reviewed by David Papineau
Friday, 25 January 2008SHARE PRINTEMAIL
We think of memory as a single faculty, but in truth it is a hotchpotch of many distinct abilities. We know this because brain damage sometimes knocks out just one while leaving the rest intact. That is what happened to the man who mistook his wife for a hat. Oliver Sacks's patient was fine, except that he'd forgotten how to recognise objects. Other kinds of brain damage can remove nothing but the ability to identify faces, or to perform familiar manual tasks. Then there are the amnesiacs who cannot recall incidents prior to some brain injury, even though they can keep track of recent activities. Other amnesiacs suffer the opposite plight, conveyed so effectively in the film Memento. They can remember their life up to their injury, but can't form new memories.

When all our memory capacities are intact, they enable us to preserve information from the past. Psychologists distinguish three broad categories of remembered information. Procedural memory retains the kind of practical information that is rarely forgotten, like how to ride a bicycle. Semantic memory preserves factual knowledge, like the date of the Battle of Hastings. And episodic memory delivers first-hand recall of events from our own experience, like your first day at school or last year's holiday.

AS Byatt and Harriet Harvey Wood's intriguing anthology has two parts: the first a series of commissioned essays by literary and scientific eminences, the second a selection of brief extracts, grouped under such headings as the "Idea of Memory" and "Memory and Imagination". The editors aim to cover all aspects of the subject, but their main focus is on episodic memory and its literary embodiment. The library rather than the laboratory is the natural habitat for both Byatt and Harvey Wood (for many years head of literature at the British Council) and their first concern is the way experience gets woven into texts. Scientists and philosophers do get a look in, but strongly outnumbered by novelists and critics.

By and large, the literary contributions take it for granted that our episodic memories provide a genuine record of past experiences. Craig Raine airs doubts about Proust's explanation of the pleasures of memory, but doesn't query Proust's presupposition that memories recall real incidents. This literary confidence is not supported by the scientists.

According to myth, everybody over 50 is supposed to remember exactly where they were when they heard that Kennedy died. Psychologist Ulrich Neisser explains that this just isn't so. They may think they remember, but they're likely to be wrong. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, Neisser immediately asked a sample of people where they heard the news. Three years later, he asked them again. A quarter of his sample gave an account wrong in every particular, and most were mistaken.

Many people resist the idea that vividly imagined episodes might be fabrications. In the anthology, Hilary Mantel's extract blankly rebuffs queries about her reliance on episodic recall in her memoir Giving up the Ghost ("I believe strongly in the power and persistence of memory"). Against that can be placed a contribution by Oliver Sacks, which confesses how he couldn't possibly have experienced an episode described in his memoir Uncle Tungsten. He says that he would have sworn in court that he remembered a bomb falling next door in the Blitz, until his brother pointed out that he was at school at the time, and knew about it only from a detailed letter.

The authenticity of literary texts isn't the only thing called into question by the unreliability of memory, as acknowledged in a short section on "False Memories". Ian Hacking and Elizabeth Loftus both urge caution about the "recovered memories" on which many accusations of past child abuse are based. Neisser's essay touches on another danger of faith in episodic memory. DNA evidence now regularly leads to the quashing of wrongful convictions. Most turn out to have been based on eyewitness evidence. Of the first 200 prisoners released because of new DNA evidence in the US, over 75 per cent were in jail because of what someone claimed to have seen.

It may seem surprising that episodic memory should be so capricious. But this makes some sense. A number of contributions conjecture that episodic memory is peculiar to humans. This is disputable. If dogs can dream – and there is plenty of evidence they can – perhaps they can also imaginatively replay incidents from their past. Still, what they clearly can't do is arrange these incidents into a coherent narrative, the story of their life.

It is this narrative ability that is peculiar to humans. Our episodic replay is just one way in which we fill in the chapters of our life stories. Given this, we can see why we might often want to augment our first-hand experiences. There are lots of other ways of finding out about our pasts, most obviously from parents and others. This will sometimes encumber us with false information, but that is the price for opening ourselves to all the sources.

If the ability to construct narratives is peculiar to humans, where did it come from? Is it aided by our genetic heritage, or purely a cultural phenomenon? Unfortunately, these questions are absent from this anthology. There is an interesting commissioned essay by Patrick Bateson on "Memory and Evolution", but this is about the way evolution can turn habits into instincts, not our facility at story-telling. Still, this anthology isn't really designed for those who want to know about the scientific origins of story-telling. For those who want to know how literature makes stories out of memories, on the other hand, it will be a very useful companion.

David Papineau is professor of philosophy at King's College, London


Review: Sun-Herald

Jan 13, 2008 | Reviewed by George Rosie

My family has no memory of my mother's brother, David Tait. All we know is that he was killed at the age of 24 in April 1917 when his ship was torpedoed in the Irish Sea. Nothing personal of him has survived no letters, no postcards, no telegrams, no photographs, no diaries. None of his younger siblings ever knew him. There are no family anecdotes about him. So far as we know he left no wife or sweetheart.

None of the old men I've met over the years in the fishing towns of Wick and Thurso remembered anything about the boy who left Caithness at the age of 12 to go "deep sea".

I couldn't help recalling David Tait as I read my way through this excellent compilation of essays (literary and scientific), poems, letters, diary entries and play fragments put together by AS Byatt and Harriet Harvey Wood on the subject of memory. As Byatt says in her introduction, memories can be elusive, "they can flitter just out of reach, like lost threads of broken webs". Which struck me as a pretty good description of what little I knew of my mother's long lost brother.

This is a superb collection of more than 160 hugely varied items that range across two-and-a-half millennia from Plato and Socrates via St Augustine and Shakespeare to a report to the House of Commons from the Digital Preservation Coalition in 2002. And while Byatt sets it all up (very effectively), most of the anthology seems to have been organised by Harriet Harvey Wood.

She divides her work into eight categories: Childhood Memories; The Idea Of Memory; The Art Of Memory;

Memory And Science; Memory And Imagination; False Memories; Public Memory; and Forgetting.

In every category I found something to relish. So many and varied, in fact, that I find it hard to single out examples. This is a book stuffed with treasures. Meditations and explanations abound. There are theories galore, and as many questions as answers. It sets so many hares running that any diligent reader could spend a lifetime chasing them. It's years since I've muttered "I never knew that" or "I'd never thought of that" so often while making my way through a book.

Among the many writers and scientists quoted are Frank Kermode, Thomas de Quincey, Sigmund Freud, the Woolfs, Ted Hughes, Plutarch, John Locke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Francis Bacon, IP Pavlov, Konrad Lorenz, Walter Scott, David Hume, Carl Jung, Terry Pratchett, Martin Amis, Philip Larkin and (almost inevitably) Richard Dawkins. The list is long. It speaks of erudition, curiosity and a love of the subject.

I enjoyed the section on childhood memories, finding the essays poignant and revealing. Here's GK Chesterton's childhood memory of Cardinal Manning emerging from a carriage: "Out of it came a ghost clad in flames. Nothing in the shilling paint box had ever spread such a conflagration of scarlet - And then I looked at his face and was startled with the contrast; for his face was dead pale like ivory, very wrinkled and old". He also recalls his father telling him the apparition was Manning and chortling, saying: "He'd have made his fortune as a model." Which, of course, raises the question: just how good was Chesterton's memory? Because some of the essays suggest we have a huge capacity for inventing (or reinventing) memories and convincing ourselves they are true. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, for instance, had a vivid memory of the day a white- hot thermite bomb dropped near his home only to be told years later by his older brother that while the bomb was true enough, young Oliver never saw it. He was many miles away at boarding school.

And how much of memory is mind and how much is brain? I was intrigued by the piece by Eric R Kandel who pointed to recent research done in Germany comparing the brains of violin players with the brains of non-musicians. The work found that the part of the brain's cortex that controlled the right hand was much the same for everyone, while the part controlling the left hand (ie the playing hand) in violinists was up to five times more developed than that of the non-musicians. The memory of playing the music made the brain grow.

Plainly this is not a volume to be read at one sitting. Instead it's a book for the magpies among us, designed to be dipped into time after time. But I suspect that even when every word of this book has been read its readers will keep going back to it, human memory being the strange and imperfect instrument it is.

But what is memory? One definition was coined by John Stuart Mill in a letter to the Roman Catholic philosopher WG Ward. "Memory I take to be the present consciousness of a past sensation. It is strange that such consciousness can exist, but the facts denoted by was and is and is to come, are perhaps the most mysterious part of our mysterious existence." That makes senility and loss of memory a sad prospect.

Which, in a way, brings me back to my long-dead uncle David Tait. More than 40 men went down with his ship, the SS Vine Branch, but only 29 names are remembered on the Merchant Marine memorial in London. Why? Because the remainder of the crew were Africans and Lascars and, therefore, judged unworthy to have their names set in stone.

How many other subjects of the empire were erased from our public memory?

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

forget me not? photography and remembrance



Ingenious [site]

Forget Me Not? Photography and Remembrance
Photography is linked closely with memory. Well aware of this, photographic manufacturers and retailers have aggressively exploited and promoted this fact in their advertising campaigns. But what exactly is the nature of their relationship? Photographs help us recall family, friends and special moments. But do they allow us to really remember them? Some people have argued that photography and memory do not mix, that one even precludes the other. Photography, they say, replaces memories with mere pictures. In order to create and preserve memories, people have enhanced photographs by adding words, fabric, objects and even hair. The photograph becomes something that is touched, whether really or in the imagination of the viewer, and this helps drag its perception into the immediacy of the present.

Selling Memories


Kodak advertising poster, c1925
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, summed up the company’s enormously successful marketing strategy in a few words: ‘Kodak doesn’t sell film, it sells memories.’ In so doing, he acknowledged the strong link in the public perception between photography and memory. Popular surveys of what people choose to photograph and why regularly ‘discover’ that one of our primary motivations for taking pictures is to preserve family memories. However, is this imperative something that photographic manufacturers have merely responded to? Or is it, rather, something they themselves have created?

One of our primary motivations for taking pictures is to preserve family memories. The fundamental shift in photography heralded by the introduction of the Kodak camera in 1888 was to have a profound effect on the nature of photographic advertising. As photography became a truly popular activity, the preservation of domestic memories was to become the dominant theme of all photographic advertising. Indeed, capturing personal memories was widely promoted as the raison d’ĂȘtre of snapshot photography. Yet this preoccupation with the mnemonic properties of photography did not appear overnight. There was, rather, a gradual change in focus from photography as a form of leisure to photography as a form of memory. Photography stopped cel


'In Memoriam' carte-de-visite, c.1875
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

Celebrating the present and became, instead, a means of safeguarding the past and protecting against the uncertainties of the future.

The Mirror With a Memory


Irish 'In Memoriam' card, 1918
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

In the 1860s, the American poet and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) was one of photography’s most enthusiastic advocates. For Holmes, photography was nothing less than a means of triumphing over time, and, indeed, even over death itself. He wrote: ‘Those whom we love no longer leave us in dying, as they did of old... the unfading ar
a means of triumphing over time, and, indeed, even over deathtificial retina which has looked upon them retains their impress... How these shadows last, and how their originals fade away!’ Quite clearly, the ‘truthfulness’ and accuracy of the photographic image was a distinct improvement on the vagaries and weaknesses of human memory. It is an assumption that we share today in our enthusiasm, indeed, almost obsession, to capture significant people and events in our lives through photography.


'In Memoriam' brooch, c.1870
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

To some commentators, however, the very permanence of the photographic image, while seeming to offer the possibility of a memory that never fades, also threatens to eclipse that original memory and, ultimately, to destroy it. Through repeated viewing, they argue, it is the photographs themselves that become implanted in our memory rather than the people or events that they represent. Photography, instead of being in the service of memory, is actually in the service of forgetting. Implanted images such as these are no more than ‘false memories’, overwhelming the viewer with their potency and usurping the possibility of experiencing true or ‘involuntary’ memory.

Forget Me Not


Locket with daguerreotype and lock of hair, c1855
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

Images can stimulate memories but memories are not images. In Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) autobiographical novel Remembrance of Things Past, just one bite of a madeleine is enough to transport the narrator into an extended reverie where he vividly experiences the past as a simultaneous part of the present. The taste of the biscuit is a trigger for ‘invo
luntary memory’ - an immediate, all-embracing, almost physical sensation. Occasionally, we have all experienced such involuntary memories. Usually stimulated by smell, touch or taste rather than by sight, they can stir up extremely powerful emotions. Compared with these, photography, with its frozen, static and unchanging representations of the past, is a very poor memory trigger.

Does a photograph really enable us to remember a person as he really was or an event as it actually happened? Does the sight of someone bring back the sound of her voice, her smell, the way she walked? Can a photograph of a childhood holiday ever bring back the sensation of warm sand slipping between our toes? Images can stimulate memories but memories are not images. They are sensations. As such, they cannot be encompassed within the boundaries of visual representation - photographic or not.


Portrait of a soldier in an embroidered mount, c1870
Credit: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/Science & Society Picture Library

Some have argued that for photography truly to serve the cause of memory, it hit has to transcend the merely visual and engage the other senses. It has to become something that you can feel as well as see. Since photography’s invention people have responded to this challenge in many different ways in an attempt to overcome time and space and create an emotional bond between subject and viewer. The results are photographs whose memory potential has been enhanced by adding words, fabric, embroidery, flowers and even human hair - extraordinary works of art created by ordinary people.

Quotes:

Marcel Proust
'Memory is not a constantly accessible copy of the different facts of our life, but an oblivion from which, at random moments, present resemblances enable us to resuscitate dead recollections.'

Pierre Nora
'History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.'

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
'The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.'

Friedrich Nietzsche
'If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.'

Walter Benjamin
'Memory is not an instrument for the exploration of the past but rather its theatre.'

Andreas Huyssen
'Rather than leading us to some authentic origin or giving us verifiable access to the real, memory, even and especially in its belatedness, is itself based on representation.'

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