353. Swann's Way - Overture

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Swann’s Way

by Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
Random House - 1924-25

Overture

Since I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this, I’m not entirely sure now if my deep interest in dreams and dreaming is something I have in common with Proust or if I caught this from him. My dreams are so much more interesting than my waking life that it really doesn’t bear thinking about. Hardly a night goes by when I don’t awaken, in the night or in the morning or even better after having fallen back asleep in the morning, and am astounded by the beauty and complexity, and sometimes just the strangeness, of my dreams. And here is something in particular that I know very well.

P5 “...for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilization, and out of a half-visualized succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.”

I sleep in a very dark room and so often I will awaken with no idea where I am. That I was just the instant before “someplace” quite different doesn’t reduce the confusion. Usually there is some light from the streetlight outside that penetrates my closed shutters. And if it is morning, there is a hint of light from several directions. But it takes a moment for me to orient myself, not just in my room but in time and place. 

I do wonder how this works for a blind person. If it is early or late there might be sounds to tell me something, but between 1 and 3 am it is nearly silent here. Without the visual clue of light I would not know where to even look for a light or a door. Or for my glasses.

But memory does reassemble your identity over time. 

San Francisco April 8, 2020
We are now in the fifth week of Sheltering in Place or practicing Social Distancing. Today I went out and walked up and down a relatively level stretch of Pine street for thirty blocks. I didn’t interact with anyone so I didn’t wear my face mask. Probably tomorrow I will need to go to the post office so I will wear my mask for that excursion. The streets are mostly deserted and many of the stores are boarded up. It’s rather more dull than the post-apocalyptic fantasies we’ve seen in films. I have been busy this whole time with homeowners association business so I have been anything but bored. I am hoping to have more time on my hands later this week, but that’s what I thought last week as well.

What I miss are things that would not have meant much to Proust, social distancing in his cork lined room. I miss settling in at a cafe with my iced tea to work or read. I have not had a drop of iced tea, or alcohol, since this started. I miss seeing the usual faces at the cafes I frequent. I worry about the workers and the businesses.

On the other hand, I’m amazed at what the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been able to achieve in a matter of months. The Paris Agreement was a half measure that I never believed everyone would live up to, but this virus is taking care of business. I never thought we would willingly do what was necessary, but I did think it would be a global recession or depression that could make a difference, this is even more effective in that it is immobilizing even the wealthy. The cruise and tourism industry is not going to recover quickly from this. Which means the carbon reduction should last for some time. Will it be enough to make a difference? Is it already too late? I don’t know. 

Even when I can return to the cafes, my seasonal work at public events is going to be slow to return. And San Francisco will be hit hard economically. We are known for tech but its tourism that pays the bills.

But as far as the pandemic goes, we are doing remarkably well. Today we counted only our tenth death. So far (knock on wood) we’re getting only a death every few days. Though that could change quickly as there are already cases in the huge, city run nursing home and several cases in the homeless shelters. I don’t see how those two communities can avoid being consumed by the pandemic.

But the city as a whole went to sheltering in place early and it seems to be working. Also, I think a lot of people left town. I know four people in my building and another two or three across the alley went home to their families. Students and even some workers can work remotely from anywhere. I would love to know by how much the population of the city has dropped. 

I’m assembling lists of places I want to go (mostly foods I want to eat) as soon as things return to normal. But how many of my favorite places will survive? In many ways, this, especially if it goes on longer than two months, is going to be as bad as the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. It could take the better part of a decade for business to return to normal. All the more so if this is the start of the Trump Depression, which is quite possible.


Another day has passed with very little change. Yesterday 799 people died of COVID-19 just in NYC and there are now more cases in New York state than in any country besides the USA. No one seems to have handled the pandemic worse than New York. Our death count is still at 10. I realize that counting the weeks is confusing so I’m going to switch to a day count, starting with the day I and the City independently decided to embrace Social Distancing. This is then Day 23. So 23 days since I’ve been able to walk into a cafe, order some tea, and sit down to work. And I’m still refining my Social Distancing routine. I wear my N95 mask when I’m going to interact with someone at a market or bank or post office. And as of today, I’m wearing a cloth mask even when I go out for exercise. The latest word is that the six foot safety zone idea may not be good enough. So with a cloth mask I am preventing any viruses I may have -- there’s no way to know for sure if you have it -- from contaminating someone else as I huff and puff up my hill while giving me a similar degree of protection from anything in the air around me. Not perfect protection, but something.

When you think about it, and look at what’s happened around NYC and even in Singapore of late, it would seem to be a lost cause, yet the case count for San Francisco has gone from increasing around 70% every three days to the most recent count of 25%. That is a greatly flattened curve.


I’ve finished reading about young Marcel’s sad victory over his mother leading to a reading of parts of, but not all of, a novel by George Sand. In some ways I wish Proust had spent more time writing about his -- Marcel’s -- family than about the Guermantes. Though he does capture them and maybe more would not be better. And it’s really his grandmother that we see clearest. I’ve known women like her, and they can be exasperating, but she is also a lovely and good person.

Yesterday I paused at page 34, just before we come to the “petite madeleines.” It had been a long day of HOA related nonsense, check writing and taking the checks and other items to the post office for special service. I’m not going to read much now, but I want to keep moving forward. While I may regret saying this, I think I’m caught up for the moment so tomorrow I should have more time.

The last day has not been a good day for San Francisco during the pandemic. It was our first day with more than one death, in fact three deaths, and the number of cases went up 10%. That last isn’t a surprise as they are now doing more testing in the places where the destitute dwell and the results are about what you’d expect. People living in SROs or tents or in shelters are not going to be able to Social Distance even if they wanted to, and many have no real idea of what’s happening. And unless Meals on Wheels start delivering opiates and meth, they are not going to keep to themselves in any case.

Finally saw some death statistics comparing now with previous year. THIS is for NYC and it extends back to include 9/11. I hope someone at our local paper will see this so we can get similar statistics for San Francisco.

So here is the famous passage, as leaving it out really isn’t an option.

P34 “...mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory -- this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?”
...

P35 “...feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself... I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth...”

P36 “And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea... But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

“And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine... immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind if for my parents... and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square... the country roads we took when it was fine... all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village... and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being. Town and garden alike, from my cup of tea.”


I wonder if Temple Grandin has read this and if so what she thought of it. If she can remember everything she’s ever seen, does she respond to smell and taste in the same way when it comes to memory? Presumably she would remember the details of a house where she had spent time as a child, but would smell take her back in a more immediate way?

332. Dancing Fish and Ammonites

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Dancing Fish and Ammonites 

by Penelope Lively - Viking 2013

Old Age
I love Penelope’s voice. Her reading and writing interest mirror mine, but she has a gardening interest where I wish she had a fitness interest. That’s just so I can get a better idea of what’s ahead for me. Ehrenreich was better in this respect. And this book is five years old now, which is significant when you are in your eighties. I would love to have an update for her at 85.

That is one of the biggest changes that seems to start after your 60s, that the rate of change/decline ramps up. You expect the next five years to be more or less like the last five years, but at some point that stops being the case. I’m guessing that 75 will be the turning point age, but that’s based on observing people who aren’t me. 

P16 Yes to being happily sidelined by age. Also to constant change of our skin -- new incarnations of same self. In my view, Youth<30 Old >75

P24 The idea of story here. Beginning, middle and necessary end. Life does have that in common with story.

P27 Penelope really loves the word “solipsism”. I appreciate that.

P28 Great stuff here.


Life and Times
What a difference a couple decades make. I’m thinking of my experience of the ‘50s here. Her Egypt is my Louisville. Odd that she doesn’t mention music. For me my first decade has a very distinct soundtrack. The music and the cars being what I best recall about those years, excepting some smells and a first kiss. But it does seem like a different world, even though my then neighborhood hasn’t physically changed that much in the decades since. In many (not all) ways, I suspect a child growing up today in what was our house could have a reasonably similar experience. The greater world has changed dramatically, but my life was initially limited to our block and that hasn’t changed. She also doesn’t mention smell. Is that because it’s Proust’s territory, or is she just not sensitive in that way?

We differ when it comes to her late political awakening in college. I was obsessed with foreign affairs in high school, so a decade after her but a decade before based on age... but then I was male.

P111 “...The feminist movement was ever a middle-class movement, and there is a big divide today between the professional woman, who may well be earning the same as a man, and the vastly larger [lower class] female workforce that is cleaning offices, stacking shelves and sitting at checkouts and mostly does not...” The middle-class nature of feminism is an interesting observation. And yet it also goes against the middle-class desire to imitate the gentry in having mates that are not required to work. The movement could only have risen from the middle-class, but it goes against the interest of much of the middle-class... and of many women who are not middle-class. An interesting topic.

P128 Memory and time - I was just thinking of this Ages of Myself aspect of time the other day. My youth was conveniently divided into chapters by our moves and my going from school to school. Several years in Louisville. A semester in Denver. Several years in Boulder. Several years in Sherman Oaks. Several years in high school in Scottsdale. More years at university. The average period in a place was three years. And there were no connections to prior places. Once I left a place/school I never saw the people again, except after I left university.

I attribute my poor memory for names to this flushing of data every three years.

And then there’s the feeling for time’s duration. I give the Louisville, Colorado, SoCal, and Arizona periods greater weight than their twenty three years should warrant. Compared to my most recent twenty years, so much happened back then. And for better and worse, unlike Penelope, my parents were an integral part of those years. Penelope was largely on her own, in a very middle class English way, during her teens before forming her own family. 

P128 Time again. TMM is rather like old age when it comes to the increasing speed of time’s passing.

P154 I’ve done plenty of this life review. I love the spacetime character of my life growing up, where the mid-’60s are locked together with Southern California at that time. I also love how SF has become a collage of past experiences. All the intersections where I’ve waited day after day for the bus that would take me to my then job or home again. My long ago path to the supermarket past where I knew Tillie Olsen lived. All the event venues that I now know inside out in a way the general public does not. Patches of Golden Gate Park where I’ve spent many busy and exhausting days. All the buildings I’ve watched rise from holes in the urban fabric. And the memory of things, businesses or buildings, that no longer exist. (For example remembering that the car is parked in front of where Winterland was. Or happily realizing that the Jack Tarr Hotel is really gone.)

P155 And again we are examining the self. Sounds like she hasn’t run into Korsakoff Syndrome. I wonder if I have more of the incidental memories she mentions because I’ve spent so many hours on public transport? In families there are always the things one person recalls that the others don’t. The subjectivity of memory, of what we notice at the time and recall later.

I was thinking about Slaughterhouse Five the other day so now I’m thinking about the “coming unstuck in time” aspect of memory. Proust and Vonnegut. I don’t normally think of them as having a lot in common, but when it comes to time I guess they do. You can imagine a, perhaps drug enhanced, version of Proust’s going back in time to re-experience a past event as though you were really there. If Temple Grandin retains a detailed image of everything she’s ever seen, it’s not unreasonable to think that somewhere in our brains there is a record of everything we’ve ever sensed. That you could re-experience it again as though for the first time. Of course those possible experiences would include having the measles and that nasty swine flu. 

P156 Finally she talks about smell. Rosemary. Perhaps she wrote more about her youth in her previous book and didn’t want to repeat herself. I would think there would be something about food as well. It does sound like her Egypt experience was very British, but you’d think it would have been somewhat different from back in England during and after the war. 

For me there are good memories around my grandmother’s cooking and my aunt’s baking during my youth. Then there were the White Castle burgers (and buns) in Louisville, the Harvey’s burgers on Colfax in Denver. Banana splits in Boulder. Abalone in Morro Bay. Steak and eggs before football games and Hamburger Hamlet for special occasions in SoCal. A few years of wonderful BBQ ribs on wax paper at a joint in downtown Phoenix before I became a veggie. Discovering Sonoran Mexican, Indian, Thai, and finally Burmese cuisines. Bread pudding!

What she hasn’t written about here is the quickening of time as you age. And this would have been the place for that. Odd. Well, she did mention it but not in the sense I have in mind, of the near future being different than the recent past. 

Also, she mentioned “hospital time” but hasn’t really said if she thought that was worth the cost. I suppose, having passed out of a bad time you are always glad you did, but do you feel improved by the experience? Are there useful lessons learned? I would like to bounce the notion of “old enough to die” off her. I do like that she’s ended up a city person. Makes sense to me but that isn’t “normal” I think.

So I’m going to try her memories by decade exercise:

1950s: Summer rain on hot asphalt. Nat Cole on my first (painted, tube) radio. First kiss. 1957 Chevy Bel Air.
Early 1960s: Walking in a silent snow storm in Boulder. That folk song, “Today,” 1958 Chevy Impala.
Mid 1960s: Ozone smog. Song about umbrella and “Bus Stop” (by the Hollies! Much of the music from "Echos in the Canyon")  Lincoln Continental with suicide doors.
Late 1960s: Lying on stack of hay bales under a shed during a monsoon storm. Riding a horse through the forest on a night with a new moon. “Young Girl”. First make out session.  Pontiac Le Mons. BBQ ribs on waxed paper.
Early 1970s: Running around campus barefoot in the monsoon rain with Phyllis. Tracy Nelson's "Down So Low". Orange blossoms. Listening to the cab radio late at night when I could imagine where everyone was and what they were doing.
Late 1970s: September ozone.
1980s: Log fire smell camping at Yosemite. Love and sex. Snapple. Sounds from the Hearts of Space.
1990s: Hanging out on the slope with goat kids and friends. Proper heartbreak.”Fat City” among so many. “Living in Clip”.. Cancun burritos with super hot green salsa. Indian food in Mountain View.
2000s: “Pride and Joy”. Alison Krauss and Union Station Live. Smell of Gideon Pond corridors. Learning to drive on snow and ice. Burmese tea leaf salad. Climbing on the scaffolding around my building.
2010s: The satisfaction of more than surviving Hardly Strictly Bluegrass one more year the "no unsorted bag" years. Dragon Boat Races at Treasure Island. 

P162 Reading and Writing
Parents’ National Education Union - I rather like her education. Of course it does reek of the English gentry. Since I am myself so self-taught, I rather like this more formal approach to a reading education. The only problem is selecting the books to read. It is possible to read a book too soon. On the other hand some of the inappropriate books I read when I was around fourteen were perfect for me. There’s history, since she writes a good deal about history, that I’m shocked I have only learned in the past year, but that doesn’t mean it would have done me much good to have encountered it earlier. One of the trade-offs of reading so broadly at university is that it precluded going very deeply into any one subject. I value the breadth of my experience and have to accept that there were periods of history or areas of philosophy or novelists I missed entirely. And when I did finally study the history of Europe between the fall of Rome and the Modern period, I was thoroughly primed for what I learned. Still, finally putting the historical pieces together in your sixth decade seems more than a little retarded.

P165-66 Amen, sister. My favorite story about growing up an insatiable reader is that I secretly, and without leaving a trace, read all the sexy bits in the few books my parents owned, not realizing until decades later that they had never read the books so didn’t know that there were sexy bits. I could have read them at the diner table. And reading, at fourteen, all of the fourteen volume official history of the US Navy in WW2 was the first indication that I could plow through literally anything.

P196 
This is such a perfect book for our club. A whole chapter devoted to other books. And we overlap hardly at all. I don’t think I’ve read a single book she mentions by title except for Plutarch. The endless richness of the written word. And I’m shocked that she would have Penelope betray Ulysses for Achilles. What a tart! I got my first glasses a year before her... nearsighted pride.

Rather than pick books, I would rather list authors who have shaped my thought. Jane Jacobs, Barbara Tuchman, Sallie Tisdale, Ackerman, Annie Dillard, Gibbon, Pirenne, Barudel, Livy, Polybius, Plutarch, Xenophon, Horace, Morison, Clausewitz, Nietzsche, Persig, Vonnegut, Kingsolver, Chatwin, Austen, Anne Tyler, James Agee, Jane Austen, Sacks, Bill Bryson, Vikram Seth, Pynchon, Proust, Mann, Goethe, Dostoevsky. Also Martha Grimes, Anne McCaffery, Norman Spinrad, Dan Simmons, Armistead Maupin, and Calvin Trillin.

P219 The Jerusalem Bible - I’m with Lively on most of this, except for liking to attend services -- which give me the heebie jeebies. But what she says about reading the bible is certainly true. I don’t think my bible is King James, but I’m not sure how it differs. I also really like the very thin paper mine is printed on. One thing I like about Protestantism is that it encourages a reverence for books. I just wish it were some other book.

P234 One of the saddest things I’ve ever read was a woman regretting that when she died the stories of all her possessions would die with her. Now that isn’t true for the artifacts Lively chose to write about. But it does interest me how none of these objects are “family” objects with a family history. The cat does have a bit of a family story, but it’s not something passed down generation to generation or something that really tells a family story. Possibly Lively edited this to avoid the objects of purely family interest. 

So of course I’m wondering what my artifacts would be. I have a bunch of things, either mine or from family, that I can’t bring myself to dispose of but that mean very little to me. I’m fond of my marbles, left over from elementary school (I sometimes think about my baseball cards and wonder what happened to them.) There are some interesting artifacts from around the turn of the 20th century that came from my great grandfather. There are, even more important to me, photographs taken by me in the early ‘70s for the most part. There are even a few (45s) survivors from my record collection when I was young. I also still own, but don’t have at home, some of my first computers, including the Timex/Sinclair that started it all. But these last are among the things I wish I could find a good home for.

260. The River of Consciousness

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The River of Consciousness

by Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, published 2017

My book club -- we might as well re-brand ourselves The Oliver Sacks Book Club -- is reading Sacks's final book, a collection of essays he completed as he knew he was dying.

I'm only a few pages into the second essay, "Speed," and he has already referenced H.G. Wells, Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and William James.

The reference to William James, yet again, made me think how differently I would have structured my education if I had it to do over again... he did just talk about The Time Machine. He also has described, which is just as important, what a curious (in both senses of the word) child he was. "Me too!" as we are all saying these days.

If I was reading the Communist Manifesto and Samuel Eliot Morison's fourteen volume history of the U.S. Navy in World War Two, at fourteen, there's no reason I couldn't have been reading Classical philosophy and history. I would have loved Livy. 

St Augustus would have been hard going, but that's still true today. The same for Scholastic philosophy, but if I dipped into it while reading Pirenne, I might have been able to get something -- I'm imagining I would be college age by this point. And so on, century by century, building on my foundation until I finally reached the intellectual explosions of the 19th and then the 20th centuries some time in my late twenties.

At that point I would be be in a state similar to that of a person who has just completed reading In Search of Lost Time for the first time. I would have a solid foundation for moving forward -- or going back and starting over at points of interest along the way. (Or expanding to other cultures.)

Even so, I'm not sure that The Brothers K, for example, would have been as significant for me at that age and before I had read much from the 20th century. That, like Proust, might be something I would need to reread at a later date. Still, working from the ground up like this, would have paid off in the end. But could any young person have the patience for putting off the thought of his own time for so long?

p32 Here he is quoting H.G. Wells, ...now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one 1000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently live 1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations... the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls...

This is close to the perception of the encephalitis patients in Awakenings.

p35 Here Sacks is talking about the experience of time of people in traumatic accidents, and how things seem to take place in slow motion. Since this is an area of experience and interest for me, I have to add that our "perception" of the event is as contrived -- mostly after the fact -- as our perception of what we see is contrived. This is all the more true as in most of these cases the perceiver is unconscious at times. The details and the sequence of my truck accident are probably correct, but I also know I was unconscious at two points in the sequence. My mind had plenty of time to organize the inputs into a sort of PowerPoint presentation which is what I remember.

The Other Road: Freud as Neurologist

p96 At a higher level, Freud regarded memory and motive as inseparable. Recollection could have no force, no meaning, unless it was allied with motive. The two had always to be coupled together, and in... [Freud's] Project [for a Scientific Psychology], as Pribram and Gill emphasize, "both memory and motive are psi processes based on selective facilitation . . . memories {being} the retrospective aspect of these facilitations; motives the prospective aspects." [Footnote: The inseparability of memory and motive, Freud pointed out, opened the possibility of understanding certain illusions of memory based on intentionality: the illusion that one has written to a person, for instance, when one has not but intended to, or that one has run the bath when one has merely intended to do so. We do not have such illusions unless there has been a preceding intention.]

This is very interesting to me just now as I'm having to deal with a person -- let's call her "CP" -- who seems to have become un-tethered from reality. She either is repeatedly lying about things that have happened, or she honestly believes the things she says. It is impossible to know which is the case, but I tend to think it is the latter.

Peeking ahead in this book, I've noticed that the next essay is on the "fallibility of memory," a topic I'm looking forward to, as, from what I've read of memory, it is quite pliable and subject to revision. If you remember the last time you remembered something, rather than the original event itself, then if you combine thinking (or dreaming) alternative scenarios with an intention (motive) for preferring that alternate scenario, you could end up honestly believing what you want to believe. The film  Memento played with a variation on this idea.]

...Nothing was more central to the formation of identity than the power of memory, nothing more guaranteed one's continuity as an individual. But memories shift, and no one was more sensitive than Freud to the reconstructive potential of memory, to the fact that memories are continually worked over and revised and that their essence, indeed, is recategorization.

If a person were to, innocently enough (though due to dominant character traits), screw up in a fairly life changing way, it would be almost irresistible to re-imagine the situation is a way that was kinder to that person's self-esteem. But here's the interesting question: Would this tactic become a tendency? Having saved the person's self-image once, would they be more likely to re-imagine any future difficult situation and to invent supporting events to go along with the re-imagined ones? Could the person slip into an almost dream-like state where it was actually impossible to distinguish dream from reality; memory for wish?

p99 ...Thus for [Gerald] Edelman, [who is continuing to work on this aspect of neurology] every perception is a creation and every memory a re-creation or recategorization.

The Fallibility of Memory

As I expected, this is a continuation of the previous essay. I'll jump to where he returns to my point. Here he's talking about plagiarism and cryptomnesias and what in Coleridge's case turned into "literary kleptomania,"

p113 ...as Holmes [his biographer] explores in the second volume of this biography, where he sees the most flagrant of Coleridge's plagiarisms as occurring at a devastatingly difficult period of his life, when he had been abandoned by Wordsworth, was disabled by profound anxiety and intellectual self-doubt, and was more deeply addicted to opium than ever. At this time, Holmes writes, "his German authors gave him support and comfort: in a metaphor he often used himself, he twined round them like ivy round an oak."

p114 Earlier... Coleridge had found another extraordinary affinity, with the German writer Jean Paul Richter -- an affinity which led him to translate Richter's writings and then to take off from them, elaborating them in his own way, conversing and communing in his notebooks with Richter. At times, the voices of the two men became so intermingled as to be hardly distinguishable from each other.
...

p115 Freud was fascinated by the slippages and errors of memory that occur in the course of daily life and their relation to emotion, especially unconscious emotion... [this leads to] accounts of having been sexually seduced or abused in childhood... he started to wonder whether such recollections have been distorted by fantasy and whether some... might be total fabulations, constructed unconsciously, but so convincingly that the patients themselves believed in them absolutely. The stories that patients told, and had told to themselves... could have a very powerful effect on their lives, and it seemed to Freud that their psychological reality might be the same whether they came from actual experience or from fantasy.

p116 [The case of Binjamin Wilkomirski who wrote a memoir, Fragments, about his childhood as a Jew in a concentration camp... only he was not a Jew and had not been in a concentration camp,] ...it seemed... that Wilkomirski had not intended to deceive his readers... He had, for many years, been engaged in an enterprise of his own -- basically the romantic reinvention of his own childhood, apparently in reaction to his abandonment by his mother at the age of seven.

p117 Apparently, Wilkomirski's primary intention was to deceive himself. When he was confronted with the actual historical reality, his reaction was one of bewilderment and confusion. He was totally lost, by this point, in his own fiction.
...

p120 There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true... depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way... and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves -- the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory...

I'm a little surprised he doesn't go into how the memory process is now believed to happen in the brain. How an older memory is physically replaced by the new one. Still, this was most of what I was hoping for.

Mishearings

p125 ... While mishearings may seem to be of little special interest, they can cast an unexpected light on the nature of perception -- the perception of speech, in particular. What is extraordinary, first, is that they present themselves as clearly articulated words or phrases, not as jumbles of sound. One mishears rather than just fails to hear.

That hasn't been my experience. My hearing of voices is not getting any better, but I'm not aware of experiencing what Sacks is talking about here. What I do experience is not being able to make out something a person is saying at the volume they are speaking. (Sounds in general show no indication of being muted or a problem.) What I find most annoying is that I experience this same difficulty in dreams. 

151. CBF and Sisters

Previous - 150. Original sin

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Vertigo

"Il ritorno in patria"

p193-194 The elaboration here of the furniture and necessary accouterments of the German petite bourgeois makes me wonder how these habits started. Why did the narrator's parents have a bone china tea service they never used? Why do I have my family's silver and silver plate and china that is very rarely used -- like the suburban living rooms that we all had and that I only recall my family using on the day after my father died. (And I imagine we sat there then because it lacked associations with my father.) 

I do know, or at least I have a working theory, why we have the silver spoons and cups given to bourgeois infants -- silver has natural antibacterial characteristics and should have been safer than other materials for children with developing immune systems. (I may even be right, see here.) What I don't know -- because I never thought to ask -- is if these items were actually used. Some of the little cups are pretty battered, which would argue for use, but perhaps they were only played with and not used for eating and drinking. Does anyone still do this? I can't imagine it. 

This is the part of the book where the narrator's -- Sebald's -- memory is most on display. His memory of his childhood in W., and of all the details of W., is quite wonderful, though I can't say it leaves Proust or even James Thurber behind. 

Here's an interesting passage where the narrator finally calls on someone, from his youth, still living in the village,

p210 ...He had seen me coming out of the Engelwirt [inn where he is staying] several times, he told me straight away, but although I had somehow seemed familiar, he had not quite been able to place me, perhaps because I reminded him not so much of the child I once was as of my grandfather who had the same gait and, whenever he stepped out of the house, would pause for a moment to peer up into the sky to see what the weather was doing, just as I always did. I felt my visit pleased Lukas, for after working as a tin-roofer until his fiftieth year he had been forced into retirement by the arthritis that was gradually crippling him... He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside... He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, [about his past in W.] but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.... [Reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist wouldn't have made Sebald feel any better.]

Cherry Blossom Festival

My weekend didn't turn out the way I had expected. I was supposed to work another day around the food court (a block of Webster Street) at CBF and then switch to Sisters in the Park (Golden Gate) on Sunday. I did start the day in Hellman Hollow, but it was raining -- not hard but steadily -- and almost no one showed up. Instead of 10,000 people we had a hundred or so and most of them seemed to be Sisters (of Perpetual Indulgence). 

I really hate just standing around, and standing around in the rain is even worse. One of my favorites was crew chiefing this event, so I suggested she check with the crew chief at CBF to see how they were doing. It seems two people didn't show up for their shifts so I was sent back to Japantown (by car service, more on this in a moment.)

So I got the mid-day shift I prefer and I still got to close out CBF, which I like to do every year. We were a little wet, it's true, but it wasn't that bad and there were no bags left to sort when I left. That's success in this business. But back to Golden Gate Park for a moment. 

I hadn't been to Hellman Hollow (formerly Speedway Meadow) since Hardly Strictly Bluegrass last October. The park is stunning at any time, but by the end of summer it looks like California -- brown except where people water. At least that's true at ground level, the trees stay green. Jump ahead almost half a year now near the end of a very wet rainy season and the park, like California in general, is lush. Green is the color of this season just as brown is the color of the dry season.

The last time I stood in that meadow (in the daylight) it was filled with a hundred thousand people and there was dust and dry undergrowth under the trees. And it was hot. On Sunday it was green and wet and cool and most of the crowd were Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in full drag. (Not real Sisters, I'm bound to say, since they, the originals in normal nun's habits, usually roller skates, mostly died in the AIDS epidemic.)

I hope we work another event here before October, but if not I tried to capture the place as it is in April so I can call that image up in October when it's in the 90sF and I'm ready to kill the vendors and concert goers. I'm almost a Buddha.

When I was reassigned to CBF, my first thought was to take the bus over, which is how I had come to Golden Gate Park, but the crew chief suggested the car service and, being aware of how what should take 30 minutes can turn into far longer with Muni, especially on a Sunday, I agreed. It was some ride sharing service that pools riders. I was the first pickup, but he picked up two more people and dropped off one before dropping me off. It wasn't a big time saver, (over 30 minutes) but then again I was sitting inside a nice car instead of waiting (in the rain) for buses and then riding in those buses. (And the 38 line is one of the most crowded in the system.) 

But what interested me was that, years ago, I had imagined a better taxi/shuttle service just like this. It was like seeing an idea realized without having to do any of the work.

The funny thing was that the third person to be picked up was in the other side of the park where my company was working a third event -- Eggstravaganza. This is an Easter event for kids I worked several years ago. It's charming but slow. I prefer the busyness of CBF.

Finally, I kept thinking on Sunday about how I now have an event overlay for so many parts of the City. This is similar to, but not quite the same as, my City-that-was overlay. The latter comes into play when you walk out of a restaurant wondering where the car is parked and someone recalls that we parked in front of Winterland -- a famous music venue that was redeveloped decades ago. What I'm talking about is when we are in the park not for HSB yet refer to locations by what stage is there for HSB. Or when I walk through Japantown on the way to a film and see the eco stations I maintained or the mountain of bags I collected for the last, totally insane, J-Pop Festival held there. Even at Union Square in my neighborhood, every time I walk past I think of all the trash toters I've wheeled around these sidewalks and I can see, as though I had X-ray vision, where the dumpsters are down in the garage and where the restroom is that the public doesn't have access to.

QCD

I've been struggling with gluons this afternoon... I know, who isn't these days? A massless "particle" (what does that even mean) that is confined to a hadron but supposedly travels at c. Previously I had ignored this abomination when puzzling over hadrons thinking it was just a way of talking about the strong force that holds quarks together, but it seems these little nasties participate in the chromatic craziness. 

I wasn't surprised when I jumped to Wiki and noticed that Murray Gell-Mann is the man responsible for gluons. (I can't help smiling every time I run into another Feynman diagram used to illustrate QCD.) 

I so wish Feynman had tackled QCD. I'm sure he could have come up with something better than this chroma metaphor. 

Next - 152. 420

137. Proust!

Previous - 136. The wine-in-itself

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Memory

Marcel Proust - The Method of Memory

p76 ... Proust knew that every time he lost himself in a recollection he also lost track of time, the tick-tock of the clock drowned out by the echoey murmurs of his mind. It was there, in his own memory, that he would live forever. His past would become a masterpiece.

... Proust used his intuition, his slavish devotion to himself and his art, to refine his faith in memory into an entire treatise. In the stuffy silence of his Parisian studio, he listened so intently to his sentimental brain that he discovered how it operated.
...

... As scientists dissect our remembrances into a list of molecules and brain regions, they fail to realize that they are channeling a reclusive French novelist. Proust may not have lived forever, but his theory of memory endures.

Intuitions
p77 ... He believed that while art and science both dealt in facts... only the artist was able to describe reality as it was actually experienced...

p78 Proust learned to believe in the strange power of art from the philosopher Henri Bergson. [Footnote: Proust... read Bergson's Matter and Memory in 1909, just as he was beginning to compose Swann's Way...] ... The laws of science were fine for inert matter, Bergson said, for discerning the relationships between atoms and cells, but us? We had a consciousness, a memory, a being. According to Bergson, this reality -- the reality of our self-consciousness -- could not be reduced or experimentally dissected. He believed that we could only understand ourselves through intuition, a process that required lots of introspection, lazy days contemplating our inner connections. Basically, it was bourgeois meditation. [Or "taking stock," regieren, from The Magic Mountain. And doesn't this recall Lin Yutang?]

...Proust's thorough absorption of Bergson's philosophy led him to conclude that the nineteenth-century novel, with its privileging of things over thoughts, had everything exactly backwards. "The kind of literature which contents itself with 'describing things,' " Proust wrote, "with giving them merely a miserable abstract of lines an surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality." As Bergson insisted, reality is best understood subjectively, its truths accessed intuitively.

p79 [Compare this passage with Moncrieff. Dodged a bullet there, Moncrieff's translation is at least as good.] 
...

... He actually intuited a lot about the structure of our brain. In 1911, the year of the madeleine, physiologists had no idea how the senses connected inside the skull. One of Proust's deep insights was that our senses of smell and taste bear a unique burden of memory:

p80 When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

...smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory. Their mark is indelible. All our other senses... are first processed by the thalamus, the source of language and the front door to consciousness. As a result, these senses are much less efficient at summoning up our past. [I wonder about this in the case of music (hearing) but only a little, smell really is more profound. It is interesting that hearing, sight, and touch are mediated by language. I suppose this is why it is so hard to describe smells.] ...

p81 Of course, once Proust began to remember his past, he lost all interest in the taste of the madeleine. Instead, he became obsessed with how he felt about the cookie, with what the cookie meant to him... 

In this Proustian vision, the cookie is worthy of philosophy because in the mind, everything is connected... Only by meticulously retracing the loom of our neural connections -- however nonsensical those connections may be -- can we understand ourselves, for we are the loom...

The Lie of Yesterday
..."It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture memory: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile . . ." ...

p82 ... he believed that our recollections were phony. Although they felt real, they were actually elaborate fabrications. Take the madeleine. Proust realized that the moment we finish eating the cookie... we begin warping the memory of the cookie to fit our own personal narrative. We bend the facts to suit our story, as "our intelligence reworks the experience." Proust warns us to treat the reality of our memories carefully, and with a degree of skepticism...

The strange twist in the story is that science is discovering the molecular truth behind these Proustian theories. Memory is fallible. Our remembrance of things past is imperfect.

...Our recollections are cynical things, designed by the brain to always feel true, regardless of whether or not they actually occurred. 

[Santiago Ramon y Cajal determines that neurons are islands separated from each other by synaptic clefs. Making memories requires new proteins. "The moment in time is incorporated into the architecture of the brain." Other scientists show that memories can be altered, "...we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren't. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes." "...every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, a process called reconsolidation... The memory is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what you remember and more about you... The moment you remember the cookie's taste is the same moment you forget what it really tasted like."]

p85 Proust presciently anticipated the discovery of memory reconsolidation. For him, memories were like sentences: they were things you never stopped changing. As a result, Proust was not only an avid sentimentalist, he was also an insufferable rewriter... [Not unlike Walt Whitman.] Nothing he wrote was ever permanent...

p87 Clearly, Proust believed in the writing process. He never outlined his stories first. He thought that the novel, like the memories it unfaithfully described, must unfurl naturally... [The first draft may "unfurl naturally" but if you are constantly rewriting and editing aren't you imposing an order after that first draft? The musical structure of the work isn't really consistent with an automatic writing model. Now Martha Grimes novels do unfurl naturally, which I enjoy, but that's probably not the best way to create a symphonic epic like In Search of Lost Time.]

p87 For a novel about memory, the plasticity of the novel's narrative was one of its most realistic elements. Proust was always refining his fictional sentences in light of new knowledge, altering his past words to reflect his present circumstances. On the last night of his life, as he lay prostrate in bed, weakened by his diet of ice cream, beer, and barbituates, he summoned Celeste, his beloved maid, to take a little dictation. He wanted to change a section... that described the slow death of a character, since he now knew a little bit more about what dying was like.

...As long as we have memories to recall, the margins of those memories are being modified to fit what we know now. Synapses are crossed out, dendrites are tweaked, and the memorized moment that feels so honest is thoroughly revised...
...

p88 One of the morals of the Search is that every memory is inseparable from the moment of its recollection. This is why Proust devoted fifty-eight tedious pages to the mental state of the narrator before he ate a single madeleine. He wanted to show how his current condition distorted his sense of the past... Proustian nostalgia... remembers things as being far better than they actually were. But Proust... knew that the Combray he yearned for was not the Combray that was. (As Proust put it,"The only paradise is paradise lost.") ... there is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction...
...

p89 ... memories do not directly represent reality. Instead, they are imperfect copies of what actually happened, a Xerox of a Xerox of a mimeograph of the original photograph. Proust intuitively knew that our memories required this transformative process. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. Combray is lost. This is Proust's guilty secret: we have to misremember something in order to remember it.

A thought here about the author's comment above that when we remember we lose track of time. I read something recently that claimed humans can't actually multitask. We can really only to one thing at a time, and if we try to do several things at once we are just switching back and forth and each switch requires a degree of re-orientation. The same is true of experiencing time. We can experience our present time or recall our past, but if we recall the past it is overlapping with the present. All your current sensory inputs (including some you may not be consciously aware of) are getting blended in with your memory. You can think of it like a multi-track recording where there's always an open mike in the studio. Playing something back also means recording the ambient sounds of the studio as a new track on the recording. And the memory of the time you were remembering is now a part of that previous memory.

I also need to add a few Wiki quotes about Bergson:

Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859. His father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish background (originally bearing the name Berekson). His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, especially those associated with the Hasidic movement.^[8][9] His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family^[10] of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski,^[11][12] King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
...

Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes (known as the Lycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education.^[14] Between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares common ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes construed as not needing a creative deity.^[15]
...

Bergson traveled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the  Harvard  philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of 4 October 1908:

"So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy."

...

The Roman Catholic Church however took the step of banning Bergson's three books, accused of pantheism (that is, of conceiving of God as immanent to his Creation and of being himself created in the process of the Creation)^[16] by placing them upon the Index of prohibited books (Decree of 1 June 1914).
...

The Creative Evolution in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transpose Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in philosophy and to construct a cosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "survival of the fittest"). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.^[35]
...

The foundation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy.^[36] Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time and  consciousness in his doctoral thesis Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness as a response to another of his influences: Immanuel Kant.^[37]

Kant believed that free will (better perceived as The Will) could only exist outside of time and space, indeed the only non-determined aspect of our private existence in the universe, separate to water cycles, mathematics and mortality. However, we could therefore not know whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith.^[37] Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation.^[38] In reality, Bergson argued, Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other. Based on this he concluded that determinism is an impossibility and free will pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified as being the Duration.^[39]

Random much?

Was in the middle of my gym routine when it occurred to me that I wasn't sure if I had left the lock securing the painter's stuff in our new little "room" locked or unlocked. I intended to leave it unlocked but in place, but had I? After going back and forth a few times and thinking what a disaster it would be if the painter couldn't get to work on what is supposed to be his last day on site, I decided to go check. This involves walking a total of 12 blocks and climbing the equivalent of a 15 story building... so not a trivial decision.

When I arrived in the laundry room I found the painter stumped by the unlocked lock. I removed it. We talked a little about what was left to do. And I returned to the gym. If I had been sure the lock was unlocked, I wouldn't have returned. Would he have eventually realized he could just turn the lock and remove it, or did I really need to be there? Who knows.

Next - 138. Good prions