One Forgets

During my time of rarely violated absenteeism from blogging, I’d quite forgotten how much labor goes into this activity. Now memory is itself a vast subject. One of its mysteries is that we often forget something; that “something” can be quite trivial or complex; the truth is that we often simply don’t remember... Then, some short period after, our better half (usually), says something like “I’ve got it!” and she (or he) then produces a name or an account. Our mind then immediately knows that it also know—and can meaningful make additions to the partner’s first mention. In other words, we know that we remember before we actually know. So it was with the matter of forgetting the effort that blogging constitutes. The memories were instantly back when I settled before this machine to do today’s little chore. But no chore in blogging is ever “little.”

One thought I had some time after writing the last posting was that the decay of a civilization is marked by many events indicative of decay which seem to be far and few but definitely cumulating in “slow motion”; but so do many events that ultimately signal something positive—the slow appearance of a new order of thought and feeling which in their turn set the stage for the birth of another culture somewhen in the far future, i.e., also in slow motion. “I’ll write about that tomorrow,” I said to myself while reaching for the lights-out switch.

When we are no longer accustomed to put our thoughts on paper (figuratively, these days), we forget that notions that seem self-evident to us are not so obvious at all. They need illustration and presentation backed by lucid argument. And half the time the intuition is correct but to flesh it out is labor.

Therefore, a mere note today to hint at future content. Let me simply say that the nineteenth century already showed, in many developments that surfaced then (e.g., in psychology and in religion to name two subjects) that the Age of Reason began, having reached its peak in the eighteenth, to build a new way of thought even as rationalism was just beginning to decay into what we now label materialism (to pick a single word). More anon.

Fading Names and Sluggish Memories

We were discussing, Brigitte and I, how dreams communicate ideas using symbols—indeed that even when we are in a full state of wakefulness, beneath the surface, dream images may well be present. I offered as an example once reading a book about the collapse of the Soviet Union just before bedtime but sitting up in an armchair in my bedroom. It was getting late. I closed my eyes for just a moment—and there I saw this gigantic image of a huge bear.

So next I tried to remember whose book I had been reading, and I said “Khrushchev.” But it couldn’t have been Khrushchev. He came later—and he certainly didn’t write a book translated into English to reach a world audience. So I said: “You know, the man with that mark on his forehead.” We both knew who we were talking about, but his name just would. not. surface.

Eventually Brigitte retrieved the famous name by recalling a saying by President Reagan: “Tear down this wall…Mr. Gorbachev.” What President Reagan actually said was “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—but B’s memory conveniently inverted that order.

Visible on the bed this morning was a prominent picture of another famous foreign politician on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. “You know,” I said, “I can hardly wait for the day when, in some context about Israel, we’ll sit here and try to remember the name of Netanyahu.”

Yes. God speed that day. But will we live long enough? That is the question.

Silas Deane and the Corrective Lens

During a recent exchange, Brigitte noted that our memories of the past filter out most of the ugly and the bad. Not always, to be sure, but on average. Such a conversation causes one to look back to check—and yes! So true. I was reminded of this again this morning. A mutual friend of ours purchased a plate produced by the D’Arceau-Limoges, a big name in fancy porcelain. It commemorates Lafayette signing a contract to serve in the American forces in  December of 1776. Present as a witness is Silas Deane, an American diplomat of the newly forged Republic—and Baron Kalb, another French officer and the first recruited by Deane. Our friend asked us to translate the French text on the plate into English—in course of which I became aware of the solemnity of this occasion, as rendered by collective memory, and of Silas Deane himself.

Collective memory recalls the gallant Lafayette—and several other French officers—gallantly serving to help the new Republic achieve its independence from Britain—and Silas Deane as the agent who did his high-level recruiting in France. And, as they say, the rest is history.

But real life as it happens is always much more problematic. Deane was effective, but in part because he promised each officer he recruited very high rank. The French recruits, once here, did not get along either with each other or with the Americans. Here a quote from Baron de Kalb (source):

On the whole, I have annoyances to bear, of which you can hardly form a conception. One of them is the mutual jealousy of almost all the French officers, particularly against those of higher rank than the rest. These people think of nothing but their incessant intrigues and backbitings. They hate each other like the bitterest enemies, and endeavor to injure each other wherever an opportunity offers. I have given up their society, and very seldom see them. La Fayette is the sole exception; I always meet him with the same cordiality and the same pleasure. He is an excellent young man, and we are good friends.... La Fayette is much liked, he is on the best of terms with Washington.

Deane was a wretched record-keeper and careless in money matters. After his recall from France, he was tried for misdemeanors, eventually turned against the new nation that he had served, and went to live in England and in the Netherlands.

The correcting lens of memory, itself once more corrected, brings us what we always experience in the here and now: a pretty kettle of fish. But memory reminds us how we should treat the never-ending failures of our nature: with benign neglect.

Physical, Mental

It’s curious but oh so true that genuine learning is enormously helped by a physical component, a physical doing. Reminded of this by a post on Laudator (link) that comments on the Latin proverb, Qui scribit, bis legit, Who writes, reads twice. I learned this long ago if in a larger context—namely the difference between doing your own research versus relying on a Research Assistant. Here a post on that a while back. Why is this true?

Is it that, for instance, copying out a quote by hand or keying means that you read it twice? Why does a graph you make yourself, laboriously in Excel, become more real than one you glance at in a paper? My own guess is that the brain stores more than merely memories. It stores a kind of invisible weight or stamp with every memory. The heavier the weight, the darker the stamp, the more accessible that memory later becomes. The brain developed as an organ for dealing with the physical world, hence physical involvement tells the brain: This is serious; he really cares. More ink on that inkpad, add some lead.

Another explanation is that the brain labels the mere reading of a page, the glance of an eye lite. It takes very little time. Hence it gets routine storage at best. Multiple readings, effort at grasping the meaning, much underlining, better yet, comments in the margin—the brain is alerted. And of course, the more time is spent, the more important.

When it comes to the genuinely experiential—say cooking or gardening—reading about it, even copying out a recipe, is as it were nothing, nothing at all, compared to actually doing the thing. Boy does that recipe expand, in my case into a veritable primordial jungle of experience, when I try to do what, for Brigitte, is effortless as she half listens to the pundits shouting at each other on the television all the while.

Shock and Awe in 1940s Style

The following extract is taken from a strange and wondrous essay titled Air War and Literature (Luftkrieg und Literatur) by W.G. Sebald, published in 2003 by Carl Hanser Verlag. Its thematic is that the air war in Europe was an unspeakable horror such that a collective forgetting has wiped it from memory—and that the literary community has utterly failed to record it. Well not quite. As I learned this morning, the essay is available in English as part of On the Natural History of Destruction, by Sebald, but the following extract is my own translation from the German. The book I own was a gift to me of son-in-law and Michelle’s husband, Thierry Paret.

In midsummer of 1943, during a heat spell of long duration, the Royal Air Force, supported by the 8th American Air Fleet, flew a series of attacks on Hamburg. The object of the mission, called “Operation Gomorrah,” was the most complete possible destruction and burn-out of the city. During the attack during the night of July 28, which began at 1 o’clock in the morning, ten thousand tons of explosive and fire-bombs were unloaded over the densely populated residential area east of the Elbe, a region that included the districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm-North and South, Eilbek, Barmbek and Wandsbek. Following an already proven method, four-thousand-pound explosive bombs were deployed by means of which all windows and doors were broken and ripped from their frames; then lighter igniters fell and set the roofs ablaze even as fire-bombs, with a weight up to 15 kilos, broke through into the lower storeys. Within a few minutes gigantic fires burned everywhere over the roughly twenty square kilometer attack terrain; the fires joined their edges so rapidly that a quarter-hour after the descent of the first bombs the entire airspace, as far as one could see, became a single ocean of fire. And after another five minutes, around 1:20, a firestorm of such intensity arose that no human, until that time, could have imagined it possible. The fire, exploding now two thousand meters into the sky, devoured oxygen with such violence that the air currents reached hurricane strength and roared like mighty organs on which all registered had been pulled. It burned like that for three hours. At its peak the storm lifted up gables and roofs and whirled beams and plaster walls through the air, twisted trees out of the ground and drove people before it like living torches. Behind crumbling facades flames shot house-high into the air, rolled like a flood wave with a speed of more than 150 kilometers an hour through the streets, whirled like fireballs in odd rhythms over open squares. In some canals the water burned. Glass panes melted in streetcar wagons; sugar stores cooked in the cellars of bakeries. Those fleeing from their underground shelters sank in grotesque twisting forms into the liquefied asphalt that formed thick blisters. Nobody really knows how many lost their lives that night or how many went mad before death overcame them.

The horrors of modern war, mirrored on the other side by the 57 nights of German bombing of London, called The Blitz, by the twin nuclear descents of atomic bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, echoed by words like Dresden, and marked more modestly on childish memories—mine were those of a child who lived through such things but managed to escape unharmed, Brigitte’s those of a young girl who had to help clear rubble—should be, if at all possible, kept vividly in mind as we contemplate yet more mayhem, endlessly, and the decades keep rolling on.

W.G. Sebald, I think, has a very legitimate point to make. It is that our memory is rather selective. We remember the Holocaust and keep its memory alive, forgetting that it was a part of a much greater display of collective inhumanity in that weirdest of all times that Brigitte and I have lived through. We remember what flatters and not that which instructs. And, indeed, reading such posts as this one does not exactly make one’s day.