Dum Paterfamilias
Now is hell.
I mentioned this discovery in a previous post, but it's as well to recapitulate: I woke up once, maybe thirty-five years ago, in pitch darkness, and after a few seconds of vague panic, realized that I had forgotten everything, including who and where and when and why I was. Imagine a computer booting up and then, on attempting the routine peripherals checks, finding the hard disk not working. That feeling. My memory was completely inaccessible, if not erased. I may have groaned, or cried out. I scrambled to my feet, stumbled a few paces, felt around blindly. Eventually, after perhaps thirty seconds, I found a light switch. When the light was on, I was even more terrified to see a room I did not recognize. I sat down on the sofa where I had been sleeping, and tried to remember. After about a minute the hard disk started whirring, belatedly. I identified the room as my mother's living room, and the sofa as the one I was meant to sleep on. Half a minute more and I was fairly confident I knew my own name, although the frantic effort of digging it up had exhausted me. After that, it was a matter of seconds before I realized I was a student on holiday, staying at his mother's house, with a whole history to draw on. There was also a jumble of desires and preoccupations which, though they at first seemed rather bizarre, apparently belonged to me (whose else could they have been) and demanded my acknowledgement. Once I had accepted them as mine, I felt human again.
Then, I could relax.
This is how I know that, while total sensory deprivation might be bearable as long as you have your memory, the reverse is not the case. Acute pain aside, there is little worse than not remembering anything, even if you have all your senses. We are designed to remember, and to background-check constantly that we can. It's also interesting to note how easily satisfied the verification routine is, how paltry its demands are. Apparently, as long as I know my name, can say where I am and how I got here, and can run through a list of five things I want, that's good enough to restore the adrenaline to normal.
A few months ago, my father-in-law had a stroke (or something of the sort: this being Ecuador, medical details are necessarily speculative). An 85-year-old, one-eyed man who had spent his life planting and harvesting rice, he spent the subsequent weeks lying on a bed more or less where I am sitting now, or being driven into town for acupuncture three times a week. Initially, he could not remember his name or recognize anyone. He spent his days clutching a leather bible like a talisman, listening to Christian songs on his portable radio or watching me across the room like a hawk while I hammered at my keyboard through the late evening. Living between brick walls was clearly exotic to him. I could tell he was trying to work out whether he was in Heaven, Hell or Milton Keynes.
Now he is somewhat recovered, and back in his own rickety shack between the paddy fields, I imagine him scanning the horizon periodically for the black vulture (Coragyps atratus) whose presence is necessary to reassure him that heaven and earth are still twisted together at the edges, and that the endless spaces still sing the same five notes.
He and I can remember and know very little and still be ourselves, but there has to be that one thing, that buzzard, that sundog, that broken drainpipe, that 1964 Supremes hit, that connection with a past that belongs to us. Supposedly.
In Orwell's 1984, the past is mostly made up, in the form of rewritten The Times archives, and what is not made up (Oranges and Lemons) has been repurposed and is placed strategically and maliciously in the citizen's path to stumble on. The clue is that it does not make sense where it is. The hero, however, the last man in Europe, does have a past that is his own and makes sense: the only catch being that he made it up himself out of scraps, removed himself from it and called it the Golden Country.
There never was a Golden Age that did not, on examination, turn out to venerate its own Golden Age, even more fictional than itself. There never was a future invoked in political slogans that did not, once arrived, teem with graceless grannies invoking a finer future. It doesn't matter. Having a Golden Age to look back to is an inevitability of the psyche, one of the compass points that come with every mental map and every culture: only pretending to point elsewhere, actually allowing you to navigate the here and now. Even your Whigs and Progressives, claiming to find only the scrubbed and stainless future palatable, secretly thrill to the dark secrets of the past, awakening in a pool of sweat to find its clammy fingers prising their thighs apart.
It doesn't even matter if our memories are implanted, like Deckard's unicorn in Blade Runner: it is made up, but so too are all the other animals, the owls and snakes and ostriches. The point is to want something that the most teleologically controlled illusion of a life cannot satisfy: which is why the memory's start-up sequence involves checking the desires off, and against each other, and against the room, confirming that each can lead, and that all in concert are hopeless, like an orchestra whose scores have been randomly transposed. The impossibility of arrival, the endless bouncing off the walls of reality in new directions, the rebirth and renewal of longing, is what allows us free will: we may never arrive at randomness, but are constantly drawn along its asymptote, rearranging and redrawing our memories as we go, repositioning them on the horizon.
The Skinnerian behaviorists, the Cultural Determinists with their Etch-a-Sketch model of the brain (turn upside down and shake to dismantle patriarchy) are ants tidying a nest over which a distracted gardener stands with gumboots and steaming kettle.
It only takes one unlicensed and uncensored memory, and this irrepressible longing, and you are out of their control. You don't need a future, and you don't need a sanitized and mendacious didactic history book.
If you can remember, the past is doing its job, and is not past.
Now is heaven.
I mentioned this discovery in a previous post, but it's as well to recapitulate: I woke up once, maybe thirty-five years ago, in pitch darkness, and after a few seconds of vague panic, realized that I had forgotten everything, including who and where and when and why I was. Imagine a computer booting up and then, on attempting the routine peripherals checks, finding the hard disk not working. That feeling. My memory was completely inaccessible, if not erased. I may have groaned, or cried out. I scrambled to my feet, stumbled a few paces, felt around blindly. Eventually, after perhaps thirty seconds, I found a light switch. When the light was on, I was even more terrified to see a room I did not recognize. I sat down on the sofa where I had been sleeping, and tried to remember. After about a minute the hard disk started whirring, belatedly. I identified the room as my mother's living room, and the sofa as the one I was meant to sleep on. Half a minute more and I was fairly confident I knew my own name, although the frantic effort of digging it up had exhausted me. After that, it was a matter of seconds before I realized I was a student on holiday, staying at his mother's house, with a whole history to draw on. There was also a jumble of desires and preoccupations which, though they at first seemed rather bizarre, apparently belonged to me (whose else could they have been) and demanded my acknowledgement. Once I had accepted them as mine, I felt human again.
Then, I could relax.
This is how I know that, while total sensory deprivation might be bearable as long as you have your memory, the reverse is not the case. Acute pain aside, there is little worse than not remembering anything, even if you have all your senses. We are designed to remember, and to background-check constantly that we can. It's also interesting to note how easily satisfied the verification routine is, how paltry its demands are. Apparently, as long as I know my name, can say where I am and how I got here, and can run through a list of five things I want, that's good enough to restore the adrenaline to normal.
A few months ago, my father-in-law had a stroke (or something of the sort: this being Ecuador, medical details are necessarily speculative). An 85-year-old, one-eyed man who had spent his life planting and harvesting rice, he spent the subsequent weeks lying on a bed more or less where I am sitting now, or being driven into town for acupuncture three times a week. Initially, he could not remember his name or recognize anyone. He spent his days clutching a leather bible like a talisman, listening to Christian songs on his portable radio or watching me across the room like a hawk while I hammered at my keyboard through the late evening. Living between brick walls was clearly exotic to him. I could tell he was trying to work out whether he was in Heaven, Hell or Milton Keynes.
Now he is somewhat recovered, and back in his own rickety shack between the paddy fields, I imagine him scanning the horizon periodically for the black vulture (Coragyps atratus) whose presence is necessary to reassure him that heaven and earth are still twisted together at the edges, and that the endless spaces still sing the same five notes.
He and I can remember and know very little and still be ourselves, but there has to be that one thing, that buzzard, that sundog, that broken drainpipe, that 1964 Supremes hit, that connection with a past that belongs to us. Supposedly.
In Orwell's 1984, the past is mostly made up, in the form of rewritten The Times archives, and what is not made up (Oranges and Lemons) has been repurposed and is placed strategically and maliciously in the citizen's path to stumble on. The clue is that it does not make sense where it is. The hero, however, the last man in Europe, does have a past that is his own and makes sense: the only catch being that he made it up himself out of scraps, removed himself from it and called it the Golden Country.
There never was a Golden Age that did not, on examination, turn out to venerate its own Golden Age, even more fictional than itself. There never was a future invoked in political slogans that did not, once arrived, teem with graceless grannies invoking a finer future. It doesn't matter. Having a Golden Age to look back to is an inevitability of the psyche, one of the compass points that come with every mental map and every culture: only pretending to point elsewhere, actually allowing you to navigate the here and now. Even your Whigs and Progressives, claiming to find only the scrubbed and stainless future palatable, secretly thrill to the dark secrets of the past, awakening in a pool of sweat to find its clammy fingers prising their thighs apart.
It doesn't even matter if our memories are implanted, like Deckard's unicorn in Blade Runner: it is made up, but so too are all the other animals, the owls and snakes and ostriches. The point is to want something that the most teleologically controlled illusion of a life cannot satisfy: which is why the memory's start-up sequence involves checking the desires off, and against each other, and against the room, confirming that each can lead, and that all in concert are hopeless, like an orchestra whose scores have been randomly transposed. The impossibility of arrival, the endless bouncing off the walls of reality in new directions, the rebirth and renewal of longing, is what allows us free will: we may never arrive at randomness, but are constantly drawn along its asymptote, rearranging and redrawing our memories as we go, repositioning them on the horizon.
The Skinnerian behaviorists, the Cultural Determinists with their Etch-a-Sketch model of the brain (turn upside down and shake to dismantle patriarchy) are ants tidying a nest over which a distracted gardener stands with gumboots and steaming kettle.
It only takes one unlicensed and uncensored memory, and this irrepressible longing, and you are out of their control. You don't need a future, and you don't need a sanitized and mendacious didactic history book.
If you can remember, the past is doing its job, and is not past.
Now is heaven.
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