“The whole world stops as this stunning dancer rises,” Alessandro said, “and its beauty puts to shame all our doubts.”
As Alessandro, the protagonist in Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War, prepares to leave for university, his father tells him, “You’ll learn more in your journeys to and from Bologna, if you make them on horseback, than from all your professors combined.” Alessandro’s narratorial voice adds, “he had almost been right.”
A Soldier of the Great War is the tale of an Italian veteran of the First World War who recounts his life story years later during a long walk with a young man he meets by chance. It is, among other things, a book about beauty and the kind of attention to the world necessary to recognize it. Alessandro believes in the redemptive power of beauty and throughout the story he shows himself to be remarkably attuned to the instances of beauty that permeate our experience. Not only the beauty of a majestic moonrise, but also the beauty in more prosaic scenes.
In her absence, and in the absence of anyone like her, he was drawn to many things that, in being beautiful, were her allies — the blue of the stage-set in the floodlights, the grace of a cat as it turned its small lion-like face to question a human movement, a fire that blazed from within the dark of a blacksmith’s shop or a baker’s and caught his eye as he passed, a single tone arising from a cathedral choir to shock a jaded congregation with it unworldly beauty, the mountaintops as snow was lashed from them by blue winds, the perfect and uncontrived smile of a child.
In his Kenyon College commencement address from 2005, David Foster Wallace, with the kind of earnestness that he was uniquely capable of pulling off, similarly insisted that
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
Attention again. Attention to beauty, attention in order to love well. My worry is that the habits we form in a wired, connected, networked, always online, linked in world combat the sort of attention that Alessandro practices as well as the kind of attention that Wallace advocated. Nothing captures this more than the posture we are all so adept at striking now: head down, focused on a small screen, with the world going by all around us — unnoticed, unattended.
The devices themselves don’t demand this, and there are ways of using them so that they do not become the enemies of attention. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a propensity toward uses and practices that form habits of misdirected and fractured attention.
Helprin and Wallace, each in their own way, push us to look up and take notice; to come up out of the digital waters for breath and for beauty and for love. To see, to really see the world around us and to get out of our heads long enough to be attentive to others — that is our challenge.
It’s not precisely one year on two counts. To begin with, The Frailest Thing existed in its first iteration as early as September 2009. I was then a true rookie blogger and working on another platform which shall remain nameless (rhymes with Frogger). That effort never quite got off the ground. By June 2010, however, I was ready to try again, and that is when the present version was launched. Secondly, the first post on this site was published on June 2, so we are actually at a year and a few days. Nonetheless, being a glutton for nostalgia, I’ve decided to take a retrospective glance back at the past year on the blog. I realize this will likely be of little interest to anyone but myself, but here it is anyway.
A look at the downside of digital distraction through the lens of Harrison Bergeron, this post was featured on Freshly Pressed over a weekend last August and garnered not only the most hits on record, but also the most comments.
Runner Up: Is Sport a Religion? My first post to be featured on Freshly Pressed was inspired by the World Cup. At the time, still relatively new to WordPress, I was unaware of the Freshly Pressed feature. It was a fun surprise.
The Most Viewed Post (Without the Help of Freshly Pressed): Gods of Love and War
A reflection on technology through the myth of Hephaestus, the lame Greek god of metallurgy. You’d be surprised how many people search for Hephaestus.
Runner Up: Life Amid the Ruins. A lot of people search for Vanitas Art as well.
Not that all who comment are not always thoughtful (clearing throat), but I must express my appreciation for the frequent and engaging comments provided by PerpetuallyFrank. Cheers!
Thanks as well, of course, to all who comment including to those friends who I know will at least read out of some sense of fraternal obligation, but have also generously plugged this blog (Messrs. Ridenhour, Fridsma, Greenwald, and Garcia, for example, among others).
The aforementioned PerpetuallyFrank and my colleague Chris Friend engaged in a very intriguing exchange on the subject of telepathy. Go read it for yourself.
“I have to tell you, Michael, you are one of the best writers I’ve never heard of before. Please take it as a compliment.” I did. On When Words and Action Part Company.
The Oddest Search Term Leading Here: Unmentionable (at least on a classy blog such as this!)
I guess that’s what happens when you have a post titled Gods of Love and War in which you refer to the sordid sex lives of the Greek gods.
Moving on, it is always a bit of a surprise when the author of some piece I’ve blogged about drops a comment. This has happened on a few occasions, and has usually been positive. So my thanks to following for dropping in.
Some one must have come up with a law of writing whereby the ease of composition varies inversely to the obscurity of the audience. If not, there it is. Writing a letter (I know, who am I kidding, just fill in whatever — email, text, etc.) to someone you know: generally easy. Writing a blog post to whoever happens to read it: less so. It probably doesn’t help matters that I tend to be introspective, perhaps to a fault (case in point).
Writing in a more public venue, however, has forced me to be a little more rigorous with the writing and thinking. I realize that this is still a rather informal space, but someone may read what I am writing and that generates a sense of responsibility to the reader. If someone is going to invest a few minutes to read a post (as you are presumably doing right now) I owe it to them to avoid careless or confusing writing. And besides, on a more self-interested note, no one wants to come off as an idiot when they write something others will read.
As far as the content, the first two or three months featured a wider variety of topics than what I end up posting these days. Not surprisingly my own context ends up guiding a good deal of the writing process. I am a graduate student and so there is a certain compulsion toward writing about what I am reading which tends to revolve around technology, writing and reading, and, lately, memory. Perhaps I’ll try to expand the scope a bit moving forward. I’m torn between finding a niche and falling into a rut. Hopefully, there’s a nice middle ground between the two.
I have also been a teacher for over ten years, s0 on here I hope to make much of what I read in an academic context a little more accessible, which is not to say that I aim to dumb it down. Ideally, I imagine that there is this broad and generous space between the arcane and the simplistic. That’s the target area I’m aiming for.
Feel free, of course, to let me know how well I’m managing that!
Cheers, and thanks for reading. I think I’ll give this a go for another year.
The sociability of social networking sites such as Facebook is built upon an archive of memories. Facebook trades in memory in at least two ways. On the one hand, and perhaps especially for older users, Facebook is platform that facilitates the search for memories. Old friends and old flames can be found on Facebook. Reconnecting with a high school buddy activates a surge of interconnected memories that lead to other long forgotten memories and so on. On the other hand, and this perhaps especially for younger users, Facebook also renders present experience already a depository of potential memories. The future past impinges upon the present. Our experience is a conducted as a search for memories yet to be formed which will be archived on Facebook. In a sense then we hunt for memories past and, paradoxically, for memories future.
This post is the second in a series situating Facebook within the memory theater/arts of memory tradition. In the first post I set the stage by describing how social networking sites and internet enabled smart phones have constituted experience as a field of potential memories. I also suggested that how we store and access our memories makes a difference. The cultural and personal significance of memory is not a static category of human nature. Memory and its significance evolve over time, often in response to changing technologies. So the question, then, is something like this: What difference does it make, personally and culturally, that Facebook has become such a prominent mode of memory?
In order to explore that question, I’ll delve briefly into the history of the art of memory, a set of memory practices with which, I believe, Facebook shares interesting similarities. But as promised at the end of the last post, we’ll start with a story.
Spatiality, images, and death have long been woven together in the complex history of remembering. Each appears prominently in the founding myth of what Frances Yates has called the “art of memory” as recounted by Cicero in his De oratore. According to the story, the poet Simonides of Ceos was contracted by Scopas, a Thessalian nobleman, to compose a poem in his honor. To the nobleman’s chagrin, Simonides devoted half of his oration to the praise of the gods Castor and Pollux. Feeling himself cheated out of half of the honor, Scopas brusquely paid Simonides only half the agreed upon fee and told him to seek the rest from the twin gods. Not long afterward that same evening, Simonides was summoned from the banqueting table by news that two young men were calling for him at the door. Simonides sought the two callers, but found no one. While he was out of the house, however, the roof caved in killing all of those gathered around the table including Scopas. As Yates puts it, “The invisible callers, Castor and Pollux, had handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing Simonides away from the banquet just before the crash.”
Cicero
The bodies of the victims were so disfigured by the manner of death that they were rendered unidentifiable even by family and friends. Simonides, however, found that he was able to recall where each person was seated around the table and in this way he identified each body. This led Simonides to the realization that place and image were the keys to memory, and in this case, also a means of preserving identity through the calamity of death. In Cicero’s words,
[Simonides] inferred that persons desiring to train [their memory] must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.
Cicero is one of three classical sources on the principles of artificial memory that evolved in the ancient world as a component of rhetorical training. The other two sources are Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and the anonymous Ad Herennium. It is through the Ad Herennium, mistakenly attributed to Cicero, that the art of memory migrates into Medieval culture where it is eventually assimilated into the field of ethics. Cicero’s allusion to the wax-writing table, however, reminds us that discussion of memory in the ancient world was not limited to the rhetorical schools. Memory as a block of wax upon which we make impressions is a metaphor attributed to Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus where it appears as a gift of Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses:
Imagine, then, for the sake of argument, that our minds contain a block of wax, which in this or that individual may be larger or smaller, and composed of wax that is comparatively pure or muddy, and harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes of just the right consistency.
Let us call it the gift of the Muses’ mother, Memory, and say that whenever we wish to remember something we see or hear or conceive in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them on it as we might stamp the impressions of a seal ring. Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know.
Plato and Aristotle in Rafeal's "School of Athens"
The Platonic understanding of memory was grounded in a metaphysic and epistemology which located the ability to apprehend truth in an act of recollection. Plato believed that the highest forms of knowledge were not derived from sense experience, but were first apprehended by the soul in a pre-existent state and remain imprinted deep in a person’s memory. Truth consists in matching the sensible experience of physical reality to the imprint of eternal Forms or Ideas whose images or imprints reside in memory. Consequently the chief aim of education is the remembering of these Ideas and this aim is principally attained through “dialectical enquiry,” a process, modeled by Plato’s dialogs, by which a student may arrive at a remembering of the Ideas.
At this point, we should notice that the anteriority, or “pastness,” of the knowledge in question is, strictly speaking, incidental. What is important is the presence of the absent Idea or Form. It is to evoke the presence of this absence that remembering is deployed. It is the presence of eternal Ideas that secures the apprehension of truth, goodness, or beauty in the present. Locating the memory within the span of time past does not bear upon its value which rests in its being possessed as a model against which to measure experience.
Paul Ricoeur, in Memory, History, Forgetting, begins his consideration of the heritage of Greek reflections on memory with the following observation:
Socratic philosophy bequeathed to us two rival and complementary topoi on this subject, one Platonic, the other Aristotelian. The first, centered on the theme of the eikōn [image], speaks of the present representation of an absent thing; it argues implicitly for enclosing the problematic of memory within that of imagination. The second, centered on the theme of the representation of a thing formerly perceived, acquired, or learned, argues for including the problematic of the image within that of remembering.
As he goes on to note, from these two framings of the problematic of memory “we can never completely extricate ourselves.”
Reflecting for just a moment on the nature of our own memories it is not difficult to see why this might be the case. If we remember our mother, for example, we may do so either by contemplating some idealized image of her in our mind’s eye or else by recollecting a moment from our shared past. In both cases we may be said to be remembering our mother, but the memories differ along the Platonic/Aristotelian divide suggested by Ricoeur. In the former case I remember her in a way that seeks her presence without reference to time past; in the latter, I remember her in a way that situates her chronologically in the past.
At this point, I’m sure it seems that we’ve wandered a bit from the art of memory and father still from social networking sites. There is a method to this madness, however, but demonstrating that will have to wait for the next post. Already, I am pushing the limits of acceptable blog post length.
Looking forward to the next post in this series, then, here are the tasks that remain:
Exploring memory as an index of desire.
Setting the art of memory tradition, and Facebook, within Ricoeur’s schema.
RAZ: And of course, the question that is probably on everyone’s mind right now is: If these biohackers can do some of these amazing things, I mean, couldn’t they accidentally or maybe intentionally do something bad, you know, like unleash smallpox?
Mr. WOHLSEN: It’s a tricky question. You know, in theory, the danger is there. Science has the ability to create a polio virus from scratch or to create a smallpox virus from scratch. But, you know, in reality, these are still things that are challenging for professional scientists. This isn’t what the biohackers are doing right now or capable of doing right now or desiring to do.
So you could worry about that. You could worry that somebody would make a big mistake and create a sort of microbial version of Frankenstein’s monster or, you know, a terrorist might start playing with this stuff and create something nefarious.
But, you know, really, if you’re going to start questioning whether it’s safe for people to be doing this at home, you really have to start questioning, you know, the whole field of biotechnology and genetic engineering and where it’s moving.
The Kindle was only released in November of 2007, just three-and-a-half years ago. By 2009, Kindle book sales briefly surpassed print sales on the day after Christmas. In July of 2010, the eBook format overtook hardcovers, and six months later, it surpassed paperbacks.
Today, according to Amazon, eBooks have surpassed print books entirely; they are selling more Kindle editions than they are selling from all of their print formats combined. Since April 1st, they’ve sold 105 Kindle books for every 100 print editions.
She is not surprised and this is part of the reason why:
And like many Kindle owners, I’ve found that I buy more books than I used to. The impulse purchases are now completely irresistible: I can have the new memoir about someone’s dead tax cheat of a husband right this instant, rather than waiting two whole days . . . by which time, I’ll have forgotten about the Washingtonian excerpt that made me want to read it.
I’m pretty sure the print book’s days are numbered for anything except specialty applications. The die-hards will cling for a while, but ultimately, book buyers are already an extremely affluent group, and the convenience in acquiring, porting, and storing your library simply overwhelms the drawbacks, especially as Amazon has introduced innovations like eBook lending.
But wait, there is a tinge of melancholy:
… it will change a lot of the dynamics of life for book people. My first adult books were pulled from my parents’ giant trunk of mystery novels, and the shelves in their bedrooms–will there be a family Kindle account, and will they be able to control access to the juicy stuff? Peter and I are already wondering if we shouldn’t merge our Amazon account, but do I really want my archives cluttered up with his comic books and movie tomes? Does he want to have to scroll through a long line of trashy police procedurals? What will happen to the pleasures of pulling a random book from the shelves of a home where you are a weekend guest?
Not too worry, it was only momentary:
They’ll be replaced by other pleasures, like instant gratification. And it’s probably more gain than loss.
Or was it:
But I’m just a little bit sad, all the same.
Why do we feel compelled to ratify what are surely trivial pleasures, if pleasures at all, while suppressing our instinctive regret for the passing of deeper more substantives pleasures? This is not an indictment of the Kindle, nor a defense of the book. I’m just intrigued by the recurring “this is better, yes its better, it must be better it’s new and the old is passing, it must pass” feel that attaches to pieces like this. Who exactly is being convinced?
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H/T to Mr. Greenwald for passing the McArdle post along.
. Here is the part of the interview that caught my attention:
L.M. Sacasas 