Externals fade and fade. Where there was once
An enduring house, an image suggests itself
Across our minds, made out of thought alone,
As if it would stand wholly in the mind….
Every such dull revulsion of the world
Has just such disinherited, to whom
Neither the first nor yet the next belongs.
— Seventh Elegy in Rilke’s Elegies from the Castle of Duino, published in 1923 and translated by Vita Sackville-West
Beware of first-hand ideas!
—an acolyte of the machine in E.M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops”
I’ve been hunkered down at the computer with shades drawn against the heat most days. Just outside the frame of this morning photo is my steampunk-style desk with its massive, glowing monitor—and, of course, me in the chair taking this photo with my phone and then clicking a button to apply a bokeh background blur, an effect that I love but that does not reflect the way I actually see.
Friday I was so mentally foggy from staring at the screen all day—all week—that I tried to plug my phone charger into a DVD case1. A long walk with friends and a good night’s sleep helped restore my sanity, but a floaty feeling still lingers, as if I were Patrick Swayze in Ghost trying to poke at things with my phantom fingers.
Walt Whitman famously wrote, “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” Not, I feel compelled to note, in a creaky wheeled chair under artificial light. Whitman may fill my screen at a click, but in this second-story room, he’s nowhere near my Keens.
If “Song of Myself” is a “barbaric yawp” calling us back to earth—the poet celebrating early American soil and himself on it—then Rilke’s “Seventh Duino Elegy” feels more like an urgent whisper from a castle turret. Are we the “disinherited” ones who, in blurring the present moment, have lost both the past and future? Like the society in Forster’s prophetic “The Machine Stops,” we digital denizens wander in echo chambers of ideas about ideas and tweets about tweets, our hearts synchronizing to artificial rhythms. Where is our common ground?
Oh, I’m exaggerating after a week of too much computer time and too few open windows and long walks. Rilke makes my malaise feel important. But that’s the power of the written word: it invites us to notice that we’re not alone in our particulars; that we float down vast rivers of human culture. A great poem or story might say, Stop for a sec: plant your feet close to the bank and feel the wind on your face, the current tugging at your legs. Just for one moment, don’t let it sweep you along. Breathe deeply and catch a whiff of where you’re headed.
A stray line from a forgotten poem floats up: something about water cold enough to break your ankles. Whole summers of childhood live in that image. It makes me feel as if I’ve lost something and I want it back. (Anybody wanna go tubing?)
Metaphors like that one make us feel more alive, while others are so abstract and removed from real experience that they disconnect us from ourselves. The metaphors I worry about are not the outmoded models of the past. Instead, they are the ones that carry us right now on powerful conceptual currents. Am I out in the light with my feet planted in cold, clear water, or am I drifting in a boat down the river Lethe, forgetting who I once was?
I read an article last week that reset my notions of who I am: research psychologist Robert Epstein’s The Empty Brain. Epstein asserts:
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
After writing about golems, I was happy to see that Epstein mentions the biblical metaphor of a human formed from clay and infused with spirit. His point is that each age has tried to understand the human mind by explaining it in terms of current technology:
Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it.
The “brain as computer” metaphor, it turns out, is just as limiting and distorting as the ones that came before it. For example, consider memory: unlike data, our memories are not stored in and retrieved from any particular place. Instead, they involve activity throughout the brain. They are inseparable from our feelings and experiences, from the whole of who we are in the moment of remembering. When I remembered water cold enough to break your ankles, it floated up from God knows where—apologies to the poet whose name I’ve forgotten, though “Thomas Lux” just bobbed to the surface—and now it’s a part of something new: writing to you next to these windows with Ani the Floof at my feet.
Years ago, I told my friend and former partner Bob an anecdote about an unsatisfying meal at a fancy tapas restaurant. With comical flourish, I told how the waiter had presented me with a tiny plate holding a single scallop cut in half and drizzled artistically with sauce.
I must have told the story well, because some time later, Bob—who has many unique and fascinating stories of his own to tell—remembered it as something that had happened to him personally. When I gently noted that that was my memory, he looked taken aback. He said, “But—but I can taste the scallop!”
Just like I can feel that river freezing my ankles.
I once dreamed of visiting the Museum of Lost Things. It was full of discarded trinkets, old bills, and defunct phones. In a small inner room, a little boy and I examined a heap of junk on a table, and I photographed the items in artistic arrangements. I can go back there in memory at any time and sort through the leavings of an imaginary life with a child who never existed.
I would like to suggest that instead of computers, we are the most peculiar curators of our shared life here on earth: our surroundings, experiences, memories, and dreams. We choose, both individually and collectively, what to bring into focus. And because this is a living museum, we also choose what to tend and grow.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter all that much what really happened.
Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination…An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. —Susan Sontag’s review of Simone Weil: Selected Essays
Ironically, the whitewater rapids we’re currently riding in this America so far from Whitman’s are a digital current driven by computer algorithms. They shape our future partly by distorting our past in ways that carry people forward on currents of emotion. Who curates the algorithms? Far too often, it’s people who care about neither reality nor truth. Maybe the only antidote is to swim sideways against the current to shore and plant ourselves on the solid earth. On that note, I’m out for a walk.
You might be thinking, Wait, a physical DVD? Who has those anymore? The public library, that’s who. I’d checked out the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis about her childhood in Iran during and after the 1979 revolution.