Thanks for the Metaphors

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Memory is a strange thing. It is universal and yet unique. Universally, memories are little pieces of spacetime that when knitted together, create the picture of our life gone by. Yet, we experience them uniquely, and since, as my sister recently pointed out to me, we cannot see inside each other’s heads, the only memory we can experience is our own. In this attempt to come to grips with this unique yet universal phenomenon, I find myself falling back on my old buddy, metaphor.

I mention my sister because we have been discussing memory. My initial inclination is to say that her’s is much better than mine, and by most traditional measures it is. However, for the moment let me quibble just a bit and merely assert that it is different from mine.

You see, her son and his wife “gave” her StoryWorth. The quotes are there because StoryWorth is an Internet-based gift that presents the recipient with topics about their life, topics that are generated by the givers. The recipient then creates a response; a story, essay, photos, copies of documents, etc. For example, “Who was your favorite childhood friend? “What was the “best” place you ever lived?” Stuff like that. Then, when the “subscription” is complete, the collected responses, which were shared with a small circle of friends and family online, are then compiled into a real, analog, "hold-in-your-hand” book. Margaret brought a copy along when we had dinner recently. I have only now had a chance to sit down and really spend some time with it. Oh. My. Or as digispeak would have it, OMG!

I had read the individual “chapters” online, but the physical book was a radically different experience. Margaret’s responses were staggeringly thorough and insightful, gracefully sketching a decades-long mural of a life that evolved in parallel to my own.  Sometimes achingly similar, other times totally alien. But always detailed to an extent that far surpassed my ability to recall. “How did she do that?” I wondered. And with the zeal of the almost fully retired, I set out to find out. Being still a media-guy, I turned to texting. I include the follow exchange with Margaret’s permission:

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ME: Hi. I have been looking at the StoryWorth books, and a question comes to mind. Where did all the content come from? Obviously you have some journals and stuff, but there seems to be an incredible amount of “memory” going on. I’m playing with a Wall about memory and was curious about yours. We have both read mysteries in which characters with photographic memories play a role. Mine doesn’t even approach those heights, quite the contrary on occasion! How about you?

MARGARET: Well. That’s a great question. Bill (Her husband - RLS) and I have talked about our vastly different abilities in remembering things, trying to tease out the differences. I keep saying “Don’t you just have a picture of x in your mind?”  And he says “No, only you have that.” Do I have a photographic memory? I don’t know. The only memory I know is mine, lol. It’s very visual and detailed and apparently quite different from his. I have trouble putting myself in his head, trying to imagine what his memories look like if they don’t look like mine.

Yes, I apparently have an excellent memory. I’m constantly saying “just a minute, let me picture that” and then I can find the sought after object, or remember the event or conversation, etc.Did I have source materials for a lot of the book? Absolutely. And I also found that just looking at some of the photos triggered a cascade of other very vivid memories. Some of them seemed as real as only yesterday. I guess if there are degrees or levels of photographic memory, then I’m definitely on the spectrum (haha) and I guess pretty far to the positive side. It would be fun to sit and talk about our memories sometime. If that doesn’t answer your question, shoot me more probing questions and I’ll answer them. But email would be easier on my finger.

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“Wow,” I wondered. “Why does she get to be on the eidetic memory spectrum, while I have trouble recalling the names of my college suite mates?” But then my battered self-confidence resurged and I thought, not necessarily better memory, perhaps just different. And that was when I began to think about the various metaphors for memory that might begin to explain the different “memory styles” manifested by my sib and I.

First, I had to wrestle with the notion of what is a “memory” other than an incredibly over-used meme in popular musical theater? It is, I decided, a slice of spacetime, unique to our existence, which led, naturally, I thought, to the flip book metaphor for memory. In a recent post I admitted to the fact that there were times - probably in 4th or 5th grade - when my attention was not actually riveted upon what was being discussed in class. One way I passed the time was to create little cartoons on the corners of the pages of my text books. You know, you draw little frame-by-frame stick figures on the corner of the pages, and then when you flip the pages you can make the little figure run off the page.

In David Baldacci’s books featuring Amos Decker, an FBI agent with an eidetic or photographic memory, he describes Decker’s memory this way, a sort of flip book on steroids, but his analogy is more 21st century - Decker replays things he has experienced like “playing back a DVD, frame-by-frame.” You get the idea. Everything you have ever experienced in your life is stuck up there somewhere between you ears. Folks who are, to use my sister’s phrase, “on the photographic memory spectrum,” apparently can access those experiences, and intentionally examine each frame, or clusters of frames and hence “remember” what happened in great detail.

Let me be clear, my memory works nothing like that. My memory works more like driving west down the largely undeveloped Route 66 back in the sixties with “roadside rests,” featuring single picnic tables usually next to a motel with a two word name like The Pines or Easy Rest. You accessed each unit directly from the parking lot. One door. One window. Sometimes with an air conditioner. Often there was a postage stamp sized swimming pool and a breezeway with a Coke machine. And there was this time just before sunset with the sun directly in your eyes, when driving became painful and you would find yourself pulling into the parking lot outside an Edward Hopper or Norman Rockwell painting. My memory works something like that.

OK, While that metaphor makes perfect sense to me, I realize I need to unpack it a bit. The "driving west just before sunset” part comes from the retina resurfacing experience that accompanies driving west at that maddening time of day when the sun is sitting on the horizon, below the spot where the sun visor can block it.  The blacktop starts to shimmer and you are reduced to driving along one-handed while using your other hand to block the sun.  But then occasionally when you do manage cancel the glare, all the stuff that was lost around the edges of your compromised vision creeps back in again, but somehow muted in pastels. Eventually those images gradually return to hi def when the sun drops below the horizon and ceases its frontal attack. Exhausted, you turn off the highway, pulling over a cracked concrete parking lot to a Hopper/Rockwell world. You get out, rub your eyes, arch your back, stretch your legs and look around.  

It is that fade from harsh glare through more gentle hues and, eventually, to recalled clarity that best describes the full range of my memory.

You see there are bits and pieces, faces and places, that so dominate in my memory that many other aspects get pushed into a kind of mental hibernation. You will notice that I subtly avoid the f-word, which in this case is get  “forgotten” and the various derivations of the root “f-word.” I make this distinction because in many instances I don’t really “forget” the supporting cast of my life - the strange camp counselor who taught us knife throwing, Mickey Fitzgerald, the earliest “girlfriend” can remember from first grade, the giant teddy bears that Mom made for Margaret and I one Christmas, but in an iconic Mom-like snafu, stuffed them with some itchy industrial foam, the Great Rock Show featuring two or three different types of quartz and granite scrounged from local construction sites - those smaller moments are all still there. As are many of the faces of the 20 or 30 thousand students I have taught in my 40 years in various college classrooms. 

The point is that, for me, those supporting cast members of my memories get washed out by the leads; those other bits and pieces, faces and places that burn so brightly that I still see them when I close my eyes at night, that populate the music I listen to ceaselessly. It is not that I value the supporting cast members any less - I just do not “see” them all that clearly. One of the first things any young stage actor is taught is how to “find your light.” This is different from hitting your spot in a performance designed to be filmed. In those cinematic instances, you hit your spot on the set and it is up to the director to get the camera to you. In live theater a spotlight illuminating a particular point on a stage will hit actors of different heights in different places. You want to, no, you need to, find your light. Only then do you feel that magical bloom on your face, the warmth that assures you that, yes, the audience loves you - or hates you, if that is your objective. 

The “leads" in my memories are those bright lights on my unique stage, bright, dominant, unceasingly precious.  But often it is their intense glow that allows me to peak around in the shadows for the supporting cast resting there in Hooper’s poignant cafes or Rockwell’s impossibly resonant scenes of everyday life. And there they are, not as magnetic as the leads, but then without them the stage would be bare.

So, no, I certainly do not have a hi-def photographic memory. But with occasional nudging it can turn out a pleasing pastel.

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To Emily Dickinson

You kept your poems  

Secreted in a drawer. 

Of a desk, or a dresser. 

I forget which I was taught. 

It was a very long time ago. 

The classroom was warm, 

I was drowsy, the window alluring. 

But I do remember being told, 

“She kept her poems in a drawer.” 

I do not think I dreamed it. 

But I never understood  

Why you would keep 

Your poems secreted  

In a drawer, desk or dresser. 

Until perhaps now. 

They were, I imagine, 

Poems to yourself. 

Desperate or simply brave 

Efforts to capture  

Those ephemeral callings 

From deep within  

Or unimaginably distant 

And anchor them  

With pen upon a page. 

Born in beauty 

Upon a second glance 

You gave in to  

Fear or reluctance. 

Perhaps they were 

Not good enough. 

And so you hid them, 

In a drawer of some type. 

Today we put them 

In a cloud. 

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The Artist's Prerogative

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Just a quick one, stimulated perhaps by a NY Times story on Banksy and his famous self-shedding painting of the girl and the heart-shaped ballon, now titled Love is in the Bin. Banksy had set the painting to “self-destruct” as soon as it was sold at Sotheby’s London in 2018, but the shredder jammed, and the half-destroyed painting was subsequently sold for more than the original undamaged work. Profit assured, no foul? It made me wonder about ownership and art. Does either authorship or ownership entitle one to destroy or alter an artwork that could be argued to be of such cultural value that it “belongs to the world?”  Mind you, I’m not arguing that Love is in the Bin is such a work, or that Banksy is a world class artist. World class marketer, maybe. But that’s not really the point. The question is what prerogatives attach to the creation or possession of an artwork? 

Salvator Mundi is perhaps a better example. This depiction of Christ attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci was sold for 450 million dollars in 2017 and disappeared. A couple of years later it was reported as being housed on the yacht of an Islamic Saudi prince. Strange context for an iconic image of Christ. Yet, nobody seems terribly put out about this - I mean he did, we assume, pay for it, and art often transcends theological fealty. Had the prince, however, opted to destroy the painting - something copyright law would allow - I assume the public reaction would have been quite different. I mean when the Taliban blew up two of the world’s tallest standing Buddhas in 2001, no one - or at least no one not in sympathy with the Taliban - said, “Well, spoils of war. They “owned” them they could do what they wanted.” So, the complexities of copyright law notwithstanding, there appear to be lines you aren’t supposed to cross. You can destroy your own work, or a work you own - the Banksy model. You can purchase an artistically unique work and keep it hidden away for your own pleasure - the Saudi prince model. But you aren’t supposed to blow up works of great cultural significance - the Taliban model.  I realize that copyright law addresses these issues, but like everything when you let the lawyers in, it is not always cut and dried. Each case seems to get adjudicated differently, and deep pockets are often an insurmountable advantage.

So, as I sit here creating a - probably tertiary - digital version of photograph of myself (photographer forgotten - chime in if s/he is you) that I manipulated in Photoshop and then spent an absurd of number of hours hand-painting and am now digitizing, I wonder how does the power of digital technology intersects with the notion of authorship and the prerogative of the artist? With the issue of provenance? Of original and copy? How do we parse provenance in the 21st century? I really don’t know who took the original black and white photo. I have had it for years - 40 or even 50. Does ownership still reside with the original photographer?  [I am now thinking a guy named Alan Williams. The photo was taken, I now faintly recall by his family’s home in the Les Cheneaux Islands off the coast of Michigan’s Upper peninsula sometime in the early 1970s, ’72, ’73?]  But current copyright law certainly asserts that the derivative versions are mine. I’ll stick some copies in here.

Original B&W

Hand-painted

When we were in Venice a year or so ago I remember being fascinated watching restorers at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco working on two large paintings by Tintoretto. Also, I continue to drop in online every now and then to watch the live coverage of the restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Both experiences reveal consummate professionals with otherworldly skills. I couldn’t help but wonder “How much of a painting can be ‘restored’ before authorship transfers from the original artist to the restorer?” Especially in the case of “old masters” where the “master” may have actually painted only a small percentage of the canvas, the rest filled in by apprentices - "a priori restorers?" - from his/her studio?  

And now imagine ultra-high resolution 3D scanners and printers capable of building The Night Watch, or Michelangelo’s David for that matter, brush stroke by 3D brush stroke, chisel stroke by chisel stroke to the point where chemical analysis of the materials used in the “copy" becomes the only way to tell copy from original.  Who is the artist?  Who owns the rights to the copy? And is the copy a copy? Ordinarily one can sell a copy as long as you are clear that it is a copy. But what happens when the copy is, by most normal measures, identical to the original? We went through this when music went digital back in 1999, the Napster days. Initially the industry went nuts - this was really, the labels thought, “the day the music died.” But eventually we all became acclimated to the new reality, and artists discovered that they didn’t really need the big labels, and the music was resurrected with far more variety and flexibility.  Will the plastic arts and traditional drawing, painting, photography show the same resilience?

The potential confusion wrought by evolving technology isn’t the only problem. Reconstruction work on the Bamiyan Buddhas has been stymied by bureaucratic UNESCO regulations that require the use of “original material.” Well, the original material was reduced to dust by the Taliban, and the bureaucrats haven’t been able to work their way around that snafu, so the giant niches stand empty, save the shattered ruins. More recently, reconstruction work on the 850-year-old iconic French cathedral, Notre Dame, which the French Senate has declared should be restored to its “last known visual state" is similarly stalled by a debate between architects, cathedral officials, and UNESCO, again, officials - who apparently have a dog in this fight because the cathedral is part of the World Heritage site known as “Paris, Banks of the Seine.”

So, these are the issues that come to mind as I switch from my keyboard back to my Wacom graphics tablet. Fortunately, no one has offered me millions of dollars for either the originals or copies of my works, so I need not thrash about attempting to resolve these issues that seem to reside far, far away from the actual process of making art. However, should the odd Saudi Prince contact you with a significant offer, do send him my way. My people will talk to his people.