Some Bullet Points on Memory and Learning

Although I am not yet off of blogging (as you can see) and I am not yet off of Facebook (as most of you can see), I have begun to change the way I access information. Right now I'm observing how changing the way I access information affects how I store information. It seems like I'm going to keep more of it in my brain. Here are a few observations clustered around that idea.


1. Telephone Numbers. I have to dial them. They are written down, and then I read them off the page and I dial them. If I were to be lost, without my address book, there are now several people whose numbers I could dial from memory...if I could only find a phone.


2. Directions. My map doesn't tell me what to do. The only way to choose between Mass Ave and Storrow Drive is to know the difference. As a result, I am more quickly developing a map of the city in my mind. I am my own MapQuest.


3. Books. Technically I can still search collections of books, by walking up to a human being and asking for help. But this is not the path of least resistance. Instead, weaning myself off of AbeBooks and Amazon, I am starting to browse. This takes a long time. The side effect of reading rows and rows of titles and authors is that you learn titles and authors. The advantage here feels counterintuitive, since my search engines organize the information so neatly according to my wishes that they could almost be writing me a personalized textbook. But, as countless college students have learned, textbooks don't do you any good unopened on the floor next to your bed. Learning only happens if I study.


4. Addresses. How many times have I asked you for your address? For those of you who know me -- my siblings in particular -- it's probably a lot of times. There's a change in energetic principle, here, from the back-end impulse in which I obtain the information from the source every single time I need it, to a front-end impulse in which I obtain the information from the source only once and write it down. I think of my stepmother and her address book, which was overflowing with information about her peers and her contacts and her loved ones. She never went anywhere without it.


5. Cooking. I am beginning to get all my cooking information from the same cookbook. It's a standard, Better Homes and Gardens. And to make this point I have to confess that I am historically very uncomfortable with cooking.


I can get the cooking done in a way that I couldn't have done five years ago, and I'm grateful for that, but it has remained a psychological strain. All the Epicurious recipes that I have found and then forgotten -- with that back-end energetic principle, like the addresses -- have not made a dent in my insecurity. I still don't know how to cook. I don't know those recipes. I don't remember how I did that crazy pineapple-duck for Christmas that one year. I don't even remember how I did the potatoes.


The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook is doing something different for me. It's always there. It's always the same. I can put my hands on it, and open it in the same spot on my kitchen counter. And as a result, I recognize that I am doing the same cooking activities over and over. The book has little insets, that function for me like a security blanket. That's how you pre-cook the meat, and how you defrost it, and how you chop the vegetables. And as I learn these stable guideposts, I'm starting to make a map in my head, not unlike my mental map of Boston.


I'm pretty comfortable with driving directions, to the extent that Nick and I do a little negotiation before we drive together: Is the hard part of this trip going to be the parking, in which case Nick should get into the driver's seat, or is the hard part of this trip going to be the navigating, in which case Esther should drive. I hadn't imagined that I could navigate cooking like that. I never thought I could relax in my kitchen, knowing that if I miss the turn to Leverett Circle I can just get off at Copley Square.


This hasn't happened yet. Please, don't invite yourself for dinner without giving me at least 24 hours to prepare. But I can see now, with no distractions and no excuses and no searchable Epicurious, I could actually learn how to cook.

Who Took My Five Minutes?

Aside from Fuzzy Bear and Ben Bear, Milo's favorite toy is his Little Touch Leap Pad. It's a pink, bean-shaped, plastic thing, and when our friend Missy gave it to us, I was skeptical. I'm the sort of person who would go a Year Without the Internet; I'm also the sort of person who is suspicious of electronic toys. But, for many months now, this interactive book has been Milo's favorite -- and sometimes only -- solo activity. He turns the pages, and he presses the green "Go" circle, and in return, his pink, bean-shaped friend tells him stories.

His favorite of the books that go with this favorite toy is A to Z Adventure. It's been missing for more than a week. They're pamphlets, really, that you change out along with a corresponding cartridge, and it's a miracle that I haven't lost them all. But Milo is unforgiving. Once every day and sometimes twice, he tries to crawl up onto my lap -- even when I'm standing, in the way that toddlers do -- and says, "A to Z A'venture? We find it, mama? We find it?"

And I answer with my best Sympathetic Mommy voice, "I know, honey, it's missing. That's too bad. When I get some free time we'll do a big search, and I'm sure it will turn up. How about Animal World?"

On this Monday morning, reentering the weekday routine, I set out to find his precious book. I brought my full attention to the task, imagining that I might have to move every single toy he owns, only to find that A to Z Adventure was in a basket with his other books, pretty much right where we usually put it. I had forgotten that "lost" means something different to grown ups than it does to toddlers. Milo's book wasn't lost at all. It was behind something.

All this inspired me to do some math. The search took about two minutes: one minute for getting myself focussed, and another minute for flipping through his book baskets. Avoiding the search every single day of the last week? That was more than two minutes.

I've been meaning for a while to collect some scattered thoughts on time and technology, since I've been living my bare bones social life now for four weeks without a cellphone. I'm thinking today about the preciousness of a Five Minutes, and to whom that Five Minutes belongs, and how best we should try to protect it.

I met D.W. Jacobs a few weeks ago at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, which is the oldest garden cemetery in New England. The poetry of a garden cemetery under fall colors is too obvious for me to do it justice here. You'd have to go yourself, to feel that it is almost impossible to exist in that place without imagining -- at least in a fleeting way -- that life is meaningful after all. At least, there is a deep interconnectedness between the life cycle of the human creature and the corresponding cyclical grandeur of something larger than ourselves.

D.W. travels a lot, and it has happened before, while breezing through the town in which I live, that he has suggested that we make an appointment for coffee. On previous occasions, we relied on our cell phones.

"I'll call you when I'm in the neighborhood."

"Okay, I should be around."

D.W. and I have in common that we are both thoughtful people, which sometimes manifests itself as daydreaming, and (in the recent past) both freelance theatre artists, which demands a certain kind of slavery to our work. And I'm no better at keeping personal appointments than I am at keeping personal friends. It has happened more than once that D.W. and I have missed a connection.

But this time, we had set an inflexible time for our meeting; without a cell phone, there is no other way to do it. And I was late. D.W. would have liked to hear that I was late because I had been lost in meditative contemplation under a poplar tree. In fact, I had forgotten to replace Milo's car seat after having made room in my car for a guest the night before. But either way, just after 11:00 am on Friday at the grave of R. Buckminster Fuller, we did not miss each other.

I can't help but wonder if the impression of awe that I carried away with me that day, which has caused me to feel unqualified even to post pictures of the cemetery with this writing, could have stood firm against the usual flurry of digital communication. "Don't wait for me; Be there in five; What grave are you at? Oh, there you are. I think I see you."

It's a beautiful idea, to live without being plugged in. I think most people would agree. But it only works for casual social engagements in garden cemeteries. For anything more pressing, we need our cell phones. In the business world, in particular, time is money, and cell phones keep us from having to waste time waiting for each other. By saying "call me when you get there," you are saving precious time. At least...your time.

When discussing letter writing a week or so ago, I almost linked Lewis Carroll's Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing. I didn't, ultimately, because the misogyny is a little distracting. You find yourself wanting to say to him, "Are you aware that institutional higher education for women came to exist in the West in the 19th century, contemporary with your clever little jabs? Do you think that, perhaps, the comprehensive failure of the female sex to adhere to your arbitrary set of rules has something to do with not having shared the handbook?"

But Carroll's five-part essay on letter writing is engaging and on point. He writes:

Here is a golden Rule to begin with. Write legibly. The average temper of the human race would be perceptibly sweetened, if everybody obeyed this Rule! A great deal of the bad writing in the world comes simply from writing too quickly. Of course you reply, “I do it to save time.” A very good object, no doubt: but what right have you to do it at your friend’s expense? Isn’t his time as valuable as yours?

I save my time at the expense of yours. Zero Sum Game, Part One Hundred and Eighty Nine: Selfish Communication = Failed Communication. If I cheat, you lose.

As I compare our present-day misbehaviors to those of Carroll's contemporaries, I begin to see the cell phone scheduling dance as a game of poker. The cards are the amount of value we each place on our face-to-face interaction, and the currency is one another's time. "I don't want to show my hand," is my unspoken subtext, as I announce that I'll call again when I am a couple of blocks away. "Something more important (better?) might appear while I make the drive."

I'm not at all draconian about my time, and have always thought that I kept my appointments flexible for purely considerate reasons. I want to protect my companion's time from things I can't control, like traffic and parking. But when the cell phone option is off the table, you also think a little differently about those supposedly uncontrollable factors. Knowing that there may be traffic on I-93, if I want to be on time, I have to leave sooner. I have to give up a little bit more of my time, in order to protect yours.

If time is money, consideration for others could become very expensive.

All this negotiation takes on a crueler face in the mechanism of electronic dating, which I have personally, very thankfully, escaped. I have listened, open mouthed, as single friends and relatives have recounted to me the labyrinthian procedures of "getting to know one another" via text and cell. Every decision is to be guarded, including when you call, when you don't call, how many times you call, and how much information you reveal.

The resulting power position -- created by veiling your romantic desires so skillfully that you might eventually have trouble revealing them even to yourself -- may press your opponent to lay down his measly two pair, telling you that he will wait, in which success you will have dominated the game. Your prize? Well, mostly the domination. A date? Maybe, but probably not. You have to stay strong in your advantage.

"Do you actually want a relationship?" I ask, in exasperation. Spending your precious time negotiating over which party will be the first to say, "I want to!" doesn't sound like very good preparation for sharing one's life.

Again, I don't imagine any of these impulses to be created by technology. That has been a recurring thread in this blog. I don't imagine that targeted advertising created corporations, or that reality-based internet entertainment created our appetite for watching train wrecks, and I certainly don't imagine that text messaging has introduced cruelty and superficiality to the mating game.

But technology is intended to give us what we want, and in that, I'm afraid, it is fairly successful. In this case, it offers us a way to avoid the challenging path of forthrightness, that one terrifying, self-obliterating moment when a person of any age has to say, "Hey, I think you're cute." My concern is that, if you've never had to look someone in the eye and say, "Hey, I think you're cute," how can you ever look them in the eye and say, "I do?"

If I set a firm appointment and leave five minutes early out of respect for my companion, and my companion doesn't do the same for me -- or maybe she does do the same for me, but any one of a million different things about life intervenes and she is late anyway -- are those minutes now lost to me forever? Isn't that a terrible waste of time?

Except, I suppose, there is always the world there for me to look at. Some days it is prettier than others, but it is always there. And aren't we always bemoaning the lack of stillness in our crazy, busy lives? If only I could get a moment to stop and think! So when that moment comes, why don't I take it? Why am I always so unprepared?

I begin to feel that my lack of preparation is a matter of being otherwise engaged. The more I plan my time, the less I use the unexpected pockets of time when they appear. Maybe the best way for me to have the time is to keep from guarding it at all.

"Tackle uncertainty," says a billboard on the I-93, just before I reach my exit on the way home from Mt. Auburn Cemetery. The advertisement is for life insurance. And I find myself thinking that, philosophically, that isn't terribly good advice. I've yet to met the man who tackled the specter of death and came out standing, regardless of the magnificence of his insurance plan.

But then again, maybe that isn't what the advertisers meant. For this day only -- I have no promises about tomorrow -- the message going up on my cork board is "Expect uncertainty." I don't know that it will ease every one of my anxieties, but it might help me to recover my Five Minutes.

The Man In The Mirror

There is a screen shot of me in the Now post that is about as accurate as portraiture can get. There I am, with my hair uncombed, wearing the reading glasses that hardly anybody ever sees, not because I think that they're unattractive, but because my value system reveres clear vision to the extent that I dislike seeing myself using technology to augment mine. I'm 20/20 or bust, in metaphor and in life. I do eventually have to wear my glasses, or I get a headache, but that it isn't how I present myself. It's private. It's like looking at myself in the mirror.


"Mirror, mirror, on the wall...Who is the fairest of us all??"


Move over, Disney. I have the most interactive mirror in the world.


There's a Bible verse that has followed me all my life, in and out of religion. It's James 1:23, and my intention here is not to start a conversation about the Bible. There are many other places where you can go to have that conversation. Rather, I recognize this verse to function as well in isolation, rendering a simple truth of the human condition. Warning the reader about the difference between "hearing" and "doing," James draws a figure who looks at himself in the mirror, and then walks away and forgets what he has seen. I have a hair trigger response to hypocrisy, as we all do -- ironically, that sensitivity exists only when we're looking outside of ourselves -- and I recognize this figure from a thousand real life interactions. In the personal, the political, and the personal as political, people simply cannot remember what they look like. And the logic follows: if you go to the mirror to cleanse yourself, it is likely that you will end up with some very shiny glass.


At the age of ten, I was a better Bible scholar than I have been since. Ten-year-olds have a way of being sure of things. And, like most ten-year-olds, I didn't understand pop music. I did like it, but I didn't understand it. Who needs nostalgia before you have lived long enough to lose anything? And this -- this particular blend of wisdom and ignorance -- is what led me to to have a disagreement with Michael Jackson.


A Facebook friend linked this youtube video shortly after he died: Michael Jackson at the Grammy's in 1989, bringing the house down -- come on, sing it with me, now --"I'm starting with the man in the mirror. I'm asking him to change his ways." When I watch it now I think, "What an amazing performer he was!" On that giant stage, that whole choir full of passionate voices just disappears behind him. They can't compete. He's terrific.


But in 1989, I had a better idea of my own intelligence. "Michael Jackson, you may be the most extraordinary performer I've ever seen. You may share with Jack White and Chita Rivera the ability to put off your skin, to sing your vocal cords right out of existence so that the audience can see through to the beating heart within. But, Michael Jackson, this will never work. You see, I know this one. You can't change yourself by looking at your reflection."


Eventually I turned eleven. And then I turned twelve, and so on, and I guess I forgot. I certainly didn't have that wisdom when I was fifteen and trying to fit into a certain pair of jeans, by looking at myself in the mirror. I didn't have it as a director, trying to get to be a better artist, by looking at myself in the print reviews. I didn't have it as a parent, trying to raise better kids, judging my parenting by what it might look like to other parents. It will never work, Michael Jackson. It's a genuine, heartfelt, beautiful desire. But it will never work.


I mentioned this last night to my brother Jacob, as we were driving down Mass Ave, taking Beth back to her dorm room with a new-to-her microwave in the back of the car. Jacob is nothing if not thoughtful, and had an intimidating supply of salient points on the subject. "Have you had a chance to look at the research," he asked, "that finds that people are actually more productive when there is a mirror in the room?"


I hadn't.


"It's a function of self-awareness," he said, "and the construction of the exoself." It's a little challenging for me to quote Jacob, because in the hierarchy of intelligence as measured by knowledge, which I dislike and find false, yet also recognize to be observable, Jacob is smarter than I am. But there is one point that didn't escape me at all:


"The image of yourself keeps you motivated, because it allows you to to compare what you are doing with what you should be doing."


We all know a little something about that.


Desiring maximum productivity, Jacob has strategically placed his mirrors. I thought briefly about moving the big mirror from the hallway a little closer to my desk. But then I remembered that my desk is currently wearing a book called Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which I don't have the time to read. Unlike Jacob, I don't have a job. And I don't want to be productive. For this one special, magic year when my kids are still babies and I'm not yet tired of New England, I want to just live.


The growing awareness of the conflict between productivity and life is like a rabbit hole, like Neo's red pill. The more I stop working, the more I realize how much life there is to be led, if I only I could stop working. And the only way to stop working is to stop desiring success, and the only way to break my love affair with success is to try to tear my eyes away -- like Narcissus -- from my own pretty reflection in the pool.


These are not original ideas. Those lilies of the field... They toil not, neither do they spin. Neither do they spend too much time looking in the mirror.


Aside from the issue of personal spirituality -- that loss of open space -- I've been beginning to address the effect of 24/7 media access on the locus of control. I've written a half a dozen posts about how I want my decision-making back. I want to decide how I hold the people I love. I want to decide how to spend and save my money. I want to decide how to be a feminist. But all the while, I keep wanting to know how I look. How does this feminism look on me? Does it make me look fat? How about this Christianity? Does it make me look stupid? How about this quiet of the soul? Does it make me look like a lazy housewife?


I'd better go check the mirror. I'd better check my image in the mirror against this full-scale bitmap of the world.


I don't imagine it to be conspiracy, that keeps us in the thrall of our own reflections. I don't imagine it to be conspiracy, either, that makes us work as hard as we do. We're all too smart for that. We wouldn't fall for it. No, this can only be happening because we want it to happen. But why is that? Are we over-performing for our omnipresent mirrors? Is this nonstop drive to accomplish only another facet of our nonstop, every-second-of-the-day awareness of ourselves from the outside in?


"Mirror, mirror, on the wall..."


I am concerned about the repercussions that our mirror-watching may have on our mental health. I am concerned about the extent to which we already live outside of ourselves. We split our identity from our attributes and work the two against each other.


"I hate my body."
"I am not in control of my anger."
"I don't feel my pain."


Are we trying to live our entire lives in that mirror?


It will never work, Michael Jackson. It makes a great pop song. It's a beautiful, true impulse. But it just won't work. We can't stare our bodies into imagined states of perfection. We can't live our lives without experiencing anger. And even if we hide our faults from everyone -- including ourselves -- they won't just go away.


And this brings me to the edge of it; in these concerns, I am officially out of my league. I probably shouldn't even have brought it up, since even my Year Without Internet is not the training that I need to address that kind of darkness. Maybe I will someday get that kind of training.


In the meantime, I will keep listening to my Michael Jackson, understanding now what nostalgia is, and how that might apply.