Gadi Ben-Yehuda's Open Salon Blog

Lorem Ipsum Rubaiyat

Mon, 5 May 2008 12:05:24 -0400

Lorem ipsum... etc, etc, etc.
Bane of English Major sets
Not Latin, not Greek, not Anglo-Saxon
Worse than misbehaving pets.

Why do we need this Lorem ipsum?
It sounds so weak, so floppy flipsum!
"The copy's coming, we promise, we promise!"
Those words seem to whine from their fulsome lipsmus.

And don't look for help from "et cetera,"
It's not made-up language, but it's hardly better-a
Than that stinking "lorem ipsum," though to its credit
It's a quick, easy way to end a brief letter-a.

For Monday Morning: a Meditation on Memory

Mon, 5 May 2008 06:05:15 -0400

Elie Wiesel says that to be a Jew is to have a memory four thousand years long. But what is memory, exactly?

In Ray Bradbury's short story "Kaleidoscope," a rocket full of astronauts flies apart, and the voyagers are cast off in their space suits in different directions. One astronaut is jealous of another's life and as he is traveling to certain death in the asteroid belt, he exclaims to his erstwhile companion "You think you had a good life? Well I'm going to tell you that it was MY life! I'm the one with the great wife and fabulous kids. I'm the one with the garage and the mortgage and the cars. You live in a studio and I have three bedrooms, a den, and an office besides." I'm paraphrasing, but the meaning is constant.

A less parasitic example is the experience of the Night of the Passover, celebrated just a few weeks ago. What do Jews say? "This is on account of what God did for me when I was brought forth from the land of Egypt." And it is not without knowledge of their language game that Jews make this statement, for elsewhere in the literature we read about four sons, one wicked, who is cut off from being a people when he does not include himself among those making the Exodus.

The wicked son asks "What mean these customs in which you engage, which God commanded you to observe?" Merely by speaking in the second person, he excludes himself from the memory, and every child at the Passover table learns that had the wicked son been in Egypt at the time of the exodus, he would not have been redeemed.

All memory is, in essence, first person because it rests on nothing more than the authority of the speaker. Call the speaker into question, and the memory is stripped of meaning as a featherless bird; it cannot fly. Even when we make claims about another's exploits, we must rationalize how we remember it. The rules for substantiation of a memory are vague, but a speaker quickly develops a record either as a person whose history comports with others' or as one whose memories are mutually exclusive of the group. If the former, one can shape the memories of the group simply by tailoring the stories carefully. If the latter, one is cut off from being a people and left worse than isolated, but compromised beyond redemption.

Why beyond redemption? Because like the reality it is supposed to conjure, memory is only possible when it is shared, and, more frightening, memory is only as real as the language it resides in. Early in the Hagadah, we read "whoever expands on the telling of the outgoing from Egypt, that one merits praise." To expand on the story makes it more real, makes it less fiction, more memory.

Memory often commingles with hearsay. We all repeat heard stories as if they happened to us, or at least around us. "Did you hear about the ten-car pile up?" we might ask our spouse after we get home from work. Broadcast news manufactures our collective memory one story at a time, so that the events of the day become benchmarks in all of our lives. Isn't that the purpose of memory, anyway?

While it is tempting to think of memory as the data from which we can draw our conclusions and a basis on which to form our theories and predictions, it is more fitting to think of memory like the canonical literature that informs our reading of the world. Data, by definition, is verifiable or falsifiable. Literature is malleable, open to revision, subject to change without prior notice.

Indeed, two people talking of the same event might come to amiable agreement with the phrase "That's not how I remember it, but it squares with my story." Could two chemists say the same about a particular
reaction? But such quandaries are a sideshow, because chemists, physicists, and other scientists are not interested in agreeing with one another so much as assuring their understandings comport with the medium in which their subjects exist. The same is true for the archeologists of memory, which fraternity we all belong to, though some dig more frequently than others.

Physicists, even brilliant ones, will reject a theory if they don't want to accept all of its ramifications. Memory often proves no less thorny. Proust said "There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory." So they do expunge it.

The reverse, as well, is true. There are some memories that are so appealing we adopt them as our own and establish them firmly in the minds of others and so graft them onto the trunk of our narrative like an almond branch onto an otherwise barren tree. Maybe we merely embellish a story-expand on the telling of the outgoing from Egypt-or maybe we include ourselves in someone else's story-become one of the mixed multitudes that left the House of Bondage with the Children of Israel-or maybe we make up a memory from whole cloth.

Scientists might say that everything that can exist does exist somewhere, so why should memory be any different? Liberated from the rigidity of provable facts and the function of reportage, and understood more clearly as a means to understand and make predictions of human activity, histories can be created after-the-fact and adhered to with as much dogmatism as any creed so long as they are not mutually exclusive of other histories.

This point is so important it bears repeating: histories can be created after-the-fact and adhered to with as much dogmatism as any creed so long as they are not mutually exclusive of other histories.

Why can't the Chinese have invented Calculus in the fifth millennium BCE but used it only for a short while and then abandoned it? How does it change anything but our understanding of the Chinese? Why couldn't any woman claim to have spoken and walked at the age of four months and remembered her first birthday in vivid detail? If either of these histories is not mutually exclusive of other nations' or people's histories, they should be accepted and embraced. And expounded on.

Why expound? More to the point, why remember and share memories? Because our lives have three components: projections, presentations, and reminiscences. Of the three, we can lay claim only to the lattermost and it alone is the measure of our lives.

Consider a person who lives a normal life until 18 and goes into a coma for 17 years. Upon awaking at 35, how much life has the person had? With only 18 years of experiences to call upon, the person would seem no older than any other high school graduate. We do not measure the newly-awakened either by what we are presented with (a 35-year old body) or what the future might hold for this person.

Now consider a person who, from the earliest age, was taught to think in the first person about the experiences of everyone in their family going back four thousand years. "Then I married Rachel the Butcher's Daughter and we have seven children, three of whom were buried before they had names," a five year old might say. This is not so fantastic; other five year olds repeat similar fictions like "I do not like to hit my younger brother," and also "I will respect my mother when she speaks to me," and also "I should not eat doughnuts that do not belong to me." Through repetition, a carefully cultivated memory can take root along side every child's natural stand of memories, acquired and defined by the random outings into the forest of available reality.

Memories handed down are not merely maps to other copses in this forest, they are the other copses themselves. To transmit a memory from one generation to another is not only to grant access and allow passage to other stretches of land, but rather is to create and preserve the land. That said, each bearer of memory is free to rearrange the topography as different tectonic stresses dictate.

As with physical geography, so with memory: the landscape changes when the subterranean pressures necessitate buckling, dipping, and violent upheavals to prevent collapse or explosion. When the memories that are passed down to us are completely at odds with our (re)vision of our selves, we cannot include it in our psychic landscape. However, we do not have the option merely to ignore the memory when the offense is too widely shared-that is, when ignoring the memory causes our history to be mutually exclusive from the history of our family, people, or nation. When this happens, we need to break violently from that land, to expunge it from our realm.

Paradoxically, to view memory in this way distances us not only from others, but from ourselves even as it brings us closer both to others who share our memories and to past and future selves. The strength and virtue of this understanding of memory is that it allows us to lay personal claim to experiences beyond the ken of our temporal, linear lives. The weakness is that it relegates all memory to the status of story, fiction, and fable. It makes all memory suspect, and we can never know if, like Bradbury's astronaut, our life was our own or someone else's.

Yet that weakness is reflective of a greater truth and is the only possible palliative to Proust's assertion, for we are not, at age 50, who we were at age 15. It might as well be another person from whose memory we can take merely a peach or transplant the entire orchard.

Memory. Stories. Literature. There is not a single multicellular organism that does not put to use the corpses or excreta of preceding generations when the extended food chain is taken into account. The medium of cellular life requires chemical fertilizer. The mind is no different. The mind comes into the world underprepared for the task assigned to it: making meaning of the seeming randomness the senses feed it. The first history we learn is at our parents' knees, and our minds are hungry as any phagocyte. The difference is that our minds require not chemical but historical fertilizer.

In the end, however, as much as memory brings us into ourselves, our people, and our land, it imprisons us. As much as it clarifies, it confuses. Through connecting our yesterdays with our yesteryears, memories conflate our personal histories with that of our nation, both the land and the people who live on it. In short, memories make us forget-and the more we try to remember the more our memories fall into one another, and soon Reb Mordachai from 1302 is driving a Volvo, while Reb Mordachai from 2013 has buried congregants who died of plague. Soon, we are calling our children by the name of their namesakes, which isn't so bad for our children, but how cross we become when their great-grandparents don't answer!

Before we lose ourselves irretrievably in the Black Forest of Jewish History, we would be wise to ask: what must this mean for a person with a memory of four thousand years?

I Love Literature, not Books

Fri, 2 May 2008 08:05:25 -0400

About two years ago, I gave away more than 200 lbs of books.

I know the weight because as I shouldered the duffel bag I put them in, my girlfriend said “it looks like you’re carrying a dead body in there.” And I said, “in a way, I think I am.” The books were like a drowning victim I carried from house to house in all my moves since I left my parents’ house for college, and with each move, its water-swollen limbs expanded. I put it on the scale before I took it to the library and found that it weighed more than I did.

The reason I was able to cast those books off like driftwood after carrying it around for so long is because I finally realized that it is possible to love literature and yet have no great affinity for books.

This happens all the time: people confuse art and artifact. Couple that with the superstition (to which we all somewhat subscribe) that items pass on their traits through prolonged proximity, and you see why so many people keep books around the house. We think that we will absorb the literature simply by housing the book! The thing is, a book is no more its literature than a reel is the movie it contains.

Here’s another thing, by way of a small digression. My father loves music, Jazz especially, but he categorizes his Jazz CDs in with his classical music. "Why?" I asked him once. "Because," he said, "once you record the music, it is no longer what Jazz is supposed to be, improvisational. You don’t listen to a recording of a piece of music to be surprised by the music itself. You can learn something new, of course, the way you can learn something new when you reread a book, but when you listen to a recording of music you are more reading it than experiencing it. Unless, perhaps, you are listening to the piece of music for the first time."

My father (excuse the pun) hit a chord there: he pointed out the difference between reading a piece of art and experiencing one. Most books are meant to be read. Even books that we take to the beach, the ones that we’re not supposed to think about, but instead let them effect us (usually by scaring or titillating), are meant to be read. Think: what the author wants us to walk away with is the reality that the book’s words conjure. We are not supposed to walk away with the words themselves.

Some authors are not like that at all. Milan Kundera is one of them. His words (or at least the structure of his story) are so much a part of his art that I don’t think you read him so much as experience him. Good poetry is like that, too. If you are reading Wallace Stevens, Stephen Dobyns, or Pablo Naruda for the meaning of their poetry, you are way missing the point. Their work does convey meaning, but the manner of the conveyance is as much part of the message as the construct of the message itself.

Writers like Hemmingway pose a problem for me. His craft is so polished that its transparency—the way he wills his words to get out of the way of his stories—become distracting by not being there. If Hemmingway wanted to be read rather than experienced, then (for me at least) he fails by succeeding too well.

Arguably, of course, even books of poetry need not be books. Art can be made of words that are not contained in books (see, for example, my poems on this very site <a href="http://www.intrepidmedia.com/column.asp?id=2026" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.intrepidmedia.com/column.asp?id=2025" target="_blank">here</a>). But the point is that I would open up my poetry books again to experience their art while I would not likely open up many of the books of fiction I rid myself of. Their stories were a part of me, and who needs to reread a story that was barely instructional the first time around?

But then, the other day, I bought Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. This is a book that can be nothing but a book. Perhaps commix, like paintings, are somewhat immune to the postmodern conundrum of having many copies and no original. Whatever the case, this is one piece of literature that I cannot foresee being separated from its medium.

I am not going to review the book (an excellent review can be read <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/review/2004/09/10/spiegelman/" target="_blank">here</a> and NPR did a story you can listen to <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3908199" target="_blank">here</a>) except to say that it is brilliant. It is both moving and arresting. And it cannot be separated from its book-ness.

I don’t think it’s unfair to pit a graphic novel against a word-only novel (logo-novel?). I have read my share of commix and given them away after reading their stories. But in Shadow, as in Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the medium didn’t seem like a necessary vector for the story so much as a part of the story’s genetic make-up.

That’s why Spiegelman is staying the next time I need to trim the deadwood from my bookshelves.

Saying Goodbye to My Cat

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:04:15 -0400

I have always been a cat person.

I find their independence admirable, their insouciance contagious, their aloofness refreshing in a high-modernist kind of way. In college, I came to think of living with a cat like reading a few pages of Joyce: neither cared if I understood, only that I appreciated. In talking with my dog-people friends, I would say that it takes little to earn a dog’s love (and to prove this, I raised and trained two Rottweilers), but that cats love only grudgingly, if at all. Some dogs, like Goldens, regard even strangers with borderline-sycophancy, while most cats muster armed neutrality at best.

So I have always been a cat person. Yet, this morning I said goodbye to my cat and do not expect to see her again. When my wife and I sold our house, the buyer, a good friend of ours who works a lot overseas, asked if he could take our cat with him. “Are you asking if our cat conveys?” my wife asked. He was. And after we talked about it, my wife and I decided that it wasn’t such a bad idea.

Since we brought our newborn daughter home from the hospital nearly a year ago, our cat hasn’t been right. We had been living together for about five years, the cat, my wife and me, and we had certain understandings.

First, we did not ‘own’ our cat, and she was not ‘our baby.’ She had a name and a nickname, Savannah and Kitohn (/KEE thone/ with an aspirated th) respectively. We would feed her and give her occasional praise. She would rub her furry body against our legs, nap at the foot of our bed for an hour or so each night (longer in the winter) and not pee on our rugs. She wasn’t a member of our family, but was a member of our household and we were no more her masters than her parents. But we were also not her servants.

Then, when the child came home, Savannah kind of lost it. It started with peeing in inappropriate places. She graduated to vomiting. Our veterinarian, an unnecessarily attractive Cuban man with graying hair and a bright smile, said “There is too much stress in her life. You should not force her into so many beauty pageants.” He pronounced the word “estress.”

So when our buyer said that he would give Savannah a life of travel and all the excitement a declawed, indoor cat could handle, my wife and I acceded. And today the buyer will come by and take Savannah to her next home even as my wife and I pack up our things and move to our next home.

I’m a little sad to see Savannah go. When I left roommates in college, even ones whose company I was happy to quit, I always wondered what would become of them. And I do wonder what Savannah will do or see. After all, I have been paying for her health insurance (yes, my cat has health insurance) for five years. I care for her. But today I left her for what may be the last time.