Prosthetics of Memory
Posted by admin on December 5, 2008, 3:17 pm
The floor is now open for comments on any of the poems we read for class, especially any cross comparisons between Wordsworth and Gibson.
19 Responses to “Prosthetics of Memory”
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December 6th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Building on class discussion, I want to clarify and extend some of the basic issues regarding the prosthetics of memory and use these to discuss some the differences between Gibson’s Agrippa and many of Wordsworth’s works.
First, what is the purpose of the prosthetics of memory? This question is really several questions: why do we need something external to ourselves to help us remember and what can this memory do for us? The simple answer to the first question is that we cannot possibly remember all that we want to remember, or more importantly, cannot remember accurately all that we want to remember. According to research on memory, unless there is a degenerative brain disorder, we technically never forget anything that has made its way into the long term memory. We are, of course, constantly forgetting things during the short-term memory stage (1-2 minutes). Long term memory “loss” is really a failure of the synaptic nerves connecting memories; therefore, we still possess the memories, but we cannot “access” them or cannot access them without help. The prosthetics of memory are there to provide this help.
But, why do we need to remember at all? We can ignore the obvious, that without memory we would not be able to do anything. Much of our memory of how to “do” things, such as write a sentence, falls into what is called procedural memory. Procedural memory does not invoke a specific experiential memory. For example, every time we write a sentence we do not need to remember learning the alphabet. We can equally dismiss the memory associate with knowledge of facts, called semantic memory. We know that Columbus discovered America in 1492, but this does not necessarily trigger a memory of an elementary school classroom. The type of memories most relevant to our discussion of Gibson and Wordsworth are episodic memories: these memories invoke the details associated with a real experience. But the question remains, why do we need to remember the first time we drove a car or baking cookies with grandma? Why can we not simply live in the current moment? The simplest answer is that our identity, our perception of self, is the summation of all our memories. This becomes immensely interesting when we consider how unreliable our memories are. The second answer, and perhaps the more relevant for our discussion of Gibson and Wordsworth, is that we can “use” our memories.
In what ways are Gibson and Wordsworth suggesting that we use memories? Wordsworth is the most explicit in how we ought to use our memories. Wordsworth wants to use memory to excite emotion, to “conjure up” emotions, for the purposes of pleasure, particularly when he is somewhere lacking the inspiration for such feelings. In “Lines written above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth/the speaker explains that the beautiful forms of Tintern Abbey have often been to him “as a landscape to a blind man’s eye.” The memory of the beauty of Tintern Abbey serves to console the speaker during moments of absence from such beauty (i.e. loss of the beauteous forms). The speaker explains:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration: — feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure;
Perhaps the best explanation of this mechanism for using memory to acquire lost feelings actually comes from Wordsworth’s writing partner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” Coleridge recounts an experience where because of an injury he is forced to stay home while his friends go off on a brief nature walk. Although he cannot join them, he realizes that he can use his current surroundings and his memory of past walks to excite his emotions and suffer no loss resulting from his current debilitated state. For Wordsworth and Coleridge then, the goal of contemplating memories is provide pleasure when none is currently at hand.
Gibson seems to use “memory” not to provide pleasure, at least not in its traditional definition, but instead to satisfy gaps in his identity. The speaker of “Agrippa” uses pictures, rather than poetry or nature or memories of them as Wordsworth does, to provoke an experience. What makes this interesting is that these are not all pictures of moments that Gibson had experienced. Many of the pictures are of his deceased father, of which Gibson would only have sparse memories. In this sense, Gibson’s speaker is not “rehearsing” a memory as much as he is “constructing” memory. I should be more clear: according to Constructivist Theory, all remembering is a revision of the memory. In other words, every time we remember an experience, the act of remembering the event inevitably alters the memory and constructs a new version of it; therefore, no memory is ever accurate. It seems pretty clear that Wordsworth was aware that his “rehearsal” or contemplation of a memory altered the memory, but that it did not matter as long as the use of the memory produced the desired passions. Gibson, on the other hand, is starting with the prosthetic of the memory, but without the memory, and proceeds from there. His contemplation of the prosthetic constructs a type of “false” memory or “wishful” memory. Given that our identity is defined by our memories, by purposefully tampering with or constructing “memories,” Gibson’s narrator is satisfying a gap in his identity: the loss of a father. Both Gibson and Wordsworth then are using memory to counteract loss.
Now that we have established why memories are useful and how they may be used, we should consider what is eligible as a prosthetic of memory and what may be signified by the creation of a prosthetic of memory. Is a prosthetic of memory anything that triggers a memory or only something that created with the intention of triggering a memory? If a prosthetic of memory is anything that triggers a memory, then it seems impossible to avoid having such prosthetics and certainly difficult to control them. Freudian psychology suggests that we actively repress certain memories, but Freud believed that the triggers still remain, only recast into something the conscious ego would not recognize. Therefore, dirt and clutter triggers a seemingly unintelligible emotional response from individuals with an “anal retentive” personality because it is subconsciously reminds the individuals of bad potty-training experiences. The purpose of psychoanalysis then is to uncover the hidden connection between trigger and emotional response.
The purposefully-created prosthetics we have seen from Wordsworth and Gibson include poems, people, places, and pictures. Each of these were created, visited, or selected to help at some later time in the act of remembering. Wordsworth ultimately believes that memory is useful in evoking passions and the purpose of poetry is to provoke powerful feelings, so it is natural that he creates poems with the purpose of acting as a prosthetic to his memory, as well as function similarly for his audience. Wordsworth also uses places such as Tintern Abbey to remember his previous experiences. And, even more interesting, Wordsworth uses children (in “Intimations”) and his sister (in “Tintern Abbey”) to help conjure memories/feelings. Gibson selects pictures to help in his memory construction. If we define a prosthetic of memory as something purposefully created to aid in the function of memory, we have to recognize that by doing so, we are also purposefully altering our identity. Gibson most obviously does this, but we can also use our own experience with pictures as evidence. All we have to do is consider what we take pictures of and how we take them to understand that we are hoping to alter some future remembrance. Why do we smile in pictures? Do we want to create the illusion that we are always happy? I remember watching a movie once where the main character only took pictures of the most inane things (e.g. hotel rooms) and never anything more traditional (e.g. monuments, people). When asked why, he explained that he would never forget the important things, so he took pictures of the unimportant things to help him remember. The film Memento provides the best example of how we use prosthetics to alter our future memory. The character Leonard uses a variety of methods (e.g. tattoos, pictures, notes) to aid his memory because he cannot create new memories. In Memento, we get to see what happens when our prosthetics backfire on us.
Ultimately, the act of creating a prosthetics of memory is an act of identity-formation. We choose what we want to remember and what we remember helps define who we are. Who we are then informs what we choose to remember for the next time. This cycle continues for as long as we can remember.
December 10th, 2008 at 1:49 am
In the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” Wordsworth states that a poet is one who possesses, “an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events.” I agree, it seems that this conjuring is the very thing that turns a poem into poetry. In Wordsworth’s poems trees become gloomy backdrops, as nature and language become, “the anchor of [his] purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being.” Though this last quote may seem contradictory to his statement in his preface, it is actually an example of the very thing which makes his poetry function. Things are not simply things as much as they are extensions of the speaker.
For Gibson’s speaker this conjuration occurs as he gazes into a photo album. A photo of a shack and imparts the smell “of the pitch.” The use of the word ‘pitch’ is useful here because the angle of the blade acts as a mechanism to impart smell to the speaker, and not simply the smell of wood, but the smell of the saw, “biting into decades.” Indeed, the speaker is experiencing a passion he’s conjured up in himself, and something that’s outside of the real event. There might be a photo of a shack and “offcuts,” but everything else is an invention of the poet to construct an emotion. Even the electric saw is probably a fabrication, considering the year of the photo is 1919 and it’s unlikely the photographed person was using power-tools considering Raymond Dewalt invented the first non-portable electric circular saw in 1922.*
At the end of “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth puts it simply, “Nor wilt though then forget, that after many wanderings, many years of absence, these steep woods and loftly cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!” For both Gibson and Wordsworth, and probably for all that is poetic, it is not simply the objects themselves; it is the meaning given to and extracted from those objects which thereby create artifacts and poetry. Gibson goes through a photo album and can “remember” a life he never lived, just as Wordsworth can go to a hillside and imbue it with a decade of absence. Both these authors are conjuring up an experience they have or haven’t had, as most authors do. To quote Blake, “Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth,” by creating an image of an event Gibson and Wordsworth create a meaning that is both outside the event and the essence of the event they are describing.
1) Raymond Dewalt devised the first radial arm saw in 1922, using a circular saw blade. This dewalt circular saw wasn’t portable, but it was certainly more versatile than the conventional saws of the day. http://www.insidewoodworking.com/saws/circular_saw.html
December 11th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Under the theme of prosthetics of memory, I think there are many comparisons that can be made between Gibson’s “Agrippa” and what Rachel experiences in Blade Runner. Both Rachel and the narrator in “Agrippa” are dealing with the constructions of memories through photographs. These constructions are different for both, but the consequences of reconstructing memories, which may or may not be based in reality, effect how these characters view themselves and their lives. Rachel’s memories of her childhood are fully constructed around the photograph she has of her and her mother. Similarly, the narrator in the poem is piecing together his past through a photo album. Both are relying on these images to help them identify themselves.
The idea of memories are skewed because both characters have little to no recollection of the times portrayed in the pictures. The importance of building a story around these pictures shows us that having a past, even if it is constructed, is an important part of being human. This is showed in the construction of the memories by Tyrell for Rachel. The company gave her these memories because it will make her more “human-like,” even though she is a replicent. Because she has access to some idea of her childhood and past, she is seen as having the important qualities of being human. This idea is also put forth by Gibson. The narrator must construct this past for himself because without a history he is somehow less human.
This also brings up the issues that surround reality. Both characters create their own past, even though it not necessarily based in reality. The photographs provide a way from them both to justify that they indeed are based in some reality of the past, though the memories they have are not real, but based off their own interpretations. This idea can also bring up the question of whether or not memories are ever real or based in reality. If we believe we remember something, even if did not happen, is it any less real then something that did in fact take place but we have no recollection of? This is one of the questions in both these pieces. If memories are not real, then why is there a basic human drive to identify ourselves on our past and memories. Maybe it is not whether these things are real, but it is more important that we have them. The similarities between both the characters need to create a past for themselves through memories and snapshots of their past is the idea of the prosthetics of memory. Even fake, or created, memories seem to be more reassuring then having no memory at all. It is one of the things that makes us feel human.
December 11th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
My post has two purposes: first, to respond to Chad’s post, and second, to try to address one of the Wordsworth poems we didn’t cover during class last week.
Chad’s post offers a lot to take in and digest, but there’s one section in particular that I’d like to reexamine. When he is discussing the similarities and differences in the ways in which Wordsworth and Gibson use prosthetics of memory, he highlights that “the speaker of ‘Agrippa’ uses pictures, rather than poetry or nature or memories of them as Wordsworth does, to provoke an experience.” He goes on to claim, “What makes this interesting is that these are not all pictures of moments that Gibson had experienced.”
While I do think that this is a valid point, I would argue that the rhetorical situations of the poems themselves—“Agrippa” and “Tintern Abbey”—are actually more similar than Chad’s distinction may allow for. I would argue that the act of looking down at an abbey and the act of looking at a picture are themselves experiences, and these experiences, however constructed they might be, are the prosthetics of memory, not the actual photographs because it is the experience that becomes the poem, not the Abbey, and not the album.
Perhaps I’m thinking about this too literally, but Gibson does use poetry. As readers, we are not looking at the pictures, just as we are not looking at the area surrounding Tintern Abbey. We are looking at words on a page created by men who used vision—a constructed medium because of the very technology of sight (i.e. cones, rods, receptors in the brain, neurons firing, etc. etc.)—to (re)formulate a certain view of any variety of things: their lives, past, present, and future; their memories; their identities.
I’m not sure if I’ve presented any of this in any clear or helpful manner, but I think it is the poems themselves that are the prosthetics, not the artifacts they poetically represent.
The second part of my post comes from a long-standing gripe I’ve had with Wordsworth. About six years ago, way back when I was a senior in college, my senior seminar class for English majors was entirely on Wordsworth. As a younger reader of Wordsworth, his treatment of the everyday rustic annoyed me so much that my senior thesis focused on the Wordsworthian or Egotistical Sublime. I specifically focused on the poems “Nutting” and “Resolution and Independence” (great reads if you have time—also check out Lewis Carroll’s parody of “Resolution and Independence,” “Haddock’s Eyes”). I’d like to believe that my scholarly mind has developed in the intervening years, so I won’t bore you with my theories about these poems, but I will say that as I was reading “A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones,” I was once again struck by that twinge of annoyance I felt all of those years ago.
In “A Narrow Girdle,” after reminiscing about the care-free nature of the group’s walk, their “vacant mood,” their willingness to stop frequently and observe “some tuft / Of dandelion seed or thistle’s beard,” a noise is heard. They follow the busy sounds of the season—the harvest—and happen upon a man. Wordsworth writes, “Through a thin veil of glittering haze was seen / Before us, on a point of jutting land, / The tall and upright figure of a Man / Attired in peasant’s garb, who stood alone, / Angling beside the margin of the lake. / “Improvident and reckless,” we exclaimed, / “The Man must be, who thus can lose a day / Of the mid harvest, when the labourer’s hire / Is ample, and some little might be stored / Wherewith to cheer him in the winter time.”
As I read this, I felt my 21-year old self rear up in the back of my head and scream incredulously, “Improvident and reckless?! The nerve! Where’s Keats when I need him?” Keats called the egotistical nature of Wordsworth poetry the egotistical sublime (Hazlitt was a bit nicer and simply called it the Wordsworthian sublime).
In a class on the Prosthetics of Memory, I think it’s interesting to point to one of Wordsworth’s many moments of convenient “forgetting” in his poetry. Wordsworth is keen to point out the misconception the travelers have about their fishing rustic, but their initial abhorrence for this man’s perceived laziness or wastefulness forces me (both young and old me) to question why the Man’s actions are perceived as different—or not acknowledged as similar to—the group’s own leisurely afternoon. Of course, the class differences must be taken into account, but Wordsworth (the speaker) seems ideologically different from a previous Wordsworth (the supporter of the French Revolution).
It is perhaps important to note that in this construction of blog post, I revived an earlier “me,” through the prosthetics of a poem. Does Wordsworth simply forget to remember an earlier Wordsworth?
December 12th, 2008 at 10:57 am
this blog entry is on Memento, but i didn’t see the entry open yet so i’m just going to post it here… =)
In this blog posting, I would like to discuss the theme of absence of memory as the driving force that triggers many of the events and situations in Memento.
Despite suffering from anterograde amnesia, Leonard wakes up every morning and eventually gets ready for another day geared towards revenge. I’ve pondered for a while how he might be able to constantly be in such a high alert mode and anger every time; the guy is not easily amused for sure, and is always intense, ready to kill. However, it struck me that perhaps because the last tangible memory he has is of the attack and associating it with the death of his wife (however true the memory might be), and because he is incapable of creating and storing any new memories after the event, Leonard is constantly greeted with grief. As he says in the movie, “can’t remember to forget you,” not having the memory of grieving effectively prevents Leonard from healing from the loss, therefore placing him in an emotional state of tremendous loss and grief every time his memory slate is cleared. Therefore, it can be argued that Leonard’s absence of memory deprives him of going through all the stages of grief and this unmanageable grief consequently drives his revenge.
Another consequence of Leonard’s absence of memory is his morality. As people often say, how can one be truly sorry if he doesn’t even know what he did wrong? In Leonard’s case, he has no way of ever knowing of the crimes he committed, the lives he took, because he cannot store and remember these memories. Leonard therefore does not have a conscience, or more specifically guilty conscience. His condition, of lacking new memories, fuels Leonard’s confidence in the facts he collects, and therefore, confidence, or arrogance, in himself as the ultimate judge of the truth. Therefore, whatever crime he commits and decides to remember by recording it, he will feel is justified, as he feels when he avenge his wife’s death repeatedly. What crimes and wrongdoings Leonard chooses to not record, therefore gets disregarded and he can never again recall those wrongdoings, making him lack the guilty conscience.
Lastly, absence of memory aids Leonard in shaping his identity. As mentioned before, Leonard’s condition disables him from making new memories: however, this condition also gives Leonard the full control of what he chooses to remember, by giving him the power to be selective in the evidences and facts derived from memories. For instance, his condition limits him in that the last memory he has is of the rape of his wife. However, there are evidences from the movie that suggests that Leonard really may have been the case of Sammy Jankis, and caused the death of his wife through accidental insulin overdose. Leonard’s condition naturally makes him forget the memory of him assisting in his wife’s death, consequently getting rid of his guilt, and allowing him to assume a better, perhaps more manageable identity as a revenger for his wife’s death. Leonard can conveniently pick and choose his identity as he pleases, as long as he has the ‘facts,’ instant polaroid pictures and notes written on pieces of papers, from the past to justify his actions and prove their validity.
In watching and analyzing the movie, we spend so much time focusing on what is present, but when we examine the effects of the absence of things, it brings another perspective, a reverse view, if you will, of the movie that further enhances the experience that is watching Memento.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
William Gibson’s Agrippa challenges the limits of memory engagement by portraying two distinct mediums, poetry and technology, as forces which are both capable of determining the dimensions of expression. It is crucial to characterize the insistence of technology within the poem as the work’s actual poetic form is wholly mediated through Gibson’s dependency on human materials as language. Human materials, while a somewhat vague conception of cultural symbols, communicates the mythic construction of a culture of tools that could subsequently produce the functionality of a modernized existence. Gibson sees a culture that exalts its mechanistic aspects. Imbuing within culture a profound awareness of the expansiveness associated with the emergence of thriving interconnectivity beyond human to human relations, now capable of incorporating the machine into humanity.
However, Gibson seems to be most chiefly concerned with capturing the variety of ways in which technological tools have been misconstrued as mere devices that reliably serve tangible purposes. Instead Gibson sees technology as so thoroughly integrated into reality that it now takes on the force of a system of symbolic expression. Gibson hones in on the projection of autonomy that rests in an almost imperceptible fashion within the tools, and he does so by his choice of framing the form of Agrippa. There is an abruptness to his lines that establishes a frantic rhythm to the poem, but beyond that he will use the isolation of particular lines to reinforce the fantasy of separation humans cling to when contemplating their startling world of materials. A brief investigation into a portion of the poem will demonstrate this:
A lapel-device of Masonic origin
A patent propelling-pencil
A fountain-pen
And the flowers they pose behind so solidly
Are rooted in an upright length of whitewashed
concrete sewer-pipe
(Gibson 46-51)
Gibson plays with the notion of distinguishing materials from each other, as though each were separate thoughts to mull over and envision in their specificity. Yet, the sensation that is produced is instead more akin to a blur of absurdly specific tools that even in and of themselves suggest hybridity, which Gibson cleverly addresses with his referencing of hyphenated tools. The final image of the lines leaves the reader with the presumed natural beauty of flowers framed within the dimensions of the technological underbelly, the materials of the sewer system. While these lines can be thought to accentuate a sort of sanitation brought on by technological imposition, I instead see Gibson as making a declaration towards realizing the essential machinery that contributes towards the projection of a reality beyond transcendental revelation. Agrippa’s poetry suggests that memory, humanity, and machine are all encompassed within the same ephemeral reality, which lacks definitiveness and thereby flourishes in its subversive ripples. Represented here in layer after layer of poetry lines that read like literary soundbites, that displace conclusiveness altogether.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Christopher Nolan’s Memento offers a protagonist whose identity is in perpetual flux, and not unlike a palimpsest, Lenny’s memory has a blankness that continually washes over experience in order to provide him with a persistent, static identity. This scenario can be formulated as a symptom of the postmodern condition of aporia (or even stasis), or it could also be thought of as contributing to a particular brand of psychoanalysis that revolves around mortality and the death drive by contemplating what unconscious prerogatives may exist within the development of identity via creativity. Reflecting on Memento I am drawn to the ways in which it engages with a desire to eschew finality. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the film in Lenny’s decision which triggers the plot and fittingly concludes the backwards film: the decision to pursue Teddy. Lenny’s revelation, which Teddy grants him, that he is continually reenacting a revenge that can never be satiated does not deter Lenny from jotting down Teddy’s license plate number in order to make him the next target of his unending hunt for vindication. However, Lenny does not solve the problem outright, instead he consciously provides himself with a patchwork of clues and leads that will allow him to methodically reach the pinnacle of his existence, carrying out the actual revenge murder.
Within Lenny there seems to be an impulse to draw out his own narrative, to make a plot which he has no choice but to meander through. In a way, this can be construed as the intentionally nuanced devices of plot and narrative that are put in place in order to resist the inevitable closure that awaits every story of revenge Lenny relives. Psychoanalysis is capable of treating this action as an unconscious, or maybe in Lenny’s case, conscious, decision to prolong the dramas of life in order to subvert the inerasable presence of death that lingers within every action. It may not be a fear of mortality that compels this action, but instead a distinct delight that stems from one’s ability to actively take part in both creation and recreation, and perhaps this is where Lenny’s desire to provide himself with the limited information required to initiate the thrill of renewed exploration, mystery, and the fleeting gratification of resolution. Furthermore, Lenny’s existence might reflect a reflex embedded within the process of decoding any textual experience, which is the desire to remain unaware of one’s role in a world of physical, mental, and symbolic limits.
December 12th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Memento
Leonard kills people because he’s a broken everyman. His inability to create new memories disadvantages him in that he is unable to overcome his past. If he accepts that he’s finished his task he will only be left with his last true memory, that of being a victim. Therefore, it is empowering for Leonard to be a killer.
In the beginning of the course we were given a quote about transcendence in romanticism. By the end of a romantic novel, we should have a feeling of having crossed some sort of boundary, having gained some sort of knowledge. Leonard presents us with a complication because even if he were to complete his task and remember it, the most reward he could get out of it would be a tattoo. He could potentially tattoo himself with the knowledge he’d killed his wife’s murderer, but he would be unable to transcend or accept it by face value. The tattoo, or artifact of the event, can never replace the real.
Memento both confirms and denies the romantic principle of transcendence. Leonard is laughing in the face of the mechanism, he’s stuck in the process. Leonard is the everyman. He’s a conventional character that has an irresolvable struggle. Just as Teddy observes, “I thought you’d remember, but you didn’t.” Leonard knows the “justice” he inflicts will be forgotten, and therefore he must create an “unsolvable puzzle” to stay in his amnesiac reality. If Leonard were to tattoo himself to remember he’d completed his task, he would open himself to his weakness. It would be the irrefutable proof through his only system of memory, of a thing that never happened.
December 12th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
For Wordsworth:
During Rami and Beth’s presentation, they asked us to write down what our first memory was. We focused more on the act of unconsciously recalling things that have happened in our past rather than the act of forcing our minds to remember certain facts that we wish to later recall. As we are all gearing up for finals, I’m sure everyone is cringing at the massive amounts of dates, names, places, and definitions you will need to later spew out for a final exam later this week. My question lies here—after winter break, how much you will remember? I’m sure by this point you are all laughing because you will not remember a large majority of the stuff you spent hours hovered over, creating acronyms, and highlighting a rainbow in your textbook.
In high school, my English teacher would give us the exact same grammar test once a month. He claims memorization was the simplest form of human thinking. But as much as we try to control our memory, is it possible to decide what we will remember and what we will not? For me, I could not tell you a single general in the Civil War (though I had American History last semester) but I could sing you every word of the Spice Girls album that came out when I was about 12 years old. In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth says he remembered “ensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart” from his time spent there as a child. Similarly, I find it much easier to remember experiences rather than facts or figures. However, the things I remember with great ease are usually things I never made a conscious effort to remember. So does my memory then control me because I cannot control it? Do my memories form who I am as a person? I think yes. When getting ready to make an action I often think about the time I made the action before. What were the results? How did people react? How did I feel afterwards? Those questions then guide whether or not I make that same decision again. As for the things I forget, would I have acted differently had I remembered them? If the answer is yes, then my memory controls and sometimes even defines who I am.
December 12th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Memento:
As a fellow presenter of Memento, I would like to add on a respond to what Jo said in her blog. First of all, she points out that because Leonard’s last memory is such a horrible one, he wakes up every day enraged and his constant grief drives him to seek revenge. I wonder, however, if that is the first thing he remembers every morning. He says a few times throughout the movie that he wakes up expecting his wife to be there and has to piece together why she isn’t. While only a brief delay in understanding that his wife is gone, he does have this time sort out in his mind what he wants to do. When he then looks in the mirror and sees his tattoos about his wife being raped and murdered, he then seems enraged and decided to repeatedly seek revenge. Getting that tattoo and leaving himself cues to make sure he looks at it every morning are decisions he makes when he believes he has all the facts of the day. He is not simply a robot that is on a vengeance autopilot, he makes sure before he goes to sleep that his tomorrow will look exactly like his day. I do agree with Jo, however, that because he relearns about her death every day, he never has the appropriate time to mourn over his loss. Perhaps if he could remember for long enough, he would move on and decide not to seek revenge on her killer.
The other thing that caught my attention is her point on morality. She claims he cannot be sorry because he cannot remember and therefore his morality is not in question here. I disagree though because I believe that it is still a part of his nature to kill. If I woke up with no short-term memory and my last memory was tragic, I can guarantee that while I would be horribly distraught and angry, my reaction would not include trying to kill the man responsible. I can guarantee this because it would never be in my nature to actively seek out a person to end their life regardless of their actions. The fact that Leonard jumps to that conclusion in his mind leads me to believe that killing is a part of his nature- something he’s used to. Also, Leonard himself says that even if he cannot remember killing his wife’s murderer, it still happened and his memory of it doesn’t matter. So if he kills other people and doesn’t remember it, it still happened and he is still responsible.
December 12th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Marshall McLuhan states that when man creates a medium, like a tattoo, he is outering some aspect of his senses. We normally experience events with each of the senses, and record them that way in our memories. When we outer a sense or faculty in a material technology, the ratio of importance among our perceptive and cognitive systems is altered. The outered sense becomes a closed system, unable to mutate and reconstruct itself, unlike mental functions that have not been outered. When the printed word became the dominant medium as a result of Gutenberg’s printing press, the visual rose to the fore, and became yoked to the forms of the medium.
Before the popularity of the printed word and widespread literacy, tradition was imputed orally. People who have not created memory prosthetics must rely on organic memory. It is believed that pre-literate man in, for example, the time of Homer, would have had an enormous advantage over modern man in the field of memory. Stories could have been recalled with excellent acuity after a single telling. Once the alphabet created the possibility of permanent, detailed memory, sight became much more important. We can say the sense ratio was altered so that the visual rose in importance at the expense of memory.
Organic memory is therefore in someway replaced by text. Memory stores our experiences, but it also stores autobiographical components: what my favorite color is, what my religion is, how tall, heavy, and intelligent I am. In effect, identity is impossible without memory. Since memory is a huge part of identity, and we can create prosthetics of memory, does that mean that part of our identity is indistinguishable from the prosthetic?
McLuhan thinks that is so. When a sense or mental faculty is outered by technology into a new medium, it retains its importance for our identity, but becomes closed off from ourselves. He writes in The Gutenberg Galaxy (pg. 265) that “in beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it.” For Leonard, from Momento, the tattoo is the memory prosthetic. The tattoos are all death and revenge, paranoia and mystery. He becomes the tattoo. Never mind that in Leonard’s world those forces are appropriate and commonplace, and are all instantiated in drug dealers, murderers, and con-women. He chose that world, just as he chooses not to return to any friends and family that he remembers from before his injury, because his new world is compatible with the identity tattoed on his chest.
The tattoo hypnotizes Lenny in a way. McLuhan writes that “the formula for hypnosis is ‘one sense at a time’.” And Lenny’s tattoos “possess the power to hypnotize because it isolates the senses.” (Gutenberg, 272) In this case, not sight but memory is the most important faculty affected. All new memories are outered into pictures, captions, and tattoos, with the tattoo medium being chosen to represent purpose and identity because of its permanence. New media diminish not just sense interplay (tattoos do not convey sound, smell, or even emotional affect) but also consciousness of the media. The viewer conforms to the new form or structure unconsciously. And as Lenny is unconscious of the medium, he adopts it as part of his identity. The tattoos instruct Lenny to kill; he becomes a killer.
Where is his empathy? Lenny has the detached, coldhearted mien of a Mengele. He has no emotions for others because of the solipsism inherent in his condition. The last paragraph of Memento Mori, by Jonathan Nolan, reads: “you’re different. You’re more perfect . . . A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you’re the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn.“ He is at the center of the entire world, because he cannot remember that there is another world. He is unable to affect his emotions because he can’t remember the steps he took to affect them, giving him the emotional variability of a rock. Because he is freed from the emotional consequences of his actions, emotion itself starts to slip away. How could you explain the value of human life—to a tattoo?
December 12th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
In this blog post I want to discuss the importance of memory and language. According to Post-Modernist theory, humans define their reality through language. What separates our language from the language of animals (among many other things), is that we can talk about things that are not in our immediate present. In class we discussed whether or not the audience should have sympathy for Leonard because either way, Leonard is still a killer. Also, the way that Leonard responds quickly to things may show that he is in a sense, programmed to kill. I want to argue this because animals have an innate defense system, “fight or flight.” The reason why animals have that type of response, among other things, is that they do not have a sense of time; they cannot remember things in a sequence of events. Leonard at least has his memory from before the accident, but his absence of memory more recent memories cause him to react. He becomes impulsive because since he has no memory and therefore has no contemplation for consequence.
Leonard’s past memory contributes to his drive for revenge, but he has no memory of the sequence of events after the accident the way animals do not have that, so they may repeat the same mistakes because they have no language of consequence. Since Leonard has no language for consequence, he cannot be responsible for all his actions. He reacts the way any animal or human would if they were threatened. When Natalie was insulting his wife, he reacted the way any person or animal would if they were threatened, but his disadvantage is that he does not remember the consequences of that. We do not hold animals responsible for killing. They do it for survival or because they are threatened. He will not remember killing, so he cannot have remorse for it in the same way that animals would. If we do not have memory for the things that we do then we repeat the same mistakes. That is why history repeats itself. By documenting our history or remembering, we learn from our mistakes and we try to make it better. Animals cannot document their history and so in the same way we cannot judge Leonard for repeating the same mistakes.
December 12th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
The Prosthetics of memory is a topic that interests me greatly. While we watched Memento, I often found myself defending Lenard more then I anticipated. Though I by no means can say that I understand what people with that disorder experience, but I do sympathize. I mentioned in class that I had two post viral brain infections, one when I was three and another when I was 17. Although I do not have any major lasting cognitive damages, but my memory is altered. I cope with my memory by keeping a detailed schedule and I write down whatever important comes into though my mind; although my system is not as sophisticated as Lenard’s and are not the nearly lengths that he must go through, but it works the same. Lenard and I share the feeling of frustration. It is the emotion you get when you know you can do something, you know you are capable of memory, but for some reason you can’t. This is what I believe that Lenard symbolizes this frustration that every American can identify with. One person’s frustrations may come from financial difficulties or health issues or some stressful family situation. It is a sense of being incapable of doing something that others can perform. Though Lenard is frustrated that he can not store short term memory, he is also frustrated by the perpetual guilt that comes from not being able to avenge his wife. His circumstances are unique because he is stuck in a continual circuit of grief anger and a need for revenge. Sammy Jenkins and his wife’s story symbolize this perpetual frustration as well. Specifically the wife’s frustration with the oppressive system is represented. She just wanted validation that the person that she once knew is gone, but because of the unjust healthcare system that cared more about money, she could not come to terms with the loss of her husband. Lenard’s disorder strongly represents the frustration that is felt in many people. \
I would stop short of saying that Lenard represents the every man because of his lack of a moral code. Although he can not remember that he killed the man who murdered his wife already, there is a clear point in the end where he takes advantage of his disorder to murder someone purposely. This is the point where one could identify him as a serial killer. However, I would argue that he kills him out of frustration of people manipulating him. Lenard realizes that it is very easy to manipulate him, as people constantly do throughout the film. Therefore when he is informed that Jimmy is manipulating him to kill others for his personal gains, he decides to murder him. I believe that Jimmy took the picture that would have reminded Lenard that he avenged his wife’s death so that he could continually manipulate him into killing.
December 12th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I am going to comment about the film, Momento, but since I did not see a space to do so, it will just have to be here. My comment refers to yesterday’s class discussion of is Leonard a victim and can be considered an everyman? I really do believe that Leonard is the victim of the film. I believe that anyone with a mental illness is a victim. These people do not ask by anyone to be afflicted with such a disorder and yes, they do have horrific consequences sometimes, such as the case is with Leonard. He cannot help what he does because he has no memory. Perhaps some of his actions were bad, but people should try to understand the circumstances of his situation. He does not commit the bad deeds because he wants to, but because he does not know any better. I mean, can we really blame a mentally retarded person for going off on a person that mocks them or calls them stupid? I don’t think so.
This leads to my next point. Leonard is an everyman. I touched briefly on this in class yesterday and I think that I am right. Leonard, in his mind, has been scorned and craves revenge. It is human nature. People say that Ghandi quote about “An eye for an eye will make the world blind,” but a lot of them are the same people who support the Jena 6, which was a case about a boy who was seeking an act of revenge, so they are just hypocrites. Anyway, if a person’s daughter is maliciously murdered, of course, the father or mother will want to see the villain suffer. A person cannot rest until their loved ones are avenged because it is justice. It is just a human instinct, end of story.
December 12th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Memento
One thing I think that is so interesting about the movie and connects back with Wordsworth is “remembering” and what the act of remembering really is.
The word re-membering is much like Wordsworth’s word choice of re-collection. Does Leonard have true “memories” from his life pre-accident or is he simply piecing together feelings and moments to construct himself a feeling or memory which he wants to be real? The latter can be seen especially through the scene with Natalie where he “re”members her - you don’t see a full moment; you see bits and pieces of moments that he pieces together well enough to know that he is angry she is gone.
Memories may have a direct connection with our past and an event that occured, but the act of remembering said memories is always in the present. We cannot remember in the past, or how we felt at that time. When we remember something, that memory is shaped by the in-between moments, and so a memory we have can be different if we remember it after a year, or after five or ten years. Though memories are often though to be objective things - something happened, I remember, fact; the act of remembering that memory is and always will be subjective.
For Leonard in “Memento”, the act of remembering is a construct, just like him. Teddy continually tells him “You don’t know who you are” and Leonard replies - “I’m Leonard Shelby, from San Franscico” to which Teddy says “That’s who you were - not who you are.”
Just like memories, Leonard has been shaped by his actions and emotions since the accident, despite his inability to remember them. The audience sees Leonard constructing himself - through polaroids, tattoos, etc. Though these things cannot be taken as fact, Leonard chooses to take them as fact. He is shaping himself by choice, to be something which he believes he needs to be to find his wife’s killer. Much like memories, which can change with whatever occurs inbetween the memory and remembering, we construct them to serve whatever purpose we need them to (at any given time).
December 12th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Since my presentation on Agrippa, I have taken a 180 in regards to some of my ideas about the poem. I think I have gotten a little closer to understanding the properties of the mechanism that Gibson posits, and the poem has changed from being a mass of clues and non-sequiturs to a unified whole. The most obvious question the first time reader has is “what is the mechanism?” The question is obvious, and the fact that the poem directly addresses it only seems to confuse the issue. Gibson writes:
The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The Shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
The camera is held by the subject, which according to the philosophical definition is the thinking feeling entity, and pointed at the object, which is external to the subject’s mind. The use of the mechanism necessarily delineates who is the subject and what is the object. And yet when the mechanism produces a medium, like a photo, that distinction is undermined. The viewer automatically identifies with the object. Just as we identify with the hero of a novel, we identify with the object of a photo. The message of the medium is incorporated into the subject’s memory, and becomes accepted. The media vision of the past becomes our past; even though, because we have identified ourselves with the object, it is not really any objective past. We have identified with the object and it therefore exists not in the past but in a separate version of our own time. Of course, the camera is just one such mechanism.
Let us investigate some of the others for a moment. The electric saw is a unique mechanism in the poem because its process in the poem is entirely metaphoric. The saw bites into decades just as father’s photos bring William back decades in time. As he scans the photos of and by his father, William begins to identify with the object. For a moment he becomes his father, and is subject to that man’s sensations, the smell in his nose and the taste in his mouth incidental to standing in a saw-mill.
The electric saw is a powerful image because it implies an absolutely standard subject-object dichotomy. The subject uses the saw necessarily on an unthinking object, which here is wood. You could use a saw on a subject, a conscious entity, but lets suppose right now that when I say ‘saw’ none of you immediately leap into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Wood is a non-thinking object, external to the subjects consciousness. However, through the photo and Gibson’s identification with his father, the saw-mill is cutting into time and memory. Gibson is asserting that the saw mechanism separates subject from object, but that through the photo the saw is actually uniting the viewer and the subject. Gibson can actually taste and feel “the sweet hot reek” of the wood because the saw cuts it.
Finally, the gun is a powerful mechanism. It appears in the poem a few times, and one of Dennis Ashbaugh’s etchings featured the gun as well. Certainly it mirrors the tropes of death and danger in The Book of The Dead (the poem is partly a homily on the dangers of media). It also separates the object and subject, making them the ‘empowered’ and ‘threatened’. Are bullets a medium? The quote that begins Memento Mori, Jonathan Nolan’s short story and the basis for Memento, is by Herman Melville: “What like a bullet can undeceive!” Like a medium, as we use it we forget about it. Just as by being gripped by a book we forget about interpreting the symbols of the alphabet, grammar, or even the concrete book we have in our hands and just fall into its world, Gibson forgets about the gun—until a round ricochets off a rock and nearly kills him.
One would think that the gun uniquely separates object and subject. How can the user of the gun identify with the mind of the object, if the use of the gun ‘ends’ the object? Yet Gibson implies this is not so. The gun reminds him that he is
Absolutely alone
In awareness of the mechanism.
Like the first time you put your mouth
on a woman.
Gibson is separated from everything that he interacts with through the mechanism. Even oral sex, part of an act that promotes spiritual unity and is opposite to loneliness, causes Gibson to separate himself from everything interacted with through the medium. He is claiming that the awareness of the mechanism of a clitoris alienates him from his partner, makes him “absolutely alone”. Gibson’s world is truly lonely.
December 15th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Just checking the time stamps. Time now: 7:39
December 17th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Authors note again: Sorry, I seem to have lost my critical response mojo—more bloggy op-ed.
“Me-e-e-mories are made of this, da, da, dada, daDA, da, da . . .” Does anyone remember this song? Perhaps you’ve never heard it or of it. Perhaps you’ve heard it on an oldies radio show? Maybe you remember hearing your parents play it on their phonograph? Perhaps you remember what a phonograph is? If I heard the song, “Memories are made of this,” the first time it was ever played and you heard it played on an oldies show in 2007, is your memory less real than mine? If I used a phonograph, or stereo record player, for years and you have only seen one in a movie that is set in the sixties, is my memory more real? Is the phonograph I used more real than the one you saw in the film? My comments are aimed more toward the earlier class discussions that looked at the relative realness of memories. Hmmm, seems the realness thing is my personal theme. Well, like my comments on reality, I don’t think memories exist in a hierarchy of realness. I could see some differentiation based on their relatively to a particular use or point of view, but that would not indicate a memory was “more” or “less” real. The event that one remembers is presumably a real event, but does the accuracy of the memory affect its reality? A more pertinent question might be, and one touching on Memento themes in particular, does the memory affect the reality of the event? (Be warned—I fully intend[ed] to raise many more specific questions than I will attempt to even tentatively answer)
Someone who is invested in the worldview which insists there is one true reality and deviation from it indicates falseness or delusion would say the event that occurs is real and any memory that is “inaccurate’ would be unreal and a subversion of reality. In a way, this would concur with Annie Dillard (in a totally unrelated book, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek) who related a instance of living in the moment, familiar to Zen Buddhists and other Eastern spiritual practitioners, which produced for her a revelation—the immediate experience only exists at the exact moment it is experienced and any subsequent attempt to remember, recreate, or capture the moment is just an attempt to describe something real and is not reality. I say ‘in a way’ because the true reality believer would probably argue that an accurate memory is real—which opens a whole other can of worms. Someone who takes an even slightly more flexible view might look at how an inaccurate memory could affect reality by influencing current events through decisions or attitudes based on faulty memories. So, the faulty memory would not be “real,” and yet, it would surely be part of the reality that would not exist if it hadn’t been there to affect it. So, causal relations would seem to have some impact on the relative status of memory as reality. So there it is and on it goes. There are multiple frames, arguments, and relations that can be applied; like the character in the new Jim Carrey movie, I tend to say “yes” to everything. In my world of multiple, fluid, infinitely unique, and endlessly intersecting realities, everything is true/real, and every memory is real. Oh, I forgot to mention the Idealist philosophy, which state the only reality is in the present, and which I interpret to conjecture that when one remembers something, they create a new reality of that memory as they bring it into their current consciousness. And yes, you can change the past because what you are doing is accessing a different past that shifts you into the present reality that included that past. Yes, I do remember going off; yes, I have turned this into way too much of a personal reflection; yes, I will gladly go down any road: yes, you can watch me fall, or yes, you can see soldier on—that part is up to you.
It’s been fun
December 17th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Oops, an addendum–I went off on my usual ADD tangent and forgot to bring it back to one point of connection to Memento. We’re talking about the accuracy of memories etc, and everyone in Memento is involved in altering or verifying memories to the end of influencing the present which comes ’round to the previous post. Also, I just though it was interesting in our Prosthetics of memory section, I didn’t know memento was from the Latin for remember, but here we are with an English noun for an artifact that acts as a prosthetic for memory and the verb for remembering being the same thing. Cool, and I’m sure it says something about the whole relation of memory to reality thing though I’m not sure how to phrase. I know, you all probably got that long ago, but hey, I’m the guy who did not notice that the name the Beatles is a play on the work beat until sometime around 1976.