Photographs and Memories

    It began, with a batch of photos, the old type, the ones printed on paper.  The benefit of such old-school paper photos, I should note, is that you can not only frame them to display, but when you mail them to others --especially if they're from 25 years ago-- it comes as a total surprise.  So I was doing just that, gathering up some photos from decades ago, adding a little letter to go with them, and dropping them in the mail to old friends.  But unbeknownst to me, when I returned home there would be a letter from one of my friends with...photos of me from decades ago.  I bring this up because I was thinking of the day when I'm gone and someone has to clean out my desk and comes across these hundreds and hundreds of photos.  Who are these people, he or she might say, right before dumping the entire batch into the trash.  And rightfully so (imagine going through your grandparents' photos).  So, what better time than now to start mailing the photos I had back to the people I knew, those who likely had children or siblings or someone to pass them on to? 

     There was a similar reflection in The London Review of Books in which Andrew O'Hagan was reviewing the book Extinct: Everyone know the feeling at four o'clock in the morning when you're suddenly unsure what any of the family's belongings have to do with you.  It can add to the grief.  'It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us,' Ibsen wrote.  'It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and forth.  They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them.'   And thus it was with my photos...even after mailing so many out, hundreds more clung to me as if I alone would have to make the decision to toss them.  And what IS that about?  You can’t alter history, wrote Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic. You can, however, change your perception of it.  The next best thing to a time machine is rewriting the story of your memories, making the baggage of your past a little lighter on your shoulders as you travel through the present and future...modern neuroscience shows that memory is more about reconstruction than retrieval.  Each time we conjure up the past, a part of the parietal lobe called the angular gyrus pieces together various bits of stored information to assemble a memory.  This process is a biological marvel but prone to change with time, as researchers have shown in various ways over the past few decades...We look to days gone by to figure out who we are and why we are doing what we’re doing now.  To make past information fit our current circumstances, friends, and enterprises, we often unconsciously edit our memories.

     I am consistently amazed at how some people can go back generations, well past grandparents and still know their history.  Rosemary Hill described her search for her father in LRB and gave a glimpse of life back in the day near London: Which brings us back to my family, who stayed on at the hutments until about 1928.  As a sample of the working class in England between the world wars their story is not untypical in its oblique relationship to national events and its private sufferings, borne with a mixture of stoicism and embarrassment.  By the time of the 1921 census, the inhabitants of 11 Mars Avenue had between them been caught up in four wars that more or less spanned the rise and fall of the British Empire.  All that is known about the oldest of them, Susannah Coomber, is that she was born in Rochester, probably in 1843, gave inconsistent accounts of her age, and on the rare occasions when she was required to engage with legal formalities made her mark with a cross, being unable to write her name.   ER doc Thomas Fisher is a bit more sanguine in his enlightening book, The Emergency: My grandmother was a robust, stout woman who kept the home.  It's hard to recognize her in photos, as she always seemed to be shrouded in a large dress and wearing a scowl, but the grandma I knew shared a ready laugh and plenty of lessons.  My grandfather operated an elevator at a meat-packing company and died when I was two.  In photos, he wears denim overalls and a part in his hair, and he never smiled.  Both of those are snippets more than I can recall of my grandparents; and beyond them, my ancestral life is pretty much a mixture of folklore and embellishment, words and photos providing a billionth or less of lives hopefully well-lived, lives which somehow took such a random path that it gave life to me.

     And that life is so tenuous.  Take this from Discover on what scientists believe was the first mass extinction, the Ordovician, which killed off 85% of all life then on earth: By looking through thousands of graptolite fossils, Mitchell (paleobiologist Charles Mitchell) and his colleagues noticed something curious.  The creatures were dying off, slowly, for long before the sharp decline associated with the mass extinction event.  “Graptolites (early filter feeders in the ocean) started going extinct considerably before the big pulse,” Mitchell says.  “That means that whatever caused the turnover had to have been a longer-term event.”  In other words, slow and incremental change eventually gave way to rapid decline.  Here, Mitchell sees a parallel to current human-caused shifts in global biodiversity.  Over the past century, vertebrate species have gone extinct at a rate 100 times that of the pre-industrial average.  This rate is projected to increase as global temperatures rise.  “It looks like things are occurring predictably, and then you fall off a cliff,” Mitchell says . “Right now, we are still in the phase of incremental change.  We can’t be fooled into thinking that this is manageable.”

     So what happens when "we" disappear?  Does everything we once were, from our thoughts to our accomplishments, vanish when others still alive no longer keep us in their memory? (so brilliantly captured in Pixar's Coco)   But surely our lives, our histories, and our civilizations won't go the way of the Egyptian pyramids or Angkor Wat (still the largest religious monument in the world, said Wikipedia), or the Anasazi or Mayan peoples.  But here's a quiz for you: what city was once the largest city north of Mexico, one which had structures that occupied a larger area than the pyramids of Khufu, and one which still boasts the largest earth structure in North America.  A hint: it's just 4 miles from St. Louis, MO.  Gone, and as with so many other massive cities and civilizations, the Mississippian peoples who built and lived in Cahokia have left us with only a mystery, said National Geographic.

     The New Yorker had an extensive piece on the Rosetta stone, its luck in being discovered, its shifting hands from France to Britain (but not back to Egypt), its surprisingly banal message in its collection of languages, and even its missing chunk of stone.  Said part of the article: The topmost text, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, was fourteen lines long. (It was probably about twice that length originally; the top of the slab had broken off.)  The middle section, thirty-two lines long, was in some other script, which nobody recognized. (Called Demotic, it turned out to be a sort of shorthand derived, ultimately, from hieroglyphs.)  But—eureka!—the bottom section, fifty-three lines long, was in Ancient Greek...Pieces had broken off, not just from its hieroglyphic text but from the Demotic and Greek texts as well.  What had the missing lines said?  Then, too, no one was sure, early on, which way hieroglyphic writing ran: from left to right, as in European languages, or, like Hebrew, from right to left, or even going back and forth between those two, like ribbon candy. (This last pattern is called boustrophedon, from the Ancient Greek bous, or “ox,” and strophe, or “turn” --hence, “as the ox turns” while plowing-- and was sometimes used for Ancient Greek, Etruscan, and a few other writing systems.)   Or might the text be running vertically -- perhaps top to bottom, as with traditional Chinese, or even bottom to top (much rarer, but found, for example, in ancient Berber)?  Never mind that, though.  Where did the words begin and end?  Like classical Greek and Latin, the inscriptions had no spaces, not to speak of punctuation, between words.  Were they even what Europeans called “words”?  Furthermore, whatever the would-be decoder figured out regarding one hieroglyphic text might not be transferrable to another.  Modern readers of English can go back maybe six centuries and still hope to understand a text written then.  Chaucer, who died in 1400, is readable after perhaps a day of practice.  But hieroglyphs developed over some thirty centuries. 

      Are there other languages that have yet to be translated?, asked Smithsonian.  Are we still seeking a Rosetta stone for any other culture?  Yes we are. There are three of them.  One is the Indus, which are inscriptions from the Punjab in Pakistan, and they haven't been deciphered at all.  The next one is Etruscan, and Etruscan comes from central Italy.  The third one comes from the Sudan and it is called Meroitic.  We can read that, as well, because it is written in a kind of Egyptian script.  But again we can't identify the language.  And if we can't understand certain human languages, how can we pretend to understand the languages of other sentient beings?*  Asked a piece in Discover: “It’s a very different question to ask whether animals understand death and whether they can grieve,” says Susana Monsó, a philosopher and ethicist at the Spanish National Distance Education University who specializes in animal minds.  Her book, Schrödinger’s Opossum, explores how animals understand death.  Monsó finds that some scientists insist an animal must understand death before grief can occur.  But she says grief ultimately stems from “an intense feeling of missing” an individual.  This loss also can occur when individuals are merely separated.  If we insist that understanding death is a requisite for grief, we may misunderstand mourning in animals.

     The universe was born in light, wrote Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott in The London Review of Books. If modern cosmology is right, for the first forty thousand years or so after the Big Bang the most important component in the young, hot universe was electromagnetic radiation, a situation that continued until the universe had cooled sufficiently for the first hydrogen and helium atoms to form.  Temperatures were still high enough at that point for the cosmos to be filled with an opaque, glowing plasma.  After a few hundred thousand years, as the universe continued to expand and cool, the first neutral atoms formed and a great darkness began, broken perhaps a billion years later by the appearance of the first stars.  These pioneers are thought to have been much more massive than their descendants in today's night sky, each several hundred times the mass of the sun.  Added National Geographic: ...all the visible matter we see is actually outnumbered six to one by mysterious, inert stuff we can only detect via its gravitational tug.  Unlike normal matter, we don't know what dark matter is made of yet.

     So what chance do we have after recognizing that we seem to simply come and go, and once gone --no matter how large our numbers-- we leave only fading clues as to what "we" once were.  Photographs and memories.  I've always enjoyed the philosophical view of Bertrand Russell who wrote that the best way to overcome thoughts of life fading away ...is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life...An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls.   Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being."

     Perhaps none of this matters, that just getting out and enjoying life in whatever form it takes in this time now is enough.  For my wife and I, the wildflowers in the mountains were blooming as if we humans were but blips on the screen, a falling pebble dwarfed by the ancient rocks embedded in the soil, rocks which had fallen off of even larger hillsides nearby, hillsides and mountains which had formed from an entirely different form deep below.  Or perhaps life is as jumbled as John Lennon's explanation of his song, I Am the Walrus (as explained in volume II of The Life of A Song): In 1967 John Lennon received a letter from a student at his old secondary school informing him that The Beatles lyrics were being drily analyzed in English class.  Bemused, Lennon set about writing a song so chock full of arbitrarily chosen images and recherché references that it would be completely impervious to meaningful interpretation...Lennon already had the first two lines when he received the letter.  The first, 'I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,' a kind of Derridean chain of deferred meaning, came to the songwriter during an LSD trip.  The second, 'See how they run like pigs from a gun', emerged during another narcotics-fueled haze...'Let the f***ers work that one out!' a bullish Lennon allegedly told a friend after penning a particularly convoluted verse.  And so it goes, life itself...

*Understand other beings' ways of communication?  Scientists are still puzzled over murmuration, said National Geographic.  Not sure what that means?  It's dazzling and awe-inspiring, as you can see in this video by Jan Vanijken, and as mysterious as our own ancient civilations.