Tying things together

I am feeling an urge to bring all the disparate articles I have written over the past few weeks to a conclusion today. I do not mean to suggest that I will not continue down this same path, just that my mind needs to take an ax and lop an arm off. "See! There it is, I did it!" So here is my brief attempt to wrap up a few loose ends as well as fulfill some of the things which Dr. Sexson asked us to do. But first, I want to start with a video, like I do a lot. Alan Watts is my favorite philosopher. He isn't famous or anywhere on most academic's list, but his views opened up my mind at the right age. I wanted to hear his opinions on memories. The video I found cuts some of his lectures together as well as plays a song over the top of it. The effect is interesting though I would have preferred the straight voice of the guru.



Alan Watts compares memories to echoes, saying "without resonance nothing happens, if there are no echoes you can't hear anything. That's why we are all so fascinated with recording things, taking photographs, writing them down, and above all remembering, it's a form of resonance. You see if you don't remember anything you don't know you are there." When a nice day happens with a group of friends who get together and laugh and talk, someone inevitably says, "It's too bad no one brought a camera so we could remember it." The photograph becomes the perfect representation of that day--again, an image or mnemonic for a past event which our mind's eye can find and then relive the moment. Experiencing the now is preached by several Eastern religions, which says "don't linger over memories, [don't] treasure memories, that's clinging to life because that memory has got you hooked, it holds you to the past, it holds you to death."

Because 'images' are by definition unmoving, unchanging, and idealistic, they are also dead. Life, on the other hand, is experience that is often meaningless, random, and causes mixed emotions and relative views. Everyone knows your darkest year also has good moments. Everyone knows your best year has dark moments. In class we have been discussing childhood as some sort of golden age. Hell, I love doing this too. But kids experience extreme stress too, though in a different way than we do. Memories are a yearning for death because they themselves are death--representations of a perfect golden age or a dark zone of pain. They are images which we make sense of through narrative. This happened because this happened because this happened. That is simply not true. The events which make up our lives may not be building to something, but we interpret them as they do because we remember by image and how the images interact with each other. Alan Watts says in the video something really similar to what Dr. Sexson says in class. Watts' limerick goes like this: "There was a young man who said though it seems that I know that I know. What I would like to see is the eye knows me when I know that I know that I know."

I really enjoyed Jennifer Thornburg's blog which discussed the psychologist Julian Jaynes. It's a very esoteric idea that the right brain is being spoken to by uncontrollable gods which the left brain interprets and boxes into speech. It also relates well to the video I posted earlier where the British psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, discusses the difference between the left and right brain. The left brain is authoritative and boxing, it sees the world in black and white, and where 'the self', "I", the conscious, is located. The right brain is the center of madness, full of life and experience. In the secret history of the world, The Odyssey would be less influenced by the subconscious then The Iliad because the ancients' minds were slowly being closed off. Their third eyes were sealing and their skulls were hardening, having less access to the gods' influence. As far as images go, I also agree that each word I am typing is an image itself--one that we don't really read in how we usually think about reading, rather we get a quick view and know what the picture is without having to sound it out. I think this is why Spencer's blog is so interesting. When you flip around the letters inside the words (i.e. I am diyng to tkae a nap rghit now) they are still, for the most part, understandable. Why? Because when we look at sentence, we don't sound out each individual word, we have memorized them all already, our eyes picking up the first and last letter and recalling them from memory. So words are also images. It makes sense then, for the same reason I explained above, that grammar has become increasingly complex through the centuries. Our left brains were slowly gaining control and cutting out the right. The Oral tradition, according to Walter Ong's 9 things, was everything the right brain is. I hope this tied a few things together for anyone that has been following.



I am thinking of remembering the first 51 Pokemon backwards. I will find this easy, I believe, because when I was a kid I loved all things Pokemon--the games, the tv show, the card game. I did it all, man. I loved them so much that I got to know their names well. To make it more challenging, however, I thought I would do it backwards to challenge myself more. I don't know if anyone knows what I am talking about. You know, the Pokedex? At any rate, I think I will find the task not so hard because they are already chunked into evolution species. I also remember the order of the game (at least Red and Blue) and the Pokedex kind of follows that order, though not entirely. I hope this is not too esoteric for anyone. Though I do find it interesting that video games can kind of become memory palaces which anyone can enter. To add a layer of complexity, I might also memorize their type as to not seem like I am making it too easy on myself. This actually might be a slight cop out because honestly I can't really think of anything cool to remember.