The Other Side (27 page)

       
that is certainly not the face

       
of the person one meant to become.

from
six

Page 84:
It's possible I'm not remembering right
.
Memory, in this case, means not only the power of the mind to remember things, but also the mind itself, insofar as it is regarded as the total sum of things remembered. By
memory
I do not necessarily mean any specific recollection, remembrance, impression, or reminiscence, but rather the relationship or association among impressions, sensory perceptions, and thoughts that arise out of lived experience. That is to say, human memory is relational, and fallible, and is not so much an accurate accounting of events as it is a set of processes by which we encode, store, and retrieve information. These processes depend on reinforcement, which moves the memory relationship from short-lived categories (immediate memory, working memory) to longer-lasting ones (long-term memory) by bringing together certain sensory information and discarding other information. The main feature of this process, of converting short-term information to long-term memory for storage, is loss, the forgetting of distracting information. It is no coincidence, then, that the word itself,
memory
, comes from the Anglo-French
memorie
, something written to be kept in mind; from the Latin
memoria
, a reminiscence; from the Old Norse,
Mímir
, the name of the giant who guards the Well of Wisdom; and from the Old English
murnan
, to mourn.

Page 87:
Slouching toward oblivion
.
W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Page 89:
Do not refute who I am!
Paul Celan, “O little root of a dream”:

even

here,

where you

refute me,

to the letter.

Page 96:
I look over my shoulder and see him
.
Michel Foucault discusses the relationship between spectacle and surveillance and power in “Panopticism”:

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjugation.

from
seven

Page 101:
As if relief might flow from unfamiliarity
.
Samuel Beckett,
Ohio Impromptu
: “Relief he had hoped would flow from unfamiliarity.”

from
eight

Page 122:
At first, I have a body
.
Anthony Synnott, “Tomb, Temple, Machine and Self: The Social Construction of the Body”:

Plato believed the body was a “tomb,” Paul said it was the “temple” of the Holy Spirit, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that it was a “corpse.” Christians believed, and believe, that the body is not only physical, but also spiritual and mystical, and many believed it was an allegory of church, state and family. Some said it was cosmic: one with the planets and the constellations. Descartes wrote that the body is a “machine,” and this definition has underpinned biomedicine to this day; but Sartre said that the body is the self.

from
nine

Page 129:
All I want is someone to fuck me senseless
.
The headline of a recent article by Katie Roiphe in
Newsweek
announces, “Spanking Goes Mainstream: From the steamy bestseller
Fifty Shades of Grey
to
HBO
's
Girls
, sexual domination is in vogue. Katie Roiphe on why women's power at work may be fueling the craze.” Roiphe quips, “Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can't control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn't said.”

from
ten

Page 139:
In a variation of Schrödinger's famous thought experiment
.
My description is, again, admittedly, a drastic oversimplification, this time of the work of noted quantum theorists Hans Moravec, Bruno Marchal, and Max Tegmark. See Wikipedia, “Quantum Suicide and Immortality.”

Page 144:
I wish you all the best
.
This e-mail, dated October 31, 2007, begins like this:

Hi,

I'm sorry to bother you with this message. I'm sure the last thing you want to be remembered of is our whole
break-up [ . . . ] though it's sad that that one incident probably erased in your memory and for sure overshadows the wonderful almost storybook time we had together for three years, traveling through Europe and Mexico, and well you were there, you know what we had.

Years later, I finally respond to him—
You better run, mother-fucker
—but the message comes back as undeliverable.

Page 147:
What was the word there for silence?
In “October,” Louise Glück writes:

I can't hear your voice

for the wind's cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care

what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem

pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can't change what it is—

Page 147:
In the transcript of the Venezuelan extradition trial
.
Translated by the author from the Spanish.

from
eleven

Page 170:
You should be scared
.
James Boswell, writing for
London Magazine
in 1777, offers this:

Of all the sufferings to which the mind of man is liable in this state of darkness and imperfection, the passion of fear is the severest, excepting the remorse of a guilty conscience, which however has much of fear in it, being not solely a tormenting anguish of reflection on the past, but a direful foreboding of the future; or as the sacred scriptures strongly express it, “a certain fearful looking for of judgement.”

from
twelve

Page 175:
I write everything I can't say out loud
.
One of my students at my first-ever real job is a doctoral candidate in the Child Language Acquisition Program. I ask her about what I understand to be the links between memory and narrative. She tells me about Genie, a girl who was kept in such isolation by her parents that she never learned to talk. For most of her early life she was locked in a room and tied to a potty chair; thus restrained, she was forced to sit alone day after day, and often through the night. She was discovered in 1970 at the age of thirteen, uttering only infantile gurgles, wearing only a diaper.

A team of researchers worked with Genie for years, and they eventually taught her a few simple words. She could communicate her needs and desires through gestures and ungrammatical phrases, but could not form sentences. My student explains that this case reinforces the theory that we're born with the principles of language hardwired into our genes but that there is also a deadline for learning them. If a first language isn't acquired by puberty, the theory goes, it won't be acquired at all.

My student tells me about Genie because though she lacked language, and had no chance of acquiring it, she found ways to describe her experience. When researchers tried to elicit memories of Genie's past—such as where she was sitting when she used to eat cereal—Genie could respond with language—
In the pot
, she'd say. It was clear that these memories distressed her, but more importantly, it was also clear that she could use recently acquired language to describe events that had happened before words were a part of her world. The events were not integrated into a narrative but constituted memory just the same.

Unfortunately, my student tells me, the story did not end well for Genie. When the research grants gave out, the researchers working on the case abandoned her, and while some believed she could have continued to learn, others dismissed her as “mentally retarded” (their term), at least functionally. For a while, she returned to live with her mother, who quickly found she was incapable of caring for the girl.
For years she was passed from foster house to foster house, where she was abused, beaten, ridiculed, eventually finding her way to an adult foster home. As of 2008, Genie was confined to a private institution for the mentally undeveloped.

One of the saddest things about this case, my student says, is that she was treated as a science experiment. Maybe if she had gotten supportive therapy, instead of being used as a test case for the latest theories. Maybe if they had just kept teaching her to speak. Maybe if she could have spoken. Maybe even just one story. Maybe. Maybe.

Page 177:
You don't get to write about me
.
In
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
, Frederick Douglass writes about the repeated beating of his Aunt Hester. Whatever the supposed occasion—usually some order disobeyed—in every case, the master strips her nearly naked, ties her to a hook in the wall or a joist in the middle of the room, and beats her with a thick leather whip until her blood drips to the floor. There is nothing she can do or say to stop him. No prayer. No speech. No entreaty will save her. The louder she screams the harder he whips. Decades later, as he commits this memory to his autobiography, Douglass has no words to describe the feelings with which he watched this.

When Douglass is sold to Mr. and Mrs. Auld of Baltimore, his new mistress takes it upon herself to teach Douglass to read and write. Just as Douglass begins to make progress, Mr. Auld learns what is going on and forbids his wife from
teaching their slave, insisting that “learning would
spoil
the best nigger in the world” (emphasis in original). If you teach slaves to read, he insists, they become unmanageable. There is no keeping them, and they grow discontented and unhappy, since education makes men forever unfit to be slaves. These words awaken Frederick Douglass to a new purpose: “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”

Page 177:
There's the story I have
.
See Charles M. Anderson, “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages That Heal.”

Page 183:
In the story I have
.
See, in particular, Georges Bataille,
Inner Experience
, and Denis Hollier,
Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille
.

Page 183:
Am I not endlessly circling?
“What did we do,” asks Nietzsche's madman,

When we detached this world from its sun? Where is it going now? Where are we going? Far from all the suns? Are we not just endlessly falling? Backward, sideways, forward, in every direction? Is there still an up and a down? Are we not being borne aimlessly into an endless void?

See “The Parable of the Madman.”

Page 186:
This cave of making
.
Gordon Van Ness writes in “Remembering James Dickey” (
Dos Passos
Review 2, no. 1):

Admitted to his house, I stood waiting in the foyer while he finished typing in a room he called “the cave of making.” I had seen the room once. It held a large table around which half a dozen or more typewriters sat silently waiting his attention, each holding a draft page of a project on which he was currently working. When he came out, we hugged, my arms not even coming close to encircling him while his easily wrapped around me, an unspoken camaraderie that ran deep, at what he would have called blood-level. There was conversation, good human talk on poetry and other vital subjects that mattered, not the silliness with which people in rural Southside Virginia, gathering for large swathes of time at Walmart, concern themselves—limited, and limiting, discussions of the weather, the football scores, the price of tobacco.

Page 186:
I don't know how to escape it
.
In “The Silver Lily” Louise Glück writes:

       
We have come too far together toward the end now

       
to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain

       
I know what the end means. And you, who've been with a man—

       
after the first cries,

       
doesn't joy, like fear, make no sound?

Secretly—I've never admitted this—I've always wanted The Man I Used to Live With to die in some sudden and tragic way (struck by lightning, hit by a train, choked on his own spit), so that I would never have to untangle these emotions, so that I could mourn him, and then move on. I've always thought there should be some easy way to just move on.

Page 186:
A trap. a puzzle. a paradox
.
When speaking of paradoxes, philosophers and rhetoricians often use the term
aporia
, the English word derived from the Greek
aporos
, meaning literally “impassable” (
a
- meaning “without” and
poros
meaning “passage”): a blockage, a trap. It's the state of perplexity, of bafflement, of doubt. Derrida in particular has used the term to describe a deadlock of incompatible information—how mourning and forgiveness, for example, are made impossible by the conditions of their possibility. How possibility requires impossibility.