sleeping, pulsing, dreaming, bit by bit, meditation

You close the white laptop. Fold it like a shiny plastic wallet, with an icon of an Apple, slightly bitten off. In the darkened room a tiny pinhole of light from the right side of the machine, the right side of the thing, beats like the heart of a pristine machine in a hospital or a laboratory, no maybe a government office. No, no, it doesn't beat. It doesn't pulsate either. More like the light that a lighthouse emits, predictably, arcing and diminishing in a steady, seemingly infinite pattern. You have sent the email. You sent it, and then you flinched. Your fingers were shaking. You decided to send it. You sent it. You clicked the mouse. You shaded over the word Send so that the hand, the hand with the pointing finger, the fingerpost, appeared, a secular icon, and you clicked. (Imagine getting a shiny penny for every time that fingerpost appeared?) It gave you a certain satisfaction, that click. And with it, the whooshing, fast-train aural symbol of sendedness. A certain finality. The fingers, your fingers, weren't shaking so much anymore but you couldn't sleep. You sent it. There was no plink signifying a bounce-back of the message, the one that had your fingers trembling. When you could not sleep, you angrily removed the AA battery from the tiny clock near the bed, on the bed stand, the one you bought in postwar Berlin, postwall Berlin, to shush the ticking, the insistent tock-ticking. But the light still starlighting the room. How can such a tiny pinhole of light throw so much into shadow? But you know that even shutting it off would not grant sleep at 0154 hours. It's not the light, is it, you say. No, you don't say anything. You swirl the covers over you, like a sultan in his raiment. Is raiment a word to use here? In the machine everything lives. You can't kill it, can you? The sent email. The 3095 messages in your inbox, even if deleted. Even the send box, the trash. You can't really delete them. You know enough. You know that much. They can't really be destroyed, can they? The human imprint, gone digital, can't be scrubbed away. The palimpsest seems eternal. Who can ever grant you the sort of absolution that bathed you in purity after the priest pronounced the absolution, in Latin, his right hand forming the cross, an invisible cross, in the air? The pristine squeekiness affirmed by a steaming bath, talcum powder, clean sheets still smelling of starch and the aftermath of the hot iron, the steam iron pressed into an ironing board. Despite what they tell you, you know that it's all in there, it is real, the scores, the news, the blogs, the chatter, the porn, the tracts, the history, the dictionaries, the databases, the secrets, the proclamations, the bulls, edicts, lies, truths, connections, divorces, the photo albums, the searches, the chatter, the OMGs and LOLs. It's all there. Bubbling. Its silence is so loud. How could they tell you it is not real? Who could believe that? They said they only believed what they could see, forget about faith and gods and goddesses, and now this. It's so invisible but so loud. How could anyone sleep through such racket? And it never stops, even when you unplug it, even when you press prolongingly on the button to the upper right of your keyboard, the button that looks almost like the smile of a cyclops, the thing itching to be pressed, to an off, to a status designated as off-ness. It can never be turned off now, could it? You can never escape its buzz of on-ness, could you?

Memories Are Made of This

I know, I know, you were expecting my regular-octane juvenile humor: "Mammaries are made of this HAHAhahaha."

As for dissecting memories, it's been a recurring theme, not dream, of The Laughorist blog (soon to celebrate its first blogiversary). As surely Marcel Proust illustrated lushly to the extreme, our memories are tricky, subjective, and flirtatious; we rarely know what doors they will open. And we don't know if we dare believe what we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel when we walk through those memory doors. That was part of the thesis of Stumbling on Happiness: the human propensity to color, or discolor, past (or future) events.

I just read an interesting take on this sort of thing by Alec Wilkinson, in The New Yorker issue of May 28, 2007 (do we really not write "19" anymore? does anyone remember writing 19XX [well, not really the X's] on checks, essays, reports, summonses, divorce decrees, baptismal certificates, marriage licenses, postcards, and letters of resignation? I do).

The article is about one Gordon Bell, who is lifelogging. He is creating a personal archive, a database of everything he can scan into a computer about his current and past life. MyLifeBits is what the project's called. He now works for Microsoft and wears a special camera as part of this all-consuming venture and experiment (experiventure, call it).

We bloggers think we're obsessive?

Think again.

It's all rather intriguing. Bell, 72, one of the founders of the Internet who has been called the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, and Microsoft want to see how computers act when they establish a responsive relationship with our memories, or what we digitally tell a computer is our memories. Thus, a computer could easily say, "Watch out, Pawlie, you are entering the trough you typically enter after 17.268954 days. And it will last 3.000012223 days."

Or so I gather.

There's all sorts of potential ramifications to this sort of thing, some wonderful, some frightful. Microsoft's Jim Gemmell says in the article, "People argue about the need to forget things, but if you look at business discipline -- advising that you write everything down, your goals and objectives, and return to them to see how you did, examining what went wrong -- I think the same thing could happen with our personal lives. Being able to say, 'Now I realize my tone of voice was threatening' -- I think there's a real positive aspect in having the real record of what things looked and sounded like, and sequences of events, because we often end up believing things that are not based on facts anymore."

Really, Jim? Great. That's all I need. Computer as Grand Inquisitor. Computer as Torquemada.

Leave it to a software engineer to quantify memory.

Imagine this after-the-so-called fact bedroom debriefing: a blow-by-blow analysis on the fruitfulness (or dearth of ripe yield) in the garden of earthly pleasures, id est, orgasm or its lack. Let's cal this the Sixth Circle of Hell. And the Seventh Circle of Hell would go beyond anyone's worst nightmare of "he said, she said." It would be a recording with painful precision not only of the words but also the feelings and motives of the players.

We don't even what to imagine applying this beyond the home to the workplace or the public arena.

O spare us, HAL 9000.

This digitalization of memory gives new meaning to that line by James Joyce, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'd rather take refuge in the facts as I remember them, filtered by my psyche, not HAL's.

(Wouldn't you?)

(Say, what would Steve Jobs and Apple say to all this?)

Is it all agonizingly Orwellian? Or enticingly Proustian?

Wilkinson, a fine writer (I once read an essay he wrote about the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, whom I met, briefly, in the 1980s, wherein Maxwell told the young Wilkinson to send a manuscript by means of letters to Maxwell; brilliant), writes: "Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth."

Whatever that is.

May you remember This.