Moonwalking in museums

MANILA, Philippines - Dug from the archives of the black-and-white, a treasured scene from the 1950s: A playwright and a director, coiffed and eloquent; a woman, mildly coquettish; and among them beckoning an unseen limelight via natural magnetism — aging star Margo Channing, played by Hollywood legend Bette Davis.

 â€œThe gentle atmosphere is very Macbeth-ish,” says the playwright as he eyes Margo Channing. “What isn’t or is about to happen?” His wife, Karen, casts similar aspersions on the actress: “We know you. We’ve seen you like this before. Is it over or is it just the beginning?” The star, being a star, craves a stage. As a response, she grabs hold of the nearby stairwell, climbs up a step or two, pirouettes, and delivers a line so resounding it pierces generations of sound barriers: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!”

Ahh, a stance worthy of freeze-framing.

And indeed it has been freeze-framed, cut, and recast elsewhere. The line could be found arbitrarily in cultural history: dissipated into an echo by a cartoon falling off a cliff, parodied by actors in sitcoms, brandished as caution by leads in reality shows. Etched lovingly, in other words, into cultural memory. 

I pause the film, All About Eve, and decide to replay the scene for the umpteenth time, as if making sure each pixel is ensnared in my mind’s eye.

Such is the way culture passes on its remembrances. Full things become fractions become fragments. And when presented fragments, we tend to see them as the whole, our interpretations breeding potential concealment or crude simplification. A fragment of truth is simply not the truth, I reason. And this line of reasoning has been plaguing me lately, until I’ve come to distrust the machinations of memory, which never seem to let us in on the panoramic view, the terrain, the universe. The consequences of this have manifested externally: I’ve begun to vigorously earmark books in fear I’d pry loose their meaning or let their cadence aflutter. I generalize forgotten Mandarin words to a loss of cultural heritage. And I bristle — at the thought of forgetting final scenes of favorite films.

Beyond issues of inadequacy, the word “mortality” looms above this essay, as memory can erode landscapes. Just the other day, I chanced upon the trailer of a new, stop-motion adaptation of Tarzan – he of the now-pixelated face and matte eyes. Extinct, went the 2D fauna of the ‘90s. Ersatz became the countenance of his simian family. I suppose this isn’t especially negative. Art, after all, is tweaked apropos of changing times. This is what logic and reason tell us as they sit unruffled. But often pathos speaks a different story, and in this one, it is of loss and grief. Watching something beloved become replaced is a form of burial after all, as the meaning once gleaned from that landscape — its space and time — suddenly becomes infinitely elusive, and what indeed is sadder than chasing an infinitely elusive thing?

The same argument holds for places. My collegiate life, for instance, pulsates in the enclosed space that spans Taft, Adriatico, and Roxas Boulevard. Various cafes and restaurants have been dashed with three years’ worth of memories, and I can’t help but wonder if their substance would diminish should those places be demolished or decimated — or if their boundaries suddenly blurred. Facts, places, exact accounts — these are merely stable (but hollow) shells, whereas actual memory itself is amorphous, wild. But what if indeed one used them as terminals or coordinates? For ease of navigation, should one want to stop past lives from dissolving as unknown ones?

Enter Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein. Subtitled “The Art and Science of Remembering,” the book quelled some neuroses and shed light on fixations (such as that Bette Davis one) by expanding my knowledge of memory. That last bit is what Joshua Foer did best, with flair. He took me to the man who birthed the art of memory, a man who remembered too much, and a man who forgot everything. Taught a peripatetic lesson in building a Memory Palace. Constructed luminous stories from neuroscience papers. Located memory’s evolution through history. And eventually sat me down in front of a Memory Championship, where he thrust himself for the research.

I’ve come away with this: I’ve underestimated my brain. Apparently, our memory is unlike a muscle or a specific lobe that occupies a designated area. Rather, it exists upon contact of arbitrary neurons, which offset free association chain reactions. Memory, in other words, is not meant to be organized. It’s meant to be sporadic — in large part due to neurons, which are full of mischief.

However, there is a way to file memory into cabinets: by storing them in Memory Palaces. This can be done by “[creating] a space in the mind’s eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate the imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember.” This works, he said, because humans are adept at learning spaces; our ancestors had to be, as necessity required them to memorize routes to survive.

Foer was advised to begin with the place most familiar to him, to most of us: our childhood homes. I pondered mine, a penthouse, with an evoked nostalgia, recalling it in Technicolor, with the sun’s opening salvo as dominating palette. He then urged us to place the first object to be memorized (say, pickled garlic from a grocery list) at the entrance of our “mental” house, and to really summon the image by adequate use of the five senses. I did as suggested, imagining I was a child again, surprised at the sight of pickled garlic on our doorstep. Next, cottage cheese in a living room. I placed the image of a cottage made of cheese on top of the sofa, imagined accidentally sitting on it, letting the humor solidify in thought. I ended up enjoying this exercise, and at the end, I was able to recall the list by retracing my mental steps.

Now, this technique is useful for school, anniversaries, and lists, but not so much beyond that. In the end, it wasn’t the memorized information I valued in this exercise. Rather, what I gleaned in the interim: the intuitive architecting of a place long abandoned, the designing of interiors as they had been, and the placement of furniture to their rightful places. I’d made no effort to memorize this place as a child, but somehow the old hiding-and-seeking, the ADHD-induced pranks, lodged an elaborate memory into mind. A few chapters more, and I became convinced: Memory builds identity in that it selects. Factual, consciously memorized descriptions may help; but essentially, memory consumes what’s inside and dispatches the shell as it sees fit. (Not unlike eating clams, now really.)

Yet another thing that could be learned from the Palace was that making memorable images required us to limn them vividly, to make sure they stood out from the background of our interior (or exterior). Otherwise, the exercise would wax monotonous, and we’d find ourselves stuck, overturning couch pillows for our lost object. In one chapter, Foer introduces us to a man who could never lose mental objects. He was codenamed “S,” and he could render vivid images as naturally as he breathed, thus making memories too easily. S involuntarily coils each of his senses with one another, creating a helix of sensory perceptions, that “every sound he heard had its own color, texture, and sometimes taste … [Someone’s voice] resembled ‘a flame with fibers protruding from it.’” This wonderment is called synesthesia, a rare disorder that entailed the brain to siphon a set of sensory images and attach these to the subject, rendering anything distinct.

After this perusal, synesthesia became a regular visitor to my late-night musings. Wouldn’t it be convenient to possess synesthesia if one were an artist? Especially, say, a poet or abstract expressionist. Image is what aesthetic experience thrives on, after all, and when certain ones are matched in the “right” combination and permutation, they deliver rapture right before our doors of perception. It’s convenient, too, when eloquence manages its occasional escape: When we can’t use words that cohere, we use images, which explains why after watching All About Eve, I tried to grope for adjectives and fidget with metaphors. If poise had a mold, it would be her silhouette.

Foer’s narrative, however, tells me to refrain from romanticizing synesthesia. It’s termed a disorder for a reason. S has difficulty sticking to a job or living a stable life because his mind’s eye is supersaturated with images he can’t shake off. Memory builds identity in that it selects. Imagine remembering every bad dream, bad breakup, or bad day. How could we delineate who we are when we can’t shear off the excess?

This idea, though, made me realize that beauty and memory go hand-in-hand. One falls insuperable heights without the other. Beautiful works — be it a passage, performance, or painting — strikes our visual palate, compelling us to remember it. And, likewise, to serve as amber and resin in preserving beauty, we depend on memory. But why is it that we are hard-wired to preserve beautiful things? I suppose, because we covet them. (Not exactly materially.) In like manner that a huntsman, mesmerized by the pop of contrast in a tiger’s coat, would want the animal caged as a pet, we want beauty within reach so we can keep looking. (And what better cage or museum than one’s own mind?) We are intent on this fixation as what we see represents a quality we admire or would like to possess. We hope that such qualities would be conferred upon us by diffusion. Memory, then, becomes ceremonial: a tribute.

I understand now that my endless looping of that Bette Davis scene has been an attempt to preserve grace and panache without stilling her movement. Screenshots don’t suffice. Neither do freeze-frames. But if memory is identity, why this scene?

Ahh, well, for protection. In a world where we are thrust into distorted truths, sound, fury, furor, better-than-human-vision DSLRs, memes, un-distilled opinions, odd gestures culled from noon-time shows, creaky conventions, brand-new bandwagons — where it is easy for simple things to become clouded, I would rather have Bette Davis pirouette a million times, or cleave her Old Hollywood accent twice that. It would be something to hold onto, a symbolism on how I’d like to live my life: the way one would create art. With patience, polish, endurance. With an affinity for subtleties, tilts of the head, sneaky eyebrow-raises. With a knowledge of distance and intervals, of knowing when to spin and which object to grab. Maybe that object is a book, a book that tells you what to do with scenes, and where they go after you perceive them: in your head, the biggest Memory Palace. And if that object means enough to you, it will stay in sovereign, rest assured. Even if staying in loving memory means letting others see fragments, letting Bette’s brand of poise peek out of your movement, your thinking, or your pirouettes.

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

Catherine Tan is currently a UP-Manila student wedged in between degree programs. She sees the world in molecules, spaces, words, and cadences. In 2010, her youth essay won third prize in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.