I'm pondering your take on the Pitt episode. This is why I like to read you. I feel I am often stuck in a place without knowing it. And then I read or hear someone else's view and my mind expands a bit. I didn't have the thought you had while watching it. My main thought when the nurse said "you are in a safe place" was: No, she is not, don't tell her that. I heard the victim's conflicting views of her rapist and I wondered how she got herself to the ER when she was so conflicted. I thought it did a good job of showing how women can have a terrible time naming the thing that happened to them for what it is. She didn't want to harm the man who did this to her. She wanted to, perhaps, excuse him. She wanted to get out of the ER as quickly as possible and perhaps put all of this behind her. She worried about ruining someone else's life. I understood this point of view, as harmful as it is. She seemed petrified, freaked out. I saw the way women have been programmed. I could feel her programmed response. So I didn't see her as just "rape victim." But I like thinking about your take. Also--everything you wrote here about memory is a yes. The past is over. We make of it what we will, depending on who we are right now.
Hi Mary, Thanks for your thoughtful comment. What you are describing and appreciating, I would call scenes established to illustrate and present information and instruction. What I am advocating is what art does, which is to subvert attempts to prove something or package meaning. I don't have a taste for the first form. Many people do. I'm glad I prompted your thoughts.
My husband (a television writer) had read something in Deadline or Variety about the rape story line beforehand and said something like "here comes the Humanitas" and it really pissed me off because mostly I like to form my own opinion before hearing what the "community" thinks about it. I was nervous watching, nervous that something horrible was going to happen. And then it didn't. And I felt... nothing. Even though I love the actress who plays the head nurse. In general, I think the show is great and have been moved by other story lines.
The diversity of this post is great. I like the memory of glittery dolls with feathers on sticks and your remaking of memory. I'm all for changing the past and thereby making a better present.
I know you are doing this as well, as part of a process that has simply emerged, not as a deliberate activity. So interesting, and as a consequence producing better writing as well for both of us.
I have no idea why I cried. I feel I definitely identified with the other child, and I think that must have rattled my mother . . . in that she was feeling, well, you're not being treated badly, how about a little credit here to me. This is an exercise in undoing memory and starting all over again.
In both of your descriptions— in the piece, of living your life again but with a different screenplay, different director, different lighting but the same actors — and here, as an exercise in undoing memory and starting all over again... as always, your writing strikes deeply for me with your most evocative language. Maybe we experience this more as we age (I am just a few years younger than you), and I've been feeling like I'm getting rushes of newly recalled memories following my return to NYC after a few years in LA. Returning to the scenes of my youth is giving me the feeling of wiping the fog off a car's windshield and seeing the road again... though it's a rear view, not the road ahead.
It's always the road ahead, because there is no other view, always in the now our view of things is being invented. For me, I'm representing a facsimile of new memory. It's not really new memory. It's what becomes available to you as a proposition through writing and deciding to change the sentences as part of the practice of art and invention, xxL
I also have weird and delightful memories of the circus as a child. Nobody told me what a circus was or what I was about to see before the show started and I just remember being completely transfixed, and transported to a new world in which all this was not just possible but kind of very quickly seemed like how life should be! But what I wanted to say about your very rich post today was that this idea of the 'impulse to revise your understandings' really spoke to me. I've been thinking of what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes as 'the virtual' and I think to a large extent it's just what you've described, the way that in not only each memory but each event whether past, present or future, there is a multiplicity of different relational capacities. But we are fixed on identity, we humans, so we choose an interpretation to stand for that thing we want to be solid. But nothing is really solid in that way, and your descriptions of revising your memories really brought home to me what this means - that our lives are so much richer and more multifaceted than the narratives we create to be coherent and acceptable. And we can go back in anytime and get more out of it all, see more and experience more, and enter into the authentic fluidity of life more fully. Enter into the stream, as you put it. There's the madness of a three-ring circus in everything that happens!
Yes I think this must be why I’m so drawn to artistic endeavours even when I’m ‘trained’ as a philosopher. I have always seen philosophy in a similar way - as formulating good questions rather than answering bad ones. But I sometimes feel very much in the minority in philosophy, where there’s often altogether too much answering going on. I am much more at home with artists!
Where to start? I love the reframing of memories and re-centring the key to the story. Love the section on change and not 'pleasing', and this -- courtesy to the koala's -- just made me laugh loudly: “That wold be a huge advance in the evolution of our relationship.” :) xx
I love this idea of turning over the memories we have preserved.
And once a year my grandfather took me to the royal agricultural show in Melbourne. We ate hot dogs, watched the sheep dogs round the sheep, and I took time to choose my favourite cupie doll. No wish to alter this lovely memory !
I always save your posts until I make time to read carefully. I’m 68 and your observations about memory seem particularly relevant for me. “I want to turn them all over. It’s like living your life again with a different screenplay, and a different director, and different lighting but with the same actors.” Some of the actors in my life are passing with increasing frequency. This resonates strongly. Thanks as always.
"Here’s another thing, this feeling I’m aware of stirring through me lately is to question almost every memory I’ve preserved. I want to turn them all over. It’s like living your life again with a different screenplay, and a different director, and different lighting but with the same actors."
YES YES! I do this, too. I feel that it is evolution. How can you look back and see the same story the same way if you have changed.
Yep. Guys on the left. Two things made me a feminist. 1. Charlotte Bunch gave a talk at my dorm. 2. The scorn, contempt, and condescension of men on the left for women. Their misogyny was more skillful, educated, and bolstered by political vocabulary than the lunkhead misogyny of so many of my fellow students. But not much. OK -- three things. My mother was a feminist, a woman ahead of her time, and this greatly helped me withstand the sexism of my male contemporaries. For her outlook, I am forever grateful.
1908. She was 41 when I was born. Interesting math there. My parents were almost a generation older than the parents of most of my friends. Both were great readers of history, which was also helpful to me. Not that I understood how helpful until I was well into my 30s, of course.
"...koala bears, which everyone knows have two opposing thumbs per front paw..." Apparently I am not everyone. I was, as they say, today-years-old when I discovered the TWO opposable thumbs per paw. For an art historian, I am apparently not that observant.
Dearest Laurie, hello from Down Under :) That was a naughty news tidbit calling it a koala bear - it's a koala, no bears involved. A marsupial with a pouch, though without a snap closure on this permanent purse for keeping babies in ;)
the mystery of how we interpret our own memories resonates—as does the weird pleasure from recognizing maybe we were wrong. for me it’s the delight of surprise, in seeing that my mind, which it seems i should control, sometimes does its own thing. and i think seeing it that way makes life more interesting.
I'm pondering your take on the Pitt episode. This is why I like to read you. I feel I am often stuck in a place without knowing it. And then I read or hear someone else's view and my mind expands a bit. I didn't have the thought you had while watching it. My main thought when the nurse said "you are in a safe place" was: No, she is not, don't tell her that. I heard the victim's conflicting views of her rapist and I wondered how she got herself to the ER when she was so conflicted. I thought it did a good job of showing how women can have a terrible time naming the thing that happened to them for what it is. She didn't want to harm the man who did this to her. She wanted to, perhaps, excuse him. She wanted to get out of the ER as quickly as possible and perhaps put all of this behind her. She worried about ruining someone else's life. I understood this point of view, as harmful as it is. She seemed petrified, freaked out. I saw the way women have been programmed. I could feel her programmed response. So I didn't see her as just "rape victim." But I like thinking about your take. Also--everything you wrote here about memory is a yes. The past is over. We make of it what we will, depending on who we are right now.
Hi Mary, Thanks for your thoughtful comment. What you are describing and appreciating, I would call scenes established to illustrate and present information and instruction. What I am advocating is what art does, which is to subvert attempts to prove something or package meaning. I don't have a taste for the first form. Many people do. I'm glad I prompted your thoughts.
My husband (a television writer) had read something in Deadline or Variety about the rape story line beforehand and said something like "here comes the Humanitas" and it really pissed me off because mostly I like to form my own opinion before hearing what the "community" thinks about it. I was nervous watching, nervous that something horrible was going to happen. And then it didn't. And I felt... nothing. Even though I love the actress who plays the head nurse. In general, I think the show is great and have been moved by other story lines.
And now you have prompted more! thank you.
The diversity of this post is great. I like the memory of glittery dolls with feathers on sticks and your remaking of memory. I'm all for changing the past and thereby making a better present.
I know you are doing this as well, as part of a process that has simply emerged, not as a deliberate activity. So interesting, and as a consequence producing better writing as well for both of us.
You always brighten my day with your stories. I was especially impressed with your innate empathy with the other girl’s loss. Thank you.
I have no idea why I cried. I feel I definitely identified with the other child, and I think that must have rattled my mother . . . in that she was feeling, well, you're not being treated badly, how about a little credit here to me. This is an exercise in undoing memory and starting all over again.
In both of your descriptions— in the piece, of living your life again but with a different screenplay, different director, different lighting but the same actors — and here, as an exercise in undoing memory and starting all over again... as always, your writing strikes deeply for me with your most evocative language. Maybe we experience this more as we age (I am just a few years younger than you), and I've been feeling like I'm getting rushes of newly recalled memories following my return to NYC after a few years in LA. Returning to the scenes of my youth is giving me the feeling of wiping the fog off a car's windshield and seeing the road again... though it's a rear view, not the road ahead.
It's always the road ahead, because there is no other view, always in the now our view of things is being invented. For me, I'm representing a facsimile of new memory. It's not really new memory. It's what becomes available to you as a proposition through writing and deciding to change the sentences as part of the practice of art and invention, xxL
I also have weird and delightful memories of the circus as a child. Nobody told me what a circus was or what I was about to see before the show started and I just remember being completely transfixed, and transported to a new world in which all this was not just possible but kind of very quickly seemed like how life should be! But what I wanted to say about your very rich post today was that this idea of the 'impulse to revise your understandings' really spoke to me. I've been thinking of what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes as 'the virtual' and I think to a large extent it's just what you've described, the way that in not only each memory but each event whether past, present or future, there is a multiplicity of different relational capacities. But we are fixed on identity, we humans, so we choose an interpretation to stand for that thing we want to be solid. But nothing is really solid in that way, and your descriptions of revising your memories really brought home to me what this means - that our lives are so much richer and more multifaceted than the narratives we create to be coherent and acceptable. And we can go back in anytime and get more out of it all, see more and experience more, and enter into the authentic fluidity of life more fully. Enter into the stream, as you put it. There's the madness of a three-ring circus in everything that happens!
Thanks for this wonderful comment. What you describe is the engine of art--the refusal of art to answer questions.
Yes I think this must be why I’m so drawn to artistic endeavours even when I’m ‘trained’ as a philosopher. I have always seen philosophy in a similar way - as formulating good questions rather than answering bad ones. But I sometimes feel very much in the minority in philosophy, where there’s often altogether too much answering going on. I am much more at home with artists!
I think that means you are one.
Where to start? I love the reframing of memories and re-centring the key to the story. Love the section on change and not 'pleasing', and this -- courtesy to the koala's -- just made me laugh loudly: “That wold be a huge advance in the evolution of our relationship.” :) xx
Thanks, lovely!
I love this idea of turning over the memories we have preserved.
And once a year my grandfather took me to the royal agricultural show in Melbourne. We ate hot dogs, watched the sheep dogs round the sheep, and I took time to choose my favourite cupie doll. No wish to alter this lovely memory !
Thanks Laurie.
I always save your posts until I make time to read carefully. I’m 68 and your observations about memory seem particularly relevant for me. “I want to turn them all over. It’s like living your life again with a different screenplay, and a different director, and different lighting but with the same actors.” Some of the actors in my life are passing with increasing frequency. This resonates strongly. Thanks as always.
Thanks so much. Very tender.
Plus, the questioning/overturning memory part came on a day when that had just happened to me in a major way.
Ah hah. So THAT'S what was nagging at me about that episode of "The Pitt."
"Here’s another thing, this feeling I’m aware of stirring through me lately is to question almost every memory I’ve preserved. I want to turn them all over. It’s like living your life again with a different screenplay, and a different director, and different lighting but with the same actors."
YES YES! I do this, too. I feel that it is evolution. How can you look back and see the same story the same way if you have changed.
Always, good, always I understand what you write. Thank you.
Yep. Guys on the left. Two things made me a feminist. 1. Charlotte Bunch gave a talk at my dorm. 2. The scorn, contempt, and condescension of men on the left for women. Their misogyny was more skillful, educated, and bolstered by political vocabulary than the lunkhead misogyny of so many of my fellow students. But not much. OK -- three things. My mother was a feminist, a woman ahead of her time, and this greatly helped me withstand the sexism of my male contemporaries. For her outlook, I am forever grateful.
Me too!! Good work. What year was your mother born?
1908. She was 41 when I was born. Interesting math there. My parents were almost a generation older than the parents of most of my friends. Both were great readers of history, which was also helpful to me. Not that I understood how helpful until I was well into my 30s, of course.
Wow, very interesting.
"...koala bears, which everyone knows have two opposing thumbs per front paw..." Apparently I am not everyone. I was, as they say, today-years-old when I discovered the TWO opposable thumbs per paw. For an art historian, I am apparently not that observant.
The remark is a joke. You will hurt its feelings if you take it seriously. 😎
Dearest Laurie, hello from Down Under :) That was a naughty news tidbit calling it a koala bear - it's a koala, no bears involved. A marsupial with a pouch, though without a snap closure on this permanent purse for keeping babies in ;)
I will fix! Sorry.
Thanks, will go back to reading the article: had to check comments to check that honour of koalas upheld ^_^
The thrill of revising memory rather than defending it -- oh Laurie, that stayed with me.
The idea that a memory doesn’t have to function as a stable document but can be re-lit, re-directed feels so alive. There’s so much freedom in that.
I’m seeing with an eye that needs less.
‚An eye that needs less‘ -- such a beautiful way to put it. Sounds like calm freedom.
Definitely freedom!
You're so interesting on memory. I don't watch The Pitt but I think what they did sounds important and valuable.
the mystery of how we interpret our own memories resonates—as does the weird pleasure from recognizing maybe we were wrong. for me it’s the delight of surprise, in seeing that my mind, which it seems i should control, sometimes does its own thing. and i think seeing it that way makes life more interesting.
Agree on all.