Category: Lit

One Thing I Learned: Moonwalking with Einstein

Josh Foer’s investi-memoir about the world memory circuit, Moonwalking with Einstein, offers a few intriguing insights into how the mind works into its quick tour – a year in the life of a journalist who decides to give mental athletics a try, and surprises himself at how practical the mechanics of extreme memory are – and raises a few more possibilities that linger with me.

The core insight of the book is that memory is a function of how sticky an idea is to our human brains, or how sticky we make it. This might mean that if we want to recall something that the brain is naturally poor at – numbers, e.g. – we might try to associate that information with something the brain is uncannily good at – spatial recall being the biggest classic example. Hence, the “memory palace” is a physical space that one might mentally revisit, and try to code other information into what the brain already finds sticky in spatial terms. One mentally fills the rooms of one’s childhood home with those things that we don’t want to forget, and upon revisiting that space mentally, we find that the associations we’ve made between the childhood bedroom and the data in question is much stickier than the data in question would be on its own. Likewise, if we can manipulate the data, or code it, to resemble something much stickier to the mammalian brain – arrange that string of digits into some kind of lewd sex act, e.g. – we find that, however absurdly constructed the association is, it returns to us.

[The second principle on which memory arts functions is chunking – that is, creatively assembling several pieces of data into a single datum, allowing us to store more and more inside what feels like a small number of things to remember. If, e.g., I ask you to remember the digit string 7-1-0-2, you can probably do that with some small attention. If I reverse those digits, though, and tell you to remember the year 2017, it’s a much simpler task.]

There is a recurrent theme about synaesthesia in the text that I find fascinating and unfathomed. A number of famous natural mnemonists describe their synaesthetic experiences – intuitively associating one sense with another, drawing relations between numbers and colors, colors and smells, smells and time. Those associations, in principle, starkly resemble what the trained mnemonist tries to manufacture – laboriously constructing associations between places and things, sounds and images, personages and concepts – so that the desired information has a web of mental associations constructed around it that would allow the multipolar mind to grasp it in some sixteen different ways.

This, to me, seems to resemble how all intelligence functions: by a thick bedding of associations, we integrate every dimension of a thing, some of which dimensions are just sticky enough for us to remember, and which lead eventually to the whole network. It is a rich attention that finds thirty different intuitive associations with the Habsburg monarchy, even if several of them are poetic nonsense. It is the densification of associative logic that allows one to reach insights across disciplines. The more interconnected our concepts, the more creatively we can deploy them.

Which brings me to generative AI, seeing as that’s on everyone’s minds these days. Like many, I’ve tinkered with the newest toys from OpenAI trying to find how they’re useful or threatening. And like many writers, it’s become apparent to me that generative AI is not currently in the running to be even a poor fiction writer. That might be intuitive when we consider how generative AI is constructed: it functions on algorithms that are trained to find the most probable construction of language and ideas in any context. That is, it takes gajillions of pieces of training data, and sifting between them, finds the most well-tread, overdone, tiresome path leading out of any possible prompt. It should be no surprise that generative AI is not yet capable of writing prose that entertains, because entertaining prose is not very probable. In response to any series of prompts, the chatbot still returns the most technically proficient, wooden, tiring recitation possible, by design. Its imagination is blinkered at every turn by what seems likelier: the prosaic or the magical.

Which leads me to an interesting query: if we want to train the next generative AI to be truly creative, should we not be systematically strengthening its associations between unlike concepts, disparate disciplines, the weird and the prosaic? And if we were to do so with deliberate intent over many probably nonsensical intermediate versions of the beast, might it not just learn to mimic a human imagination, but suggest to us things that we would tire long before imagining?

Though this technology, seemingly for now, rests in the hands of a technocratic class trying to maximize its profit potential, it would be very, very timely for artists to start trying to understand how they might lend their understanding of imaginative processes – the types of associations it thrives on and how they are selected for – to its development.

There’s this beautiful turn, about 80% through Nabokov’s Ada, where the lovers are separated, after coming tantalizingly close to reunion. This time, it will take them 17 years to find each other again. They will be past fifty. They will have lost many of their qualities. In the meanwhile, one of them will write a treatise on the texture of time.

Time compresses beautifully in Ada – the first snatches of love at 12 and 14 occupy whole chapters. As the mind ages, time speeds up. One’s thirties pass in a single section. The last few decades go in as many pages.

That turn, though, just after the lovers withdraw again, is so lovely and dense with avoidance. We launch into our protagonist’s treatise. We contemplate the fabric of time for pages on end, and whether and how it is bound up in space, and infer backwards from what it does to what it is made of. When we open our eyes again, seventeen years are gone. The loved one is returned, a little less than what she was.

The metaphysical questions give the human heart its weight, Ada insists to me. The pain of absence is more than a person’s qualia – the absence itself is probative of some mystery of the human condition. I love you, by which I mean to say, you are a marker that fathoms the depth of my own mortality. Or: I stitch my heart to yours to ascertain something about the heart itself — whether it is one or many. And all our little dramas are different shadows of a larger question, standing between us and the sun. When a character becomes conscious of what their drama means, they grow a little divine.

Some thoughts on Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching –

Oyeyemi, as a stylist, is rich and restrained in fine balance. She lets, it appears to me, each emotion of the book take a metaphorical shape, become a surprising object, motion, surrealist spasm. Her prose is otherwise confident and restrained. There’s shy humor and wit, especially about growing up. There’s an exciting willingness to play with perspectives.

Oyeyemi, as a structuralist, is doing things that I’m surprised she was able to get past a publisher. The antagonistic force that drives the novel (Ghost(s)? Curse(s)? Historical trauma? Racism?) is perceived differently by different characters, including the voice of the family home itself, which speaks to fill in the history past our other characters’  memory. With multiple contradictory and incomplete accounts, further muddied by the poetics of the style, the book challenges the reader to piece together a version of the story that explains the evil that haunts its protagonist, without ever truly resolving it. The book begins with a series of questions and conflicting responses. It ends in refrain.

Which means that Witching, as a story, is a little too incoherent for my tastes. I am certainly allured by the style and the structural gambit. But my investment in the core conflict of the story is hobbled by not knowing what the core conflict is. It’s not until halfway through the text that I resolve that there will not be a discrete conflict that I can invest with emotional force. At that point, I can have a little more fun reading between the lines to pick at the theories Oyeyemi is setting up for us – it could be a malignancy brought out by an ancient witch and/or how that malignancy bent future generations of women to commit haunting crimes and/or something inherent in the property itself and/or the racist attitudes of certain ancestors but none of them suffice for really defining the stakes of the story. I am left ultimately ambivalent. I am not entirely unsure that wasn’t the goal.

A good surrealist/magical conflict can pit two moral forces against each other that couldn’t otherwise collide in a literalist world. A discrete past trauma haunts the present in Beloved, e.g. But our engagement in the story requires us to buy in to what those moral forces are – what is really represented by the haunting/cursing/sickness/etc. Without that clarity, the conflict is hollow.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the gambit. But I think it’s the kind of book you might enjoy better on a second reading than a first, knowing that your reading depends on you deconstructing the text and making something of it.

Although (obviously) white middle aged American writer protagonists with a fetish for Shakespeare should be a red flag that I’m being pandered to, I have to admit that Arthur Phillips’ The Tragedy of Arthur is the book I’ve inhaled the most defenselessly this year.

The premise of the text is simple: A lost work of Shakespeare has been discovered. The book in your hands is the first publication of the play. The introduction to the play (all 200-some pages of it, contractually obliged) is the confessional family story of the man who sold it to the publisher, and who now (for reasons endemic to the story) believes it to be a forgery by his long-time grifter father.

The narrative voice is charming, self-doubting, furiously introspective and confused enough to serve both plot and character. The family drama unveiled through the “Introduction” is a tensile triangle of love, distrust, hurt, yearning. (And though the ending is a bit weak, I can’t help but read it and think of the narrator earlier apologizing for Shakespeare himself, whose endings were always the weakest parts of his plays).

The play at the end is convincing to a lay eye as a plausible lost work of Shakespeare (I read the whole thing searching for the obvious error, speculated earlier by the doubting narrator, that would give the lie to the whole thing [my best nominee, the word “Dad”? – though it predates the publication of the play in the OED, it appears nowhere else in Shakespeare per my Ctrl+F’ing and would be an obvious poetic device]). Moreover, the debate between footnoters and the resonance of some parts of the play (generously to the careful reader, some parts that even go uncommented on by the commentators) with the family drama that precedes it gives the reader more dimensions to look at the work from. And it’s rare to find such a dimensionality in a popular novel.

The meta-textual engagement, interpreting everything in the story through Shakespeare in order to finally interpret “Shakespeare” back insofar as his imputed work determines their own story – expertly balanced. The trick of the novel – the existence of an unpublished play that may or may not be their father’s forgery – is accomplished with just enough steady aplomb and just enough showy exhibitionism to make you believe alternately that this could really happen – that a man could know everything about the Bard and his time and textual forensics and fool the world (and Arthur Phillips, the novelist, makes a winking case to the reader that it would be him), or else a son could be so convinced of his father’s conniving that he’d be incapable of seeing what the rest of the earth has discovered, a literary miracle. My ambivalence at the end of the text about the authorship question is exactly what the author wants to achieve, I imagine – and I am suggestible, therefore, to all his philosophical questions about the value of authorship itself, insofar as it determines how we relate to a work.

It’s a book I’m sad to have to give back to a library. It’s a book I think I might like to return to for a second reading someday.

Because you can’t critique a memoir for its themes and structures like you can a piece of fiction, I’ll be brief.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is everything that they say it is – a luxuriant time spent in his always stylistically provocative and dense voice, a beautiful meditation on the act of remembering, an insightful portrait at turns into the collapse of the Russian bourgeois with the rise of Communism, and a handful of bright insights into the writing process, which gather speed as his subject comes to intellectual maturity.

 

***

A few choice quotes –

On his butterflies:

“And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

And the study of them:

“ … what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light – translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little world of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise and silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft. In the glass of the slide, meant for projection, a landscape was reduced, and this fired one’s fancy; under the microscope, an insect’s organ was magnified for cool study. There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.”

On his first literary attempt:

“A moment later my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief – the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say ‘patter’ intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.”

On his chess problems:

“It is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a level adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often I have struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world) …. ”

 

***

One note, on suspicious omissions that say more than the author may intend.

Sergey Nabokov, his brother nearest in age, receives two pages in the text (paling beside certain arousing leaves, sunsets, butterflies, or literary critics), which begins with a half-apology (“for various reasons I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother”), a careless excuse about their lack of shared interests growing up, the peculiar anecdote that Sergey was obsessed with Napoleon as a child and took a bust of the French leader to bed with him, followed by a very discreet allusion to his homosexuality (“a page from his diary that … provided a retroactive clarification of certain oddities of behavior on his part”), a factual relation on how they later lived near to each other in Paris, on amiable terms, but how Vladimir did not tell him he was moving to America until he had disappeared, sometime after which Sergey died in a Nazi concentration camp.

It is two pages of such dense avoidance and double-speak that Nabokov could not have designed it better were he writing a character.

It is no wonder that Vladimir’s admirers go on to speculate that Sergey played an outsized role in the writer’s subconscious, attributing an obsessive shame and avoidance of the brother that undergirded Vladimir’s sexual imagination – disputed by Vladimir’s children, argued for the cheap thrill of a Freudian interpretation by scholars (and did you notice how often Nabokov scorns Freud, particularly, in this text? Out of no convenient context? The writer doth protest too much, methinks!), even inspiring a novelization.

The introverted, myopic genius is on full-flowering display, and it seems generous to call it fully self-aware – not just with Sergey, but in the avoidance of any mention of his wife (which absence he only listlessly accounts for in addressing the book to her), who is an assumed figure taking his child for walks or boarding the boat with him for America. Vera herself cries for a voice, which biographers and historians have been trying to give her ever since, too.

It does make one wonder at the depth of voiceless that must be paved over to grant the writer his own.

“The red blood of the Jiao-Gao soldiers and the green blood of the Iron Society soldiers converged to nourish the black earth of the fields. Years later, that soil would be the most fertile anywhere,” writes Mo Yan in Red Sorghum, set in the midst of the 1930s war between Japan and China, in what might be the covert thesis statement of the novel.

There’s a strain of blood and soil in Red Sorghum that leaches into the meaning of community, what ties together these rural Chinese outposts. What we’ve termed filial piety, what we think of as belonging to a place, these are also terms that undergird tribalism. These are terms that inform the right to a piece of earth, the right to pass it to your kin, the right to kill the outsider who would take it from you.

The grotesque barbarism of the war between Japan and China is only a part of the show. Equally indiscriminate, if not quite as cruel, are the killings between tribes of bandits and ad hoc governments within China, and the extent to which the reader is invited to scorn the social milieu of the novel is never clear. One is tempted, actually, to think we are not: we conclude with the descendant of these local warlords mourning their lack of connection to the old ways, the moral atrophy of the cities. If there is a critique of the recklessness of violence, it is at least nested with its glorification. It is posited within a naturalistic framework, wherein the red of the sorghum fields, the sorghum wine, the wars with local dogs to preserve the corpses on the battlefield, all of these natural symbols map to the world of violence in a way that suggests that the strife and killing for place and power is endemic to the soil, to the identities of its people – at least, once upon an age.

Nabokov had a great quote on writing (worth reading in full, but for these purposes, the snippet will do): “The force and originality involved in the primary spasm of inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will write.”

There are two beautiful spasms of imagination in Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M. One is in the first few pages. One is in the last few. Because I’d like to discuss each equally, you can rest assured that I AM GOING TO SPOIL THE ENDING.

***
In just the first ten pages of the book, we are given such a ferocious spurt of imagination that it could light our minds for days if Shepherd never wrote another chapter. People’s shadows the world over start disappearing, and with them, their memories. It was never suspected until that moment that a person’s shadow was where memory was stored.

The beauty in this idea isn’t just poetic, it catches such resonance with one of the core questions in neuroscience. We’ve never been able to localize memories in the brain. Disable any one part of the brain, the remainder more or less remembers everything that the whole once did, suggesting perhaps that memories are stored by a network of relations that is self-similar at different scales. Another way of thinking about it is referred to as holonomic mind theory – that the human mind functions much the same way a hologram does, in which all of the information in the signal is nested (with some resolution errors past a point) across each subset of the signal. At least, that’s one theory. The truth is we’re properly riddled by this.

This mystery of memory’s location, which is so key to securing our sense of self in the face of a materialist worldview, already has a lot of traffic in scientific circles, to the point where I think it’s pretty pop culture-y. So kudos for finding a magical realism way to play off it.

Shepherd adds a dimension to her premise by making reality adjust to fit the mistaken memories of the shadowless, but frankly (though this is easily the most awe-inspiring and fantastical element in the book), I’m less intrigued by this element. It’s a driver of adventure, more than having something to say about the human condition. And the logic of how her world functions under these rules is a bit more confounding – whose memory takes precedence, what kinds of memories change the world around them, why hasn’t one random person forgotten what oxygen is and ended the world – so that its effects feel more random and plot-servicing than numinous.

But hell, it’s certainly fun to wander a world where statues can come to life and smash buildings, so I’m not bagging on it.

***
What follows from there is a dutiful, well-crafted story exploring a post-apocalypse. If you thrill at those, you’ll thrill at this.

For me, it dragged a bit. The payoff comes in the last few pages.

***
Shepherd’s second great spasm of imagination comes when a great healer type begins stitching shadows back onto people, hoping to give them their memories back. Unfortunately, only the shadow of an object appropriately invested with some kind of cognition will serve this purpose. Give a person the shadow-memories of a rock, they go crazy in rock-ish sorts of ways.

The moment that sings is around a tape recorder. Before she loses all her memories, a woman named Max wanders the country recording everything she can remember onto a tape recorder. The tape recorder’s shadow is stitched back onto a woman who the healer thinks is Max. But the healer is mistaken. The wrong woman inherits the memories stored in the recorder, and with it, the identity of Max.

So when whoops-wrong-woman meets the man she now thinks is her husband, he rejects her. She has the mind of the woman who made the recordings (we can presume Max is dead at this point), but nobody else sees her that way. The pain is tremendous. She believes she’s held out so long trying to preserve her mind so she could one day reunite with her husband, but she’s in the wrong body and he’s not having any of it.

Tragic, poignant, and this is where Shepherd closes.

Hot take: this is not where Shepherd should have closed.

This is, if anything, the more inviting spasm of imagination between the two, which begs for these characters to evolve. This begs for two people, one of whom believes they are married, and the other of whom is fighting a profound repulsion to the woman who thinks she’s his wife, to explore what their relationship is now. Because it’s not as simple and pat as they don’t have one.

And in the process, this invites Shepherd to explore what it means to have selfhood, to answer serious human questions in ways that only a fantasy premise can engage in. Is it enough to believe that you’re a specific person? To have all the memories of that person? To walk in the sack of carbon that collected those memories originally? To be recognized as that person by the people who know you?

If I had my druthers, this is the midway point of the book. Strip out a certain amount of post-apocalyptic wrangling, and write me a half of a book about two people trying to see if they’re still married, in different bodies.

Or – just in case she’s reading her reviews – fine material for the sequel.