Tag Archives: Memory

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.5

12 Thursday Aug 2021

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            Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,  (20)

Into our first world, shall we follow 

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

To put these lines into their context, here are the lines already considered. I have also added an underscore to the word “echo”.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. (5)
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. (10)
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.                                   (15)
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                        Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate, (20)
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

Looking back we can a major shift in line 11 with the first “echo”. The first ten lines are philosophical and distant. But at line 11 we enter into some sort of memory and that memory is an “echo”. The echo is of “footfalls” and so of some movement which never happened (down the passage which we did not take). At line 15 there is a bit of a pause, should we follow after this memory?

Then in middle of line 17, someone else intrudes and pulls the “we” toward the door which was never opened. Here there are “other echoes”. We will meet these phantoms in a bit, but here are just sounds. 

So why this word “echo”. It is not a sound but the echo of the sound; it is not the original but the copy. By using the word “echo”, Eliot increases the dream quality. Also, these sounds are “echoes” because the original happened (or did not happen) in the past, but they are being experienced in the present. 

We also learn what is on the otherside of the door which was never opened, “the garden.” 

Raising the image of a “garden” holds all sorts of allusions, particularly in the hands of someone like Eliot. There is archetypal garden of Eden. There are also all of the wall, specially kept places as gardens. 

Here the garden is “an abstraction” and a “perpetual possibility” which exists “only in a world of speculation.” To enter through this door in the memory is to enter into this “world of speculation.” 

The image of the rose-leaves now comes into focus for we know where the roses came from: the garden in this memory. 

But how could there be “other echoes” in this space? If the first echoes were the hurried steps to the door, who is on the other side of this door. But the “reality” (if you will) of the echoes beckon: 

He then turns to the reader (?) “Shall we follow?” We could be overhearing his conversation with someone, or we could be the one spoken to: This would mean that in reading the poem, you are being addressed in the lines, “My words echo/Thus, in your mind.”  And even if the poem is addressed to a particular “you” and “we”, the fact remains that the reader of the poem is the one who is following down the path toward the garden.

There is something quite mythical about a speaking bird leading one toward a garden. I feel there must be a particular allusion here, but I do not know what it is. It might be an allusion to the Norse god of poetry, Bragi. Whatever the allusion, the image is charming. 

This bird calls “us” on quickly, and now we are hurrying down the pathway through the door, through the gate.

In lines 20-22 we have the word “first” used three times: It is the “first gate” and then twice “our first world.” When we couple this with the “garden” we have our first world is the garden: this points toward Eden – at least some pre-Fall world.

Now, Eliot will not actually place in the primeval garden, but there is a deliberate prelapsarian element: The fall may not be the fall of all humanity, but rather a much more personal “fall”. This is “our first world.”

Shall you (the reader, someone in particular to Eliot) and I (Eliot) open this gate in the memory and proceed to the world which didn’t happen and yet is this real to us?

There is one more point to consider, “The deception of the thrush.” What precisely is the thrush’s deception? That there is this “first world”? That we can enter it?  If I am being called into something which is abstraction and possibility, is the call to consider that at all a deception? 

Is it a deception to consider a world which never happened as a reality now?

And as we know from the first lines: this world which did not happen “point[s] to one end, which is always present.” This first world which did not happen brought about this present: a present where I am being deceived to enter a the garden of our first world.

It is fascinating because it allusive and difficult, but not muddled. He is describing something which cannot easily articulated: it is the vision out of the corner of your eye, the thought which startles and then slips away before you can focus. It is real and a deception; present and only a speculation.

Burnt Norton.2 (“a perpetual possibility”)

18 Sunday Jul 2021

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Burnt Norton.2

The Persistence of Memory, Dali, 1931

The prior post on this poem is found here

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation. 

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Prosody

It appears he is structuring the lines around beat and alliteration. I may be off here, but there is not a regular meter like iambs. The basic line seems to be built off the Old English alliterative four beat line.

TIME PREsent and TIME PAST

Four beats, the T and P repeated

are both PERhaps PREsent in TIME FUTure

The T and F from the first line as well as the P.

This scheme is not cared with perfect fidelity to the alliteration. For instance line 8:

ONly in WORLD of SPECulAtion. 

We can get four accents but no alliteration in the line. It would be possible to read this instead as a third beat line. 

Notes:

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation. 

“What might have been” is the item under consideration. He then defines it by three characteristics:

First, it is an “abstraction”. It is an abstraction in both senses: It is abstracted,that is set apart from all else It has no connection with the tangible world. Second, it is an idea without tangible substance. 

Second, it remains always and only a “possibility.” It had an opportunity to have come into existence, but it did not. It never matures from that place. 

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Third, it remains in “a world of speculation.” Access to this “might have been” is available only through speculative thought. It has a real existence, but only as a speculation. I can gain access to this “might have been” by thinking it; but it never moves from that space.

What might have been and what has been 

Point to one end, which is always present.

This takes some consideration: Why the addition of “might have been” to what has been? Here he says that might have been and what has been point together to this one point: the present. 

The actual past makes sense as pushing a direction to the present. But how does the might of have been participate in this? 

Since there is an abstract, speculative existence for might have been, we can’t say that it has no existence; only, no tangible existence. 

He is going to develop this “might have been” more as the poem develops, but let’s consider here what it could be. The “might have been” while not have a historical effect outside of my thinking has a profound effect upon me.

Might have been can be the source of enormous regret and loss. But it can also be a ground for thankfulness on tragedy avoided. The might have been is “remaining a perpetual possibility”. When we think of how a might have been actually effects us, that line “remaining a perpetual possibility” grows larger. I am constantly being affected by this perpetual possibility. It is always there.

And this potential acting upon me, and all that has actually occurred have conspired and I am here at this one point, in the present. 

EMDR and Memory (and some questions)

21 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by in Psychology

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Reading a ‘Critically evaluate Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) as a treatment method for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” by Milauro Giovanni of the University of Kent (a review the literature on EMDR for treating PTSD, particularly in respect to certain co-morbidities) got me wondering about memory. I jotted down a few questions to perhaps take up some other time.

The “point” of the therapy is to erase the effect of a peculiarly unpleasant memory and thus the negative effects upon behavior, cognition, and affections which come with that memory. (I’m being careful here to not say that the memory causes the negative behavior; there may be any number of relationships between a behavior or thought and a memory. But there certainly is some connection between the two). 

The unique aspect of EMDR is in the desensitization phase, which the APA describes as follows: “During this phase, the client focuses on the memory, while engaging in eye movements or other BLS. Then the client reports whatever new thoughts have emerged. The therapist determines the focus of each set of BLS using standardized procedures. Usually the associated material becomes the focus of the next set of brief BLS. This process continues until the client reports that the memory is no longer distressing.”

Somehow talking about the unpleasant memory while trying to keep track of the light causes the memory to fade in effect. 

Giovanni reports that studies have not shown a distinction between moving the light up and down as opposed to side-to-side. This seems to rule out the theory that the light movement is integrating the hemispheres of the brain.  

The other explanation for the effects of EMDR is that “the overcharging of working memory, that will lead to a less vivid memory of a traumatic memory and the related emotion.” (It should be noted that watching the light while discussing good memories, also results in good memories being less vivid.)

So, if I am understanding the research correctly, watching the light while speaking about a particular memory makes the memory less distinct.

There are some other observations which may be relevant here. First, there is a theory of dyslexia which explains certain effects as a failure of eye tracking and other effects as an inability to remember the correct sounds to visual image. It is as if the eye sees some X and the brain delivers a Y to the mouth. 

Second, years ago I received some advice following an unpleasant interpersonal experience: Every time I began to recall the unpleasant event, I was to pinch my hand and deliberately think of a particularly pleasant event in its place. 

Related to this would be the technique advanced by Jeffery Schwartz in “You are not Your Brain”. When my brain throws up a response to an unpleasant sensation (hey, why not get drunk/go shopping/etc rather than have this bad feeling), see this as a “deceptive brain message” and seek to repackage the event while heading in another direction: I’m feeling stress and my brain has grabbed my previous go-to response, but that is a terrible idea, let’s do this other productive thing in its place. In short, it is about reworking bad habits. 

If this analogy is correct, then EMDR may be breaking a habitual connection between the emotional/behavior/cognitive response to the memory and the memory itself. The memory functions like a key to start a habitual chain of responses. The therapy disconnects the chain of memory-to-panic/anger, et cetera. 

If it is merely a practice of disconnecting the memory from the responsive chain, is that always a good thing? Someone recalls the memory of being a victim of a crime. They respond with horror (and then perhaps some additional responses for the purpose of alleviating or displaying the horror). While I am certain that someone who has anxiety, inability to sleep, et cetera would be very happy to be freed from such painful experiences, does the disconnection of the memory from the chain of responses (as opposed to merely obscuring the memory), does this result in a desensitization to that particular stimulus in all events?

Say I am the victim of a violent crime who then suffers horrible memories and reactions to that crime. Thereafter, I undergo EMDR and no longer have that response. Am I desensitized to violent crime altogether? Or am I desensitized to only my particular memory?

Or, does it simply obscure the particular memory. The chain of memory to horror is still in place, but the first link in the chain (the memory) is removed so the remaining links do not arise.

Could the chain of memory and horror be reworked at the level of the horror? Is that what happens when someone turns to revenge rather than fear? (Anger is an easy substitute for fear). 

What happens when I recount the event in terms of (1) the sovereignty of God, (2) the knowledge that God will judge all sin, (3) that God will vindicate, (4) that we will receive “praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ”?  

Is this something which can be reworked at the level of thought? What additional behavioral responses are necessary to respond effectively such that the memory does not perpetuate a cascade of dangerous behavioral/emotional/cognitive responses?  

David Lynch on video and memory

16 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Memorization, Uncategorized

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Lynch also expressed disappointment with sharing videos on such platforms as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The director banned festival-goers from using their phones during his hour-long discussion on May 20, with everyone in the audience forced to put their mobile devices in locked cases that could only be unlocked once they’d left the venue.

Lynch argued that not only do video phones make people more occupied with capturing an experience than actually experiencing one, they also can’t provide people with the benefits of memory. The director said that camera phones “don’t shoot your interior,” so you’re better off reliving an event by relying on your memories of the emotional experience than by watching recorded video footage of whatever it is you’ve seen

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/david-lynch-social-media-television-guilty-pleasure-1201966844/

How to Create a Memory

20 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Apologetics, John, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Many researchers have created false memories in normal individuals; what is more, many of these subjects are certain that the memories are real. In one well-known study, Loftus and her colleague Jacqueline Pickrell gave subjects written accounts of four events, three of which they had actually experienced. The fourth story was fiction; it centered on the subject being lost in a mall or another public place when he or she was between four and six years old. A relative provided realistic details for the false story, such as a description of the mall at which the subject’s parents shopped. After reading each story, subjects were asked to write down what else they remembered about the incident or to indicate that they did not remember it at all. Remarkably about one third of the subjects reported partially or fully remembering the false event. In two follow-up interviews, 25 percent still claimed that they remembered the untrue story, a figure consistent with the findings of similar studies.

Read the rest

The trouble with eye witness testimony

What then can help guarantee a good memory? Notice that events which are traumatic are questionable. Notice that distant, vague events are questionable. Compare that to events which take place over a period of time, events which are witnessed by multiple persons, events subject to objective independent corroboration. And with the case of the Scripture, Jesus speaks of receiving supernatural assistance of the Spirit. John 14:26

You’re not as smart as the Internet makes you think you are

22 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in Culture, Persuasion, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Journal of Experimental Psychology
2015, vol. 144, no. 3, 674-687
Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, Frank C. Keil
“Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge”

Human beings can create systems for distributing tasks and information. Families and businesses do this sort of thing: work and information is distributed across all the members of the system. This permits the system to do more than any individual could do alone. Or to quote our authors,

By reducing redundancy, transactive memory systems work to encode, store and retrieve information more effectively than could be done by any individual.

Id., at p. 674. Now, our transactive partner in this memory storage and recall process could be a technological: indeed, the Internet has taken over as perhaps the primary source of information storage.

But the Internet goes far beyond what a spouse or business partner can provide in terms of information: it is always there, always ready, always responsive, nearly instantaneous and provides seemingly inexhaustible resources:

The Internet has been described as a “supernormal stimulus” in that its breadth and immediacy far surpass any naturally occurring transactive partner to which our minds have adapted.

Id. at p. 675. Thus, not surprisingly, the Internet has a profound effect upon how we understand our possession of knowledge. But rather than humbling us, the Internet plays to our pride and causes us to over-evaluate our self-understanding:

And in the case of the Internet, an especially immediate and ubiquitous memory partner, there may be especially large knowledge overestimations. As people underestimate how much they are relying on the Internet, success at finding information on the Internet may be conflated with personally mastered information, leading Internet users to erroneously include knowledge stored outside their own heads as their own.

Id. at p. 675.

The authors of the study note that there may be dangers in this freely accessible information. This unnoticed tendency to overestimate our intellectual abilities is coupled to a decreasing ability to retain and access “internal” information.

To draw this point out further, the Internet seems to have the ability to make us increasingly vulnerable to information: (1) we have decreasing ability to critique this information (granted the question of critique was not tested in the study, however, that seems like an inherent trouble with an atrophied cognitive mechanism: one merely “finds” the information, rather than segregates the information; and, the hideous ability to manipulate public opinion almost instantly through the “news” media seems proof of this point); and (2) when we ingest this information we are not realizing that it was sourced outside of ourselves, but rather come to believe that this is our “own” information.

News about brains, intelligence, talking to yourself, etc

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Psychology

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What this means is that there is clearly an established physiological mechanism through which colour and light can affect mood, heart rate, alertness, and impulsivity, to name but a few.

Their research was based on model that suggests intelligent people with “hyper brains” are more reactive to environmental stimulus and that “may predispose them to certain psychological disorders as well as physiological conditions involving elevated sensory and altered immune and inflammatory responses”.

Researchers have found no evidence to support the theory that video games make players more violent

The drive to be perfect in body, mind and career among today’s college students has significantly increased compared with prior generations, which may be taking a toll on young people’s mental health, according to research.

Scientists have identified a key chemical within the ‘memory’ region of the brain that allows us to suppress unwanted thoughts, helping explain why people who suffer from disorders such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and schizophrenia often experience persistent intrusive thoughts when these circuits go awry.

As far as our brain is concerned, talking to ourselves in our heads may be fundamentally the same as speaking our thoughts out loud, new research shows. The findings may have important implications for understanding why people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia hear voices.

Humans brains are interconnected through type of ‘wi-fi’ which allows us to pick up far more information about other people than we are aware of, a leading professor claims.

Kierkegaard, “The Rotation Method” Part 4 (Either/Or)

11 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Psychology, Theology of Biblical Counseling, Uncategorized

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The remainder of the essay is how to engage in the “rotation method”: how to live in this world without becoming bored. First, there is the matter of what boredom is. Some just acquire boredom, but he spends more concern about boredom as “the result of a mistake effort to find diversion.”

He then makes this fascinating observation:

Boredom depends on the nothingness which pervades reality; it causes a dizziness like that produced by looking down into a yawning chasm, and this dizziness is absolute.

There is a pointlessness to existence. There is a grinding similarity. The endless emptiness produces boredom.

When I read that I think, Jesus could have not been bored. We see how people seek to invest trivial things which great importance (think of entertainers who often do little else than divert us).

The solution to this endlessly pointless world is treat the world even more pointlessness. I cannot help but read this and think of Oscar Wilde and “all art is useless.” To avoid the endless similarity of existence, we need diversion.

But, to obtain diversion we need two things (1) forgetfulness, and (2) a lack of commitment to anything.

He calls forgetfulness “an art”. It’s first element is how one remembers. We must experience an event as an experience, it is never quite clear, but there cannot be no more or spiritual reflection. An event exists merely as an experience to be enjoyed: “Enjoying an experience to its full intensity to the last minute will make it impossible either to remember or to forget.”

Forgetfulness is more than simply not being able to recall some detail, it is to not be bound by any event. Hence, “”Nature is great because it has forgotten that it was a chaos; but this thought is subject to revival at anytime.”

Hence forgetfulness permits one to obtain “freedom”:

The art of remembering and forgetting will also insure against sticking fast in some relationship of life, and make possible the realization of complete freedom.

Hence one must avoid friendship (“The essential thing is to never stick fast, and for this it is necessary to have oblivion back of one.”), marriage  (“Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”), official positions.

This of course is a position which has risen to a level of moral permission, even obligation in the contemporary world. Appropriate psychological counsel for one in an unhappy marriage is often to not be bound by custom and tradition, but rather to “forget” vows, obligations and constriction and seek happiness.

I recently saw the truly wonderful movie Fences (it is well worth your time to watch). In that movie, the main character “forgets” his marriage because he desires some happiness from what this essayist would call boredom. But unlike our unattached essayist created by Kierkegaard, the character in Fences brings much suffering upon himself and others (interesting, I imagine this essayist would find that an acceptable cost because at least misery is not necessarily boring).

One must be “arbitrary”: “You go to see the middle of a play, you read the third part of a book….Arbitrariness in oneself corresponds to the accidental in the external world.” This reminds me of Cage’s attempt to make accidental music.

 

Remember Your Creator

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Ecclesiastes, Thomas Brooks, Uncategorized

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Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”;Ecclesiastes 12:1 (ESV)

‘Remember now thy Creator.’
Remember to know him,
remember to love him,
remember to desire him,
remember to delight in him,
remember to depend upon him,
remember to get an interest in him,
remember to live to him, and
remember to walk with him.

‘Remember now thy Creator;’ the Hebrew is Creators, Father, Son, and Spirit. To the making of man, a council was called in heaven, in the first of Genesis, and 26th verse. ‘Remember thy Creators:’

Remember the Father,
so as to know him,
so as to be inwardly acquainted with him.

Remember the Son,
so as to believe in him,
so as to rest upon him,
so as to embrace him, and
so as to make a complete resignation of thyself to him.

Remember the Spirit, so as to hear his voice,
so as to obey his voice,
so as to feel his presence, and
so as to experience his influence, &c.

‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.’
He doth not say in the time of thy youth, but ‘in the days of thy youth,’ to note,
that our life is but as a few days.
It is but as a vapour,
a span,
a flower,
a shadow,
a dream;
and therefore Seneca saith well, that ‘though death be before the old man’s face, yet he may be as near the young man’s back,’ &c.

Man’s life is the shadow of smoke, the dream of a shadow.
One doubteth whether to call it a dying life, or a living death. (Aug. Confess. lib.i.)

Thomas Brooks, The Complete Works of Thomas Brooks, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart, vol. 1, “Apples of Gold”, chapter 1 (Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; James Nisbet and Co.; G. Herbert, 1866), 178–179.

The Good of Meditation

26 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in Meditation, Richard Sibbes, Spiritual Disciplines

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It is therefore Christian wisdom, to fix our souls on good meditations, to have them wedded to good thoughts, to have those comforting thoughts, befitting Christians, that may lead us comfortably in our way to heaven. Let a man think of God’s deliverances past, and that will strengthen his faith for the future deliverances. Let him think of future deliverances, and that will lead him to a kingdom, to praise God; and this praising of God will stretch his soul, for ever and for ever; as if there were no time sufficient to glorify God, that is so excellent and glorious. What a blessed condition is this, to have God’s Spirit warming our souls and perfuming our spirits with holy thoughts, continually putting us upon the employment of heaven, till at length it hath safely brought us thither.

Richard Sibbes, The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart, vol. 1, “The Saint’s Safety in Evil Times” (Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; James Nisbet and Co.; W. Robertson, 1862), 329.