the irretrievability of lived time

the end of this post goes off the philosophical deep-end in an ADD sort of plot twist and bears no relation to its beginning

Everyone I've met thus far in Germany has been able to speak at least passable English, a kind of multilingualism that makes me feel embarrassed for my own country - as if this fact somehow singly confirms the American stereotype that we've been too busy watching Home Shopping Network to bother learning about the existence of other countries.

"Do you speak English?" I'll ask almost apologetically. And almost invariably in response: "Yes! What is it?"

On Saturday we leave for Stuttgart to get away from pretty much already being away from it all, and I emerge from the train station to see a picturesque city center with gleaming fountains and neatly fitted cobblestones. Eurozone crisis be damned; Germany seems to be doing pretty alright for itself: an H&M sprawled across a block, a clothing store called Kult whose color scheme is composed entirely of red and black, small creameries selling gelato at a felonious 2 euro a scoop, a boulevard positively bristling with middle-aged couples and roving packs of teens. I look back at the train station, and on top of the tower where a national flag would normally be, I see a Mercedes Benz sigil soaring triumphantly instead, revolving slowly against the sun like a giant stick of schwarma meat.

One moment unsettles me: a balloon artist in full clown regalia leaning against the wall, one hand casually thumbing an iPhone, the other dangling an idly-smoking cigarette. His eyes flicker up at me, and for a second I tense up - I recognize the same dead look I see in grocery store cashiers or bus drivers: the utter lack of processing power of a mind atrophied by endless monotony, terrifying to a college-aged student like me because it might be contagious, because ten years and a student loan ago that balloon artist might once have stood where I stand.

I also don't like clowns very much.

We head to the Mercedes Benz museum, a modern-looking building all steel and blue glass, the misshapen egg of a Godzilla-sized nightingale. When I step inside I realize that the entire structure is hollow and dome-shaped, dimly lit and rising up for six floors to draw your eye towards the ceiling, which some clever architect has managed to sculpt in the shape of the Mercedes Benz star. It's like the dome in St. Paul's Cathedral, I find myself thinking, and not at all ugly - except the object of worship here is the Engine and its chosen messiah: Petroleum.

A pair of retro-looking elevators take us to the top, and for the next two hours I walk along a carefully-designed downwards spiral, curiosities on every corner practically grabbing me by the lapels. The first model of a car engine is crudely simple, almost enough so that I imagine I could understand its mechanics if i squint my eyes the right way, turned it inside out somehow and -

- huh. I paused in the middle of that sentence and went out for dinner (the Maultaschen was excellent, thank you) and came back a few hours later, intending to start up again but getting caught by the internet in the same way a shopping addict will go out to buy groceries but wake up two hours later in Macy's jeans section. And during my mental jean-fitting time, I watched this.*

"Do you ever feel like you do things even though they're really not that enjoyable just to collect the memory? I do. Often. But what do we do with those memories? We optimize for remembering but we spend so much less time remembering than experiencing. Like that trip I took to Europe. I spent 3 months experiencing but since then I've probably only spent the equivalent of a day or two remembering it. I wonder if I would have done that trip differently if I didn't care what I remembered about it."

You have to admit that that piece of food for thought has a freakish sense of timing, as if the universe has all of a sudden decided to start harassing me with highly specific symbolism, subtlety be damned. I'm also particularly vulnerable to this type of philosophical labyrinth because of an old obsession with the psychological present - basically the idea that we're conscious for very little of our life, and are instead on a sort of neural autopilot, backseat drivers to our own consciousness - and the fact that right at that moment, before I watched the video, I was in the process of meticulously recording the memory of my past weekend at Stuttgart in overwrought prose, faithfully retracing my steps so that my remembering self would have fodder to burn - exactly the activity Ze ends up talking about.

And in fact this sort of memory record-keeping is fairly standard for me, and arises out of my fear of forgetting, forgetting being the next closest thing to oblivion and the mind's slow circling of the drain (question: if you don't remember an experience, is it as if that experience might as well never have happened? God knows I don't remember a smidge from the vast majority of my classes, let alone the books I've read or the conversations I've had. Is it as if I had never taken the class? Read the book? Lived?) and I in response have over the years attempted to nail down the passings of the days onto the page.

Observe a typical Hans Gao diary entry, taken from the archives:


10/02/11
Geol field trip, rocks bedding, time flashing by, crumpling sheets of land and erosion, donuts, Jan is one of those people/professors I want to impress.

Gano street tunnel, waiting for Emma's laundry, Maddy walking with us a bit (need to spend more time with her/catch up), off the road, a small hole, and the sounds of dripping, a walking stick to lean against the ground, pools of water - don't fall in, walking on top of the the rail tracks, a balancing act, singing echoing in the tunnel, darkness held at bay, the songs reverberating, stalactites and white calcium underfoot overhead, complete dark, complete dark, graffiti on the walls, spray paint, the pinprick of light behind us receding walking walking walking, approaching the end, a ray of light hitting the ground, outside the door a real world separated by a thin layer and that's it.

HealthLeads get-together, the words running into each other, awkward, walking back with Kirsten and detouring at Starbucks, the warmth of good company, going to see Doctor Who finale at Andrew's, Swab coming in with nothing but boxers and a trenchcoat, end, SciLi studying.


Because the grim truth of why we take pictures and write in journals and save our old emails is to stave off the void of forgetting, Even as we approach the Eiffel Tower, we automatically reach for our cameras - we want to capture this moment - prove that it existed, pin it down so that even though we may forget how the wind felt on our faces and the way the hum of the crowd drowned out any single conversation or the way the Tower seemed to reach up and graze the dome of the sky with a single long sweeping hand (you swear it was alive that the Tower was vibrating you couldn't believe that this was man-made and not man-grown) even though we may forget all that, we can look at this photograph in the future and say: "I didn't imagine it. My memory is blurry, but here is a moment of clarity, and if you hold it up to the light you can almost see through it, to the essence of that moment itself."

And so even as we're there in front of the Tower, our experiencing self is shoved to the background; we're busy optimizing for our remembering self, taking pictures, anticipating looking back - anticipating the remembrance at the expense of experiencing what we will later strive to remember.

So what if we spent less time worrying about forgetting - just accepted it as human, inevitable, the logical consequence of the transience of the human mind - and absolved ourselves of all guilt, and just experienced? Didn't take any photos and didn't spend hours meticulously placing one word after another in the optimal way that would aid remembrance, and instead just stood there, beneath the Eiffel tower, felt the minute wind upon the face and lived completely and utterly in the moment, in the present, in the (wait for it) psychological present? And after it was time to leave, just left, left that moment in the past with the knowledge that there were a million other moments equal to it in transcendence and purity - in fact one was happening right now, are you paying attention? - and if we remembered it, we remembered it; and if not, well that's just the way things worked in this universe.

It's the irreversibility of lived time, the irretrievability of lived time that frightens me. But I've been coming to learn that this is in fact perfectly normal, is actually universal and supremely human and basically just comes with the territory of having a soul. And in fact I write as much to interpret as to remember, as much to make sense of my emotions at the time, to pull out the dangling thread and unravel what seems like a seamless surface that resists comprehension, to create order out of what appears to be constant white noise.


So in fact the rest of this blog post would have ended thus: the Mercedes-Benz museum was great. Later in the metro I ended up trapped in an elevator with eleven other people. It was for a good length of time, and the experience was not without a twinge of hysteria, as our breath fogged up the glass and the box got hotter. We ended up prying the door open.

And that's the end of it. There's no takeaway message here, other than perhaps to experience the fuck out of the moment, and to remember not to worry about remembering too much. To not let remembering get in the way of experiencing.




*ze frank being of those of the rare people/artists/writers who resonates with me consistently. Others include DFW (let's play a game - it's called "can you spot this post's hidden DFW reference?") and Roger Ebert.