Speak, Memory

Memory is under attack. A recent New Yorker article by Michael Specter (“Partial Recall,” 5/19/14) discusses findings by neuroscientists which might enable memory to be edited. Though most of the work has been done at Mount Sinai and N.Y.U. with rats, it seems to offer the prospect of a more benign version of The Manchurian Candidate. The idea would be that survivors of atrocity who suffer from PTSD along with addicts whose addictions are often tied to people, places and things could be freed of symptoms by treating the mind the way the Avid deals with digitalized images. But let’s say that this can be achieved is it advisable? Do the means (which run the gamut from analgesia to eradication) justify the end of producing a so called happy and untroubled individual? Can bad memories be looked at like cancers which must be removed before they become systemic? The New Yorker piece has profound resonances because while it reports research, it’s also telling the story of Daniela Schiller, a scientist whose work is in part driven by her own history, which is that of being the child of a Holocaust survivor. The memory reconsolidation issue also is reminiscent of the lobotomy, a once prevalent approach to mental illness that is now rarely employed. If memory might be painful, can we say that removing it is a little like locking someone in a cell and throwing away the key? On a collective scale would we want to remove painful memories of mass murder, plane crashes, serial murderers under the theory that these instances create nightmares in children and an atmosphere of fear in society? Even if we could would we want to eliminate the bad and ugly to spare the good? And don’t the famous words of Santayana come into play, in considering both ontogenic and phylogenic consequences of using the neuroscientific techniques involving reconsolidation  amputate gangrenous recollection? “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,”  Speak, Memory was the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiographical memoir. Imagine the Proustian madeleine in a world of artificially induced memory reconsolidation. It would be just a madeleine.

Success and Succession

Determining the order of succession in the new secretive North Korean government of Kim Jong-un, the son of the recently deceased Kim Jong-il is as difficult as discovering the elusive Higgs Boson. As you may recall the Higgs Boson is the tiny particle that scientists have been seeking out for over 40 years. Recently, teams of particle physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva discovered some very encouraging results which would as Columbia physicist Brian Greene recently said in a Times Op-Ed piece, “complete an essential chapter in our quest to understand the basic components of the universe.” (“Waiting for the Higgs Particle, NYT, 12/14/11). So little in fact is known about the North Korean leadership that like understanding the Higgs particle, it would involve in Greene’s words “a rewriting of the very definition of nothingness.” One other thing that the North Korean leadership has in common with the Higgs particle is that any sightings tend to be short-lived. “Finding this particle would be no easy task,” Greene went on to comment. “The Higgs particle would be short-lived, quickly decaying into other, more familiar particles.” Doesn’t that too seem the problem when it comes to determining the ephemeral coterie of officials surrounding around both Kim Jong-il and his anointed successor Kim Jong-un. “Identifying the mourners and absentees in the world’s most closed society is one of the few ways available to outsiders trying to solve the mystery of the unfolding succession in Pyongyang,” Choe Sang-Hun said in a recent Times piece (“Buzz Over Who’s Not in the North Korean Picture(s),” NYT, 12/22 /11). Is it too far a stretch  to think that Angela Landsbury could be brought back to reprise the evil mother she played in Manchurian Candidate to play the role of Kim Ok who Choe Sang-Hun described as “one of Jim Jong-il’s closest aides.” According to Sang-Hun, Kim Jong-un  is “the second son of Kim Jong-il’s third wife” and Kim Ok is now serving “as the North’s de facto first lady since Kim Jong-un’s mother died  in 2004.” Yes we are going from West to East from the extreme right to the extreme left (and beyond), but in our quantum universe where a particle can be in two different places at the same time, nothing is surprising. Lawrence Harvey played Landsbury’s son (Raymond Shaw) in Manchurian Candidate and if he were alive, he would have been the perfect person to play the role of the handsome but baffled looking Kim Jong-un, whose mother Ko Young-hee was a prominent North Korea Opera star. The wild card according to Sang-Hun’s story is Kim Jong-nam (no relation to Viet), the hapless oldest son of Kim Jon-il and the product of KJi's marriage to his first wife who “fell out of favor and was alone in Moscow when she died.” Sang-Hun reports that there were rumors Ko Young-hee, the opera star, had been behind a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-nam who “now lives in effective exile in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macao.” Hopefully, by the time the existence of the Higgs Boson is finally confirmed, more will be revealed about who’s who in Pyongyang.