Broadening Your Event Horizon

Pandora by Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1882)

You go to an otolaryngologist for throat problems, but an ichthyologist if you’re the old man in the Hemingway novel and want to know what fish your wrestling with. Herpetologists are consulted about the representation of snakes in Egyptian mythology and if you want to understand Vladimir Nabokov, who collected butterflies, then you’d better know your lepidoptera. See an arachnologist if you have a question about spiders. If you’re interested in charitable matters then get used to the word eleemosynary and if you’re the kind of person who is always anticipating questions don’t feel bad if you’re accused of prolepsis. It could be worse. You could be rebarbative or morganatic, which is to say that you may be one of the royalty, but you won’t be able to pass on your title. There are so many more quotidian words to describe human aspirations. I’d rather be a quisling than a person who sells out his own country. I’d rather suffer the psychoanalytic condition of après coup than a mere trauma. Bipolarity and borderline disorders are such ubiquitous diagnoses these days that they literal demand bigger words with little tails like casus belli. I would much rather suffer a paraphilia than be a simply pervert. Irredentism is a conversation stopper, but what would you prefer an ugly silence or another boring and destructive civil war since there are always those little breakaways that are not going to happily allow themselves to be reconstituted into the whole. Are you just a utilitarian who’s read his Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill or consequentialist? Getting down and dirty do you follow the Chicago school and supply side economics or do you hearken back to Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism? Call a spade a spade. Don’t settle for being a game theorist when you can, following Philippa Foot, become a prodigy of trolleyology. Why study loss aversion when you can pursue neuro-economics? Tinnitus is annoying, but tintinnabulation can be majestic. Everyone wants a six pack, but an extended word is not a distended stomach. It need not be a Pandora’s Box. It’s a form of prestidigitation that will broaden your event horizon.

The Intepretation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Dreams

Gennady Barabtarlo’s TLS piece (“Textures of Time, “ 10/31/14 ) recounts an experiment that Vladimir Nabokov conducted between October of l964 until January 3, l965 in which he wrote down his dreams. Barabtalo explains, “The point of the experiment was to test the theory that dreams can be precognitive as well as retrospective.” According to Barabtarlo, Nabokov was testing the theories outlined by J.W. Dunne in his An Experiment with Time (Studies in Consciousness) (1927). Barabtalo’s TLS piece also provides some sample dreams which are unavoidable fodder for the kinds of simplistic interpretation Nabokov would have enthusiastically discountenanced. Only a comically deluded character in a Nabokov novel would be grandiose enough to take on the psyche of the master. But here’s a go. On November 22, l964 Nabokov dreams he's in a "lecture-hall." His father is speaking. Nabokov is plainly interested in what his father has to say and he's taking notes. At one point after Nabokov clears his “throat a trifle too loudly,” his father unjustly reprimands him thusly, “Even if you are bored you might have decency to sit quietly.” If you noticed a tremor in your computer, it’s Nabokov coming back from the afterlife in attempt to cut off the oncoming oedipal interpretation at the pass. On October 16, l964, Nabokov dreams that he is "dancing with Ve” (his wife Vera). He comments “A man kisses her in passing. I clutch him by the head and bang his face with such vicious force against the wall that he almost gets meat-hooked on some fixtures on the walls.” OK, OK! Why belabor the obvious? Oedipus here, Oedipus there, Oedipus everywhere. Nevertheless our psychoanalytically oriented sleuth can’t help himself. And finally there’s October 14, l964. Here Nabokov dreams about running by a “carriage." "A stranger in the cab (round face, oldish) asks me in Russian (or German?) am I well off? Criticizes my clothes (those I wear to-day) I explain that the spots on my trousers (which are browner than any I wear to-day) are due to my splashing across a puddle.” Thundering and lightening from the heavens, but alas nothing can stop the avalanche of earth bound rumination. Our sleuth is certainly having a party with this one to the extent that Nabokov was a Russian émigré, a displaced aristocrat, who lead a hardscrabble life in Berlin(where his father was assassinated). Is our sleuth being too simplistic in concluding that the puddle may be the Russian Revolution with the stains on our esteemed author’s pants representing his decline in social status?

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.