Drink Not of Lethe

Theoretically we all know that memory isn't perfect, that it's subject to perspective, revision, erosion. Yet it's hard for me to take all that book-learnin stuff and retrofit it to how I understand what I remember. Partly that's because the only source I have to tell me what happened is, you know, memory, unless there's hidden cameras everywhere I go, in which case The Man would know what I do and there would be some objective record of my actions, but even so I don't have access to those archives, so, still, the only thing I have to inform me of my journey through time and space is what my memory says is Truth.

And I have a good memory. I remember events that my friends forget. Studying for tests in college, the kind where all you do is fill in definitions, check boxes, those sorts of things, I could always get the info down pat after a few short rehearsals. So I trusted my memory without giving an extra thought to the theories and hypotheses I learned in psychology classes about the subjectivity of memory.

Slate magazine published an ongoing series about just such a topic: Mneme and her malleability. The writer follows the trajectory of Elizabeth Loftus's career in order to chronicle her pioneering studies on memory. Of course I remember Elizabeth Loftus from Cognitive Psychology. My professor was all about her work, which consists of altering memories, consulting for ad firms and defense attorneys on how to use memory to gain an advantage in the market or courtroom, creating false memories in order to discredit repressed or recovered memories, coloring memories in an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind sort of way to help people feel happier, and so on. It's good, interesting stuff.

Then, in an unrelated, contemporaneous incident, I looked over some running logs from my lustier years, back when I ran for the Pilots, back when 95 miles in a week was no big deal, the last time I was truly "in shape" (as we on the cross country and track teams understand it). As a matter of course I remembered the numbers and workouts without help from the log. A typical week for me looked something like this:

Week beginning 12 February 2007

Mon: 12 miles

Tues: 13 miles (3 mile warmup, 3 mile cooldown, 5x2000m with 1 minute rest in 6:23, 6:22, 6:13, 6:09, 6:07)

Wed: 14 miles

Thurs: 9 miles

Fri: 13 miles (3 warmup, 3 cooldown, 8x1000m with 400m jog in between in 3:00, 3:01, 3:02, 2:59, 2:56, 2:54, 2:48, 2:43)

Sat: 10 miles

Sun: 17 miles

Surely, a solid week: 88 miles, a couple good workouts coming off a 3k race the week prior in which I set a personal best. I also remember exactly what happened in that race, how the speed of the initial pace shocked my legs, how my aerobic conditioning pulled me through to the win at the wire over some BYU kid. I can also remember the workout from the above Friday being tough at the beginning, the result of a "wardrobe malfunction" of which my coach notified me during the 4th or 5th interval -- "Fix your shorts!" I remember the track spikes I wore that day (a blasted pair of Nike Eldorets, which I now attribute to causing an Achilles injury that very day). And it’s all fun to remember because it's fun to laugh about the misaligned liner of my shorts, and to think sweetly how that was the last time I felt fast, how that day I balanced over Edge City and fell off, on the wrong side.

What I had forgotten, though, is how consistently tough everything was then, which seems curious. My thoughts now tell me it was business every day, something we just did, "no big deal": 90 miles a week, averaging 13 a day like clockwork. Simply done, provided one honored the time commitment necessary to log an average of 13 a day. Saturday nights were spent in youthful exuberance while Sunday long run mornings were spent rolling out of bed and hammering the 16-20 mile-long trail. And then eating a ton. I remember hardly any fuss, a long day at the office, some more money in the bank, like in a Nike commercial or something.

Apparently I'd make a good example in Cognitive Psychology (PSY 330) because I was surprised to read in my log how consistently exhausted I felt. Nearly every other entry features the words "felt horrible," “exhausted,” "unbelievably tired," and many more creative iterations of weariness. The harder parts of my “journey through time and space" had been shaded to obscure those endless painful miles, run daily and tirelessly.

Today I invoke my memories of Clint Eastwood-like stoicism in order to marvel at what I once did. Rather I’m like Tennyson’s Ulysses looking back on the days of yore. Who knew we were all the tougher for that perseverance through weariness and how in reality I was harcorer than in memory? I colored my memories of the lustier years. And I've always called them lusty, or sublime; they were both. And they seem the lustier for the strife at the core of every day. The calendar of my log, filled with 10s, 12s, 14s, and 18s seemed only a function of youth, how many stories we could tell to stay the boredom of running in a straight line, and time devoted to the cause. Now I remember a little better what grit and resolve factored into the formula. It gives me hope that some work of noble note may yet be done.

Testing. Testing.

I've put this off for some time now, and though I don't yet have a subject about which to write, I figured getting something out there is enough for the time being.

I think I'll probably write about some movies I watch and some thoughts I have, or books I read, or I'll write about things I write. As I said, I haven't decided. I just feel like this sort of exercise can help me sort things out in my head, put my ducks in a row, and so on. If anyone is out there, you can expect those sorts of things.

Part of the subtitle on this page is a line from a cummings poem, "all in green went my love riding." To me, riding the echo down is mostly about what I put out in the world and how its effect on the green hills, that is, stuff, can be measured. It's important to explore how my perspective and actions change reality.

A book I lately read called Motherless Brooklyn sort of looks at this phenomenon. Jonathan Lethem wrote it. The main character has Tourette's and the syndrome is characterized as a sort of affliction of the mind in which the main character tries to affect a certain status quo in the world surrounding him. If things are too orderly, he disrupts them. If they are too confused, he compulsively organizes. The main point is that he recognizes what his language and tics do to the world: reality changes as a result of what we say.

Of course it does, but it's also about reality itself. An echo is not only noise, but the shape of the hills or canyons or mountains or whatever. Attending to these sorts of things, how one sees them is how they are, which is to say fluid. By riding perception down one pursues it until it stops squirming and settles on something definitive.