4 | Musings
Clouds of Memory
13 | Muller Bros. Moving & Storage
I OWN MANY OLD and beautiful books, classics of natural history bound in leather and illustrated with hand-colored plates. But no item in my collection comes close in personal value to a modest volume, bound in gray cloth and published in 1892: Studies of English Grammar, by J. M. Greenwood, Superintendent of Schools in Kansas City. The book belonged to my grandfather, a Hungarian immigrant. He wrote on the title page, in an elegant European hand: “Prop. of Joseph A. Rosenberg, New York.” Just underneath, he added in pencil the most eloquent of all possible lines: “I have landed. Sept. 11, 1901.”
Papa Joe died when I was thirteen, before I could properly distill his deepest experiences, but long enough into my own ontogeny for the precious gifts of extensive memory and lasting influence. He was a man of great artistic sensibility and limited opportunity for expression. I am told that he sang beautifully as a young man, though increasing deafness and a pledge to the memory of his mother (never to sing again after her death) stilled his voice long before my birth. He never used his remarkable talent for drawing in any effort of fine arts, though he marshaled these skills to rise from cloth-cutting in the sweatshops to middle-class life as a brassiere and corset designer. (The content of his chosen expression titillated me as a child, but I now appreciate the primary theme of economic emancipation through the practical application of artistic talent). Yet, above all, he expressed his artistic sensibilities in his personal bearing—in elegance of dress (a bit on the foppish side, perhaps), grace of movement, beauty of handwriting, ease of mannerism.
Sadly, I have no snapshot of Papa Joe and me. But here he is with my cousin Adele, impeccably dressed as always.
I well remember one manifestation of this rise above the ordinary, both because we repeated the act every week and because the junction of locale and action seemed so incongruous, even to a small child of five or six. Every Sunday morning, Papa Joe and I would take a stroll to the corner store on Queens Boulevard to buy the paper and a half-dozen bagels. We then walked to the great world-class tennis stadium of Forest Hills, where McEnroe and his ilk still cavort. A decrepit and disused side entrance sported a rusty staircase of three or four steps. With his unfailing deftness, Papa Joe would take a section of the paper that we never read and neatly spread several sheets over the lowermost step (for the thought of a rust flake or speck of dust in contact with his trousers filled him with horror). We would then sit down and have the most wonderful man-to-man talk about the latest baseball scores, the rules of poker, or the results of the Friday night fights.
I retain a beautiful vision of this scene: The camera pans back and we see a tiny staircase, increasingly dwarfed by the great stadium. Two little figures sit on the bottom step—a well-dressed elderly man gesturing earnestly, a little boy listening with adoration.
Certainty is both a blessing and a danger. Certainty provides warmth, solace, security, an anchor in the unambiguously factual events of personal observation and experience. I know that I sat on those steps with my grandfather because I was there, and no external power of suggestion has ever played havoc with this most deeply personal and private experience.
But certainty is also a great danger, given the notorious fallibility—and unrivaled power—of the human mind. How often have we killed on vast scales for the “certainties” of nationhood and religion? How often have we condemned the innocent because the most prestigious form of supposed certainty—eyewitness testimony—bears all the flaws of our ordinary fallibility?
Primates are visual animals par excellence, and we therefore grant special status to personal observation, to being there and seeing directly. But all sights must be registered in the brain and stored somehow in its intricate memory. And the human mind is both the greatest marvel of nature and the most perverse of all tricksters: Einstein and Loge inextricably combined.
This special (but unwarranted) prestige accorded to direct observation has led to a serious popular misunderstanding about science. Since science is often regarded as the most objective and truth-directed of human enterprises, and since direct observation is supposed to be the favored route to factuality, many people equate respectable science with visual scrutiny—just the facts ma’am, and palpably before my eyes. But science is a battery of observational and inferential methods, all directed to the testing of propositions that can, in principle, be definitely proven false. A restriction of compass to matters of direct observation would stymie the profession intolerably. Science must often transcend sight to win insight. At all scales, from smallest to largest, quickest to slowest, many well-documented conclusions of science lie beyond the strictly limited domain of direct observation. No one has ever seen an electron or a black hole, the events of a picosecond or a geological eon.
One of the phoniest arguments raised for rhetorical effect by “creation scientists” tried to deny scientific status to evolution because its results take so much time to unfold and therefore can’t be seen directly. But if science required such immediate vision, we could draw no conclusions about any subject that studies the past—no geology, no cosmology, no human history (including the strength and influence of religion) for that matter. We can, after all, be reasonably sure that Henry V prevailed at Agincourt even though no photos exist and no one has survived more than five hundred years to tell the tale. And dinosaurs really did snuff it tens of millions of years before any conscious observer inhabited our planet. Evolution suffers no special infirmity as a science because its grandest events took so long to unfold during an unobservable past.
Moreover, eyewitness accounts do not deserve their conventional status as ultimate arbiters even when testimony of direct observation can be marshaled in abundance. In her sobering book, Eyewitness Testimony (1979), Elizabeth Loftus debunks, largely in a legal context, the notion that visual observation confers some special claim for veracity. She identifies three levels of potential error in supposedly direct and objective vision: misperception of the event itself, and the two great tricksters of passage through memory before later disgorgement—retention and retrieval.
In one experiment, for example, Loftus showed 40 students a three-minute videotape of a classroom lecture disrupted by 8 demonstrators (a relevant subject for a study from the early 1970s!). She gave the students a questionnaire and asked half of them, “Was the leader of the 12 demonstrators…a male?” and the other half, “Was the leader of the 4 demonstrators…a male?” One week later, in a follow-up questionnaire, she asked all the students, “How many demonstrators did you see entering the classroom?” Those who had previously received the question about 12 demonstrators reported seeing an average of 8.9 people; those told of 4 demonstrators claimed an average of 6.4. All had actually seen 8, but formed a later judgment as a compromise between their actual observation and the largely subliminal power of suggestion in the first questionnaire.
People can even be induced to “see” totally illusory objects. In another experiment, Loftus showed a film of an accident, followed by a misleading question: “How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn while traveling along the country road?” (The film showed no barn, and a control group received a more accurate question: “How fast was the white sports car going while traveling along the country road?”) A week later, 17 percent of students in the first group stated that they had seen the nonexistent barn; only 3 percent of the controls reported a barn.
Thus, we are easily fooled on all fronts of both eye and mind: seeing, storing, and recalling. The eye tricks us badly enough; the mind is even more perverse. What remedy can we possibly suggest but constant humility, and eternal vigilance and scrutiny? Trust your memory as you would your poker buddy (one of my grandfather’s mottos from the steps).
With this principle in mind, I went searching for those steps last year after more than thirty years of absence from my natal turf. I exited the subway at 67th Avenue, walked to my first a
partment at 98–50, and then set off on my grandfather’s route for Queens Boulevard and the tennis stadium.
I was walking in the right direction, but soon realized that I had made a serious mistake. The tennis stadium stood at least a mile down the road, too far for those short strolls with a bag of bagels in one hand and a five-year-old boy attached to the other. In increasing puzzlement, I walked down the street and, at the very next corner, saw the steps and felt the jolt and flood of memory that drives our recherches des temps perdus.
My recall of the steps was entirely accurate—three modest flagstone rungs, bordered by rusty iron railings. But the steps are not attached to the tennis stadium; they form the side entrance to a modest brick building, now crumbling, padlocked, and abandoned, but still announcing its former use with a commercial sign, painted directly on the brick in the old industrial style—“Muller Bros. Moving & Storage”—with a telephone number below from the age before all-digit dialing: ILlinois 9-9200.
Obviously, I had conflated the most prominent symbol of my old neighborhood, the tennis stadium, with an important personal place, and had constructed a juxtaposed hybrid for my mental image. Yet my memory of the tennis stadium soaring above the steps remains strong, even now in the face of conclusive correction.
The side wall of Muller Bros. as it appears today with its painting in the old industrial style. Photograph by Eleanor Gould.
I might ask indulgence on the grounds of inexperience and relative youth, for my failure as an eyewitness at the Muller Bros. steps. After all, I was only an impressionable lad of five or so, when even a modest six-story warehouse might be perceived as big enough to conflate with something truly important.
But I have no excuses for a second story. Ten years later, at a trustable age of fifteen, my family made a western trip by automobile: I have specially vivid memories of an observation at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming (the volcanic plug made most famous as a landing site for aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind). We approach from the east. My father tells us to look for the tower from tens of miles away, for he has read in a guidebook that it rises, with an awesome near-verticality, from the dead-flat Great Plains, and that pioneer families used the tower as a landmark and beacon on their westward trek. We see the tower, first as a tiny projection, almost square in outline, at the horizon. It gets larger and larger as we approach, assuming its distinctive form and finally revealing its structure as a conjoined mat of hexagonal basalt columns. I have never forgotten the two features that inspired my rapt attention: the maximal rise of verticality from flatness, forming a perpendicular junction, and the steady increase in size from a bump on the horizon to a looming, almost fearful giant of a rock pile.
Now I know, I absolutely know that I saw this visual drama, as described. The picture in my mind of that distinctive profile, growing in size, is as strong as any memory I possess. I see the tower as a little dot in the distance, as a midsized monument, as a full field of view. I have told the story to scores of people, comparing this natural reality with a sight of Chartres as a tiny toy tower twenty miles from Paris, growing to the overarching symbol and skyline of its medieval city.
In 1987, I revisited Devil’s Tower with my family—the only return since my first close encounter thirty years before. I planned the trip to approach from the east, so that they would see the awesome effect—and I told them my story, of course.
In the context of this essay, my dénouement will be anticlimactic in its predictability, however acute my personal embarrassment. The terrain around Devil’s Tower is mountainous; the monument cannot be seen from more than a few miles away in any direction. I bought a booklet on pioneer trails westward, and none passed anywhere near Devil’s Tower. We enjoyed our visit, but I felt like a perfect fool. Later, I checked my old log book for that high school trip. The monument that rises from the plain, the beacon of the pioneers, is Scottsbluff, Nebraska—not nearly so impressive a pile of stone as Devil’s Tower.
And yet I still see Devil’s Tower in my mind when I think of that growing dot on the horizon. I see it as clearly and as surely as ever, though I now know that the memory is false.
This has been a long story for a simple moral. Papa Joe, the wise old peasant in a natty and elegant business suit, told me on those steps to be wary of all blandishments and to trust nothing that cannot be proved. We must extend his good council to our own interior certainties, particularly those that we never question because we regard eyewitnessing as paramount in veracity.
Yours truly on the fateful steps. Photograph by Eleanor Gould.
Of course we must treat the human mind with respect, for nature has fashioned no more admirable instrument. But we must also struggle to stand back and to scrutinize our own mental certainties. This last line poses an obvious paradox, if not an outright contradiction, and I have no resolution to offer. Yes, step back and scrutinize your own mind. But with what?
14 | Shoemaker and Morning Star
KOKO, the obsequious tailor promoted to public executioner in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, maintains “a little list of society offenders who might well be underground”—and he means dead and buried, not romantically in hiding. He places into the lengthy ledger of those “who never would be missed,” a variety of miscreants, including nearly all lawyers and politicians, and even, in a bow to his Victorian prejudices (the true setting beneath the Japanese exterior), “that singular anomaly, the lady novelist.” But the most deserving character in Koko’s compendium, for he haunts all times and places, is “the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own.”
Admittedly, we do live in a conceptual trough that encourages such yearning for unknown and romanticized greener pastures of other times. The future doesn’t seem promising, if only because we can extrapolate some disquieting present trends into further deterioration: pollution, nationalism, environmental destruction, and aluminum bats. Therefore, we tend to take refuge in a rose-colored past—lemonade and cookies in a rocking chair on the porch of a warm summer’s evening. (I actually participated in all these lovely anachronisms, after a lecture last year, in the intellectually dynamic but architecturally frozen Victorian village of Chautauqua, and I was thoroughly charmed until I remembered that, at the actual time recaptured à la Rockwell, my ancestors worked in sweatshops and lived in tenements, while all black people in town probably dwelled in shacks, literally on the other side of the railroad tracks.)
Foolish romanticism about the past feeds on our selective memory, our fundamental human ability—the only rescue from madness in this world of substantial woe—to discard the ugly and reconstruct our former lives and surroundings to our liking. I do not doubt the salutary, even the essential, properties of this curiously adaptive human trait, but we must also record the down side. Legends of past golden ages become impediments when we try to negotiate our current dilemmas. Blubbery nostalgia clouds any hope for rational understanding. (I don’t remember the fifties as a wonderfully pleasant and carefree time, and nostalgia for that particular decade of McCarthyism and the cold war seems strongest in young people who weren’t even alive then!) Mythology about a happy and simpler past also presents a seemingly limitless arena for commercial exploitation.
I encountered an interesting, though minimally disturbing, example of this commercial side during a recent family visit last month to the Amana Colonies in Iowa. The seven Amana villages were founded in the mid-nineteenth century by German pietists, members of the Society of True Inspirationists who, like so many religious minorities, left a scene of Old World persecution for a new life in America. They first settled near Buffalo, New York, and then, in 1855, moved to Iowa, spurred westward by cheap, abundant, and fertile land.
Utopian communities in America had variable success; few lasted for very long, and those that survived usually held their membership tight (and unrebellious) by strong, shared religious bonds. Amana was a truly communistic society; members ate in communal kitchens a
nd used no money (common foodstuffs could be taken from supply bins “according to need,” while the colonies issued scrip for purchase of rarer items in company stores). They endured in this admirable and decidedly un-American fashion until 1932, when a variety of inevitabilities, from economic woes of the depression to a “youth revolt” spurred by desire for personal ownership of standard consumer goods, provoked what residents still call the “Great Change.” Amana split its major affairs of church and economy (the former has been declining ever since, the latter booming)—and the work of the fields, shops and industries transmogrified, in the good old American way, into a joint stock company.
The villages remain small and pleasant, displaying an architecture both simple and elegant in Shakeresque fashion. But the main street of Amana (the central village) is abuzz with businesses, all designed to separate tourists from dollars by promoting the bucolic and agrarian simplicity of a romanticized past. Some, like the Amana Furniture Shop, at least feature indigenous (if remarkably pricy) crafts of the original inhabitants; others offer utilitarian, and more economically accessible, products of local bakeries and vineyards. But many ply the objects of other states and nations, forging their link to Amana only in the “product image” of nostalgia and bucolia—and producing a dispiriting sameness that struck me as a country counterpart to the identical Crabtree and Evelyn soap store found in every yuppie boutique mall of urban America.