Bringing Them Back

(The photo, Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery, is by John Moore, via Getty Images)

In honor of Memorial day, I thought I'd post this link to a Wall Street Journal article that came out a couple of days ago. Came across it by chance and thought it would be fitting for this post over this weekend. Basically, we may assume that bringing back the bodies of the fallen was always considered necessary. But that's a collective lapse of memory. It's a fairly recent development. Of course, seeing those massive graveyards of American dead in European ground from World War II should have made that obvious. But of course we forget...

Oil, Oil Everywhere

It's funny, but this is the blog I often have the most trouble thinking up ideas for. Right now, though, I am spoiled for choice. As the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is perhaps the most pressing at the moment, though, I'll mention two sources that show how we have already been here time and time again. The first comes from a Talk of the Town piece by Elizabeth Kolbert about the 1968 accident off the California coast, showing both that we knew everything we needed to know about this stuff way back when, but also mentioning how such catastrophes can, at the right cultural moment, be catalysts for change.

That seemed enough, but then I caught the Rachel Maddow show tonight, which shows how, in 1979, we went through a very similar experience in the Gulf of Mexico. (No, I don't remember it either--that's sort of the point around here, though.)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

volcanoes

I'm not sure that this April's eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull really ties into the theme of a lapse of memory, since it's hard to forget something that you've never heard of before. Still, I found it quite intriguing that something we don't actually think about all that much was able to so swiftly bring much of the European economy to a halt and through something that most of us had never heard of--the vulnerability of jet engines to spewn volcanic ash.

But obviously it's someone's lapse of memory, otherwise either it would have been common knowledge, or no one would have known it and whole airline fleets would have flown out, none the wiser on the potential peril. It always interests me when knowledge that some people had all along suddenly emerges and becomes our common knowledge so quickly. It happens when presidents have major or even minor surgery, for instance, and it's always rather heartening me that, given the right incentives, people of all ages and opinions can be like sponges in their capacity to learn.

Anyway, in stumbling around for ideas that might link to why I thought volcanoes might be a good Lapse of Memory post, other than the fact that I haven't posted here for awhile, I came across this site on the top 10 volcanoes in geologic history. As these type of memory tests are supposed to be good for the brain, why not test yourself and see how well you do?

I only knew a few and one of them was due really to a wonderful children's book that imprinted it vividly on my memory. If anyone's curious, just drop a note here and let me know.

Black Beauty--or The Secret History of Anna Sewell

Well, not secret so much as forgotten and obscure. I was at work yesterday and one of our used book buyers showed me an old copy of Black Beauty and this brought back some of my own memories of the book. I read it or at least some abridged version of it in my horse-obsessed girlhood. I empathized deeply with Black Beauty's plight, but being seven or eight, did not exactly read the story critically.

I must have been in my twenties when the book--again, some old, forgotten, illustrated version, maybe even the same one--resurfaced at my sister's. We spent an evening laughing, perhaps with gallows humor, at the unrelenting woe that filled its pages. And then promptly forgot it again.

What I remembered yesterday, though, was a wonderful article I'd read in The Believer four or five years ago. It was written by Paul Collins, which of course I had not remembered, and takes up the subject of Black Beauty and the life of Anna Sewell about midway through. I think I'll save the fascinating, but tragic facts he comes up with as the background of the novel, as you can read the whole thing in it's entirety here. I'll summarize for the less inclined by saying that Black Beauty is sad for good reason.

But one of the things that struck me this time, and made it a worthy subject for this blog, is Sewell's almost completely forgotten and unknown status.

Here's a taste of the article:

Black Beauty has been translated into everything from Swedish to Hindustani, and made and remade many times over in both silent and sound movies, as well as a TV series. It has also generated sheaves of sequels—including Son of Black Beauty, which sounds like a swell idea for a book until you recall that Black Beauty was a gelding. No matter: he is an unstoppable force. Nearly everyone has heard of him, many have read him, and few have any notion whatsoever of his origins.

I cannot find a single academic monograph dedicated to examining Black Beauty. The book’s critical obscurity is matched by that of Anna Sewell herself; the only full-length biography devoted to her, The Woman Who Wrote Black Beauty, has been out of print for thirty years, and was more about mother Mary Sewell than about Anna herself. As biographer Susan Chitty readily admitted, Anna was almost impervious to biography: her one surviving diary is a tatty notebook of fourteen pages in length. Compare this to Sewell’s rival in the shut-in spinster-genius sweepstakes, Emily Dickinson: she, at least, left hundreds of letters behind. Of Anna Sewell we have little but what comes, so to speak, straight from the horse’s mouth.

But oh, how he spoke!

MFA scholars in search of a topic, take heed. You will be doing the world a favor.

Iran--or The Revolution Isn't Over Just Because American Television Isn't Covering it Right Now

One of the original things I wanted to do with this blog, though I've gotten a bit away from it, is tracking events that caught our attention at one point, but have slipped away from our media driven memory. Last year's Iranian revolt is hardly history, and in fact I got a message from Amnesty International just in the last few days asking for urgent action for protesters at Ashoura:

Two women, Leily Afshar and Atieh Yousefi, and one man, Reza al-Basha, are among hundreds of people believed to be held incommunicado following mass arrests on 27 and 28 December 2009, around the Shi’a Muslim holy day of Ashoura. All of those arrested are at risk of torture or other ill-treatment.

I encourage you to visit the Amnesty International website. However, what I really wanted to do was post about an Iranian blog or two and then maybe add them to my blog roll here. It doesn't turn out to be that easy to find the active bloggers though. Understandably, some of the blogging fever that was part of the uprising has subsided. This article explains a bit more about that.

Another site that has quite a comprehensive list of blogs in English is Iranians' Blogs. Although the list itself might be a bit overwhelming, the blog roll shows blogs that have been active recently. And then there's United for Iran , which hosts frequent updates on the situation "on the ground".

As a Californian, I feel a certain connection to Iran. Before the fall of the Shah, there were a lot of Iranian students studying here, and a friend of my sister's, Mariam, was studying at UCSC at the same time I was. She represents to me the bright flowering of the Iranian student movement then, which makes me feel an affinity to the Iranian student movement now.

It's relatively easy to protest in America these days, even if sometimes we don't feel like it accomplishes much. But even with great polarities, our civil rights tend for the most part to be protected. It's not the same thing in places like Iran. I can't imagine the guts it takes to take to the streets, or blog. It's worth your time to take a moment and read the reportage of some of the brave souls who, armed only with their courage, do still manage to do this.

Dark City and Last Thursdayism

In a discussion of the recently released movie Avatar over on Adrian McKinty's highly recommended blog, the




conversation veered toward other sci-fi movies hailed as landmarks, formative, influential and so on. Dark City came up in this context. Although wikipedia cites it as a cult classic, many may agree with McKinty's implication that this is now largely a forgotten movie. And though that itself might make good fuel for a blog about lapses of memory, in fact, it is the movie's subject matter that makes it rich material for this blog.

A man named John Murdoch wakes up in a bathtub not remembering too much about how he got there, but he is soon on the run from the law and other forces with other ends. A nice little intro to the film can be found here. You might like to stop here and start with that if you haven't seen the film, which deserves to be watched without a lot of spoilers...



...If you are still with me, though, I will go on to say that Dark City is a stunning film about lost memory, recreated memory, and how much we should trust memory at all. Personally, I'm a sucker for movies whose theme is "reality as we know it is not as it seems", like The Matrix, Groundhog Day, Truman and, well, the list goes on and on, doesn't it? Put differently, how do we know that everything we believe about the world is true?

This film, perhaps even more than the others cited, makes the very foundations of our memory suspect. The analogy is most closely related to dreams, where premises we find ourselves adhering to turn out to have been created in the moment based on suppositions that wouldn't hold water if we could really think about them. But how much can we really think about anything, given that we have to use our own thoughts and memory as the very basis of our inquiry?

As for Last Thursdayism, I learned about it in the course of doing a little research for this post. According to Skepticwiki, Last Thursdayism is "the unfalsifiable belief that the whole of the universe was created Last Thursday with the apparent age of an ancient universe". It is apparently a parody of many Creationist arguments about the earth being only 6000 years old, in contradition to the geological record. Well, I'm hardly a creationist, but these kind of mind games do lead to the more difficult question of what it is we really know--one which I expect in the last analysis is unanswerable.

Concussions

Unfortunately, I have been at one remove from several major accidents involving concussion over the past couple of years. (Two of these involved flukey bicycle accidents, so wear your helmets, people, even if for some reason you think it's uncool to do so. Spend some money on a comfortable and super hip helmet, and think of it as a gift to future generations, who, as small impressionable children, will adore your great look from afar.) I used to think that concussions were serious in the moment, but then you 'woke up' from them, so to speak and went on with your life. I now understand that concussions can have a more lasting effect, and that it isn't always clear, at least to the casual observer, what is just temporary and what is long term or permanent.

For this reason, I was especially interested in the recent 60 Minutes segment on professional athletes, concussion and memory loss.

I'm sure that helmets for motorcyclists, cyclists and basically anyone who rides around on things with wheels and no windows will eventually become de rigueur. But a designing genius may well come up with a helmet that everyone thinks is great to wear, and thus prevent many unnecessary accidents from keeping those hazardous slips on the ice, inadvertent walking in front of buses, and, well, general clumsiness from becoming the life altering accidents they could be.