I also did not tell my students that what is most disturbing about this is that it makes the thinness of our perception clear to us. We really and truly notice almost nothing of the world. We live only a small fraction of our lives. All around us are systems and connections of which we are completely ignorant. We go around thinking these things we don’t notice don’t exist, but of course they do. The overwhelming majority of people and things in the world are, to us, not even ghosts or phantoms but absolutely nonexistent. But ghosts exist, and they are not waiting for our attention.
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In a short section on Vertigo in Nick Flynn’s The Reenactments, a memoir about the process of turning his earlier memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, into a movie, Being Flynn, Flynn writes: “The real appearing unreal, the unreal appearing real — this is the definition of the uncanny.” His definition is not definitive, though: the uncanny comes to us from Freud’s unheimlich, “unhomely,” meaning, “that which ought to have stayed at home, but hasn’t,” and this meaning, ultimately, is the more complete, the more complex, the more accurate definition. Freud’s “homely,” heimlich, the German homely, doesn’t mean “plain or banal”; it refers instead to family secrets and the memories we leave behind when we leave home (i.e., “grow up”). The uncanny, then, the unhomely, is that which dredges up these old secrets, secrets that are sometimes not even known to us — the uncanny is not a species of déja vu, in other words, not something we recognize as something we’ve seen before, but something which we haven’t seen but is yet familiar to us or else something we have seen before but which seems unfamiliar to us. The classic example is that of a traveler in a strange house, waking in the middle of the night and catching his reflection in a mirror, believing it to be someone else. Flynn, perhaps without realizing it, describes the reverse example elsewhere in The Reenactments, sitting on a couch on the set that is to stand in for the house he grew up in: “After all, whose childhood home doesn’t feel like a prop, until you leave it, then it is the dream you enter, night after night.”
Describing a “treatment strategy” prescribed by a hypnotherapist, Flynn is reminded of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr., in which Keaton plays a projectionist who falls asleep while showing a movie, finds that the actors in the movie are people he knows, and, ultimately, joins them onscreen. The hypnotherapist’s treatment asks the client to imagine himself in a movie theater, in front of a movie of his own traumatic experience, in control (as projectionist) of the speed and direction of that movie. This, Flynn is told, allows the client to separate the associations that have built up, to remove or at least divide the traumatic memory from the words that describe it. Flynn is not so sure: “Even if you rewrite the trauma. in the end she will still be dead.” But the purpose of the treatment is not to alter the past — that would be impossible — it is to make the present bearable, to make the past past, to allow it to pass.
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Under normal circumstances, your memories of daily events are consolidated. by an area of the brain called the hippocampus. But during frightening situations — such as a car accident or a robbery — another area, the amygdala, also lays down memories along an independent, secondary memory track. Amygdala memories have a different quality to them: they are difficult to erase and they can pop back up in “flashbulb” fashion — as commonly described by rape victims and war veterans. We’re not talking about a memory of different events, but multiple memories of the same event — as though two journalists with different personalities were jotting down notes about a single unfolding story.
(David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain)
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History decomposes into images, not into stories.
(Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project)
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Our desires have found and will find no real echo in the world. “The people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope,” Sandor Marai says.
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If we view ourselves from a great height it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose, and our end.
(W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn)
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Our sense of time — how much time passed and what happened when — is constructed by our brains. And this sense is easily manipulated, just like our vision can be.
(Eagleman, Incognito)
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Towards the end of my certificate program, I had to go to San Francisco on consecutive weekends, for the firm. I didn’t like these trips. They made me nervous. I would fly down on Thursday night or Friday morning, and then I would have to wait until Monday to finish my business. I usually stayed in the hotel all weekend and watched tv. I brought books with me and read them in restaurants and on the street, walking to the restaurant. Anything to keep from seeing him on every corner, her next to him. Thousands of hims. Thousands of hers. My wife invited herself down for the second of the two weekends. The hotel was going to be taken care of by the firm anyway, she said, and why would anyone care? Besides, I wouldn’t be working Saturday or Sunday. I told her it wasn’t allowed. While I was in class, she talked to her friend, and when I got home the first thing she said was, Guess who’s going to San Francisco?
I went on my own the first weekend and stayed in the firm’s shared apartment, in Nob Hill. No one was staying there, and hotel rooms were scarce that weekend because of the Folsom Street Fair. The apartment was beautiful, with two bedrooms each with their own bathroom, hardwood and marble everywhere, and even a fancy coffee-maker nicer than the one in the office. The picture windows faced up the slope, with Coit Tower in the center. I pulled the blinds shut and kept them shut all weekend, but I couldn’t help myself and I looked up the tower on the internet. I could see a picture of a few people frozen at the base on Google Maps. Wikipedia told me it had been built by Lillian Hitchcock Coit, no relation. Apparently, Ms. Coit had an affection for firemen, and designed the Tower to resemble a firemen’s hose.
On Sunday morning, my wife called to tell me there had been a huge fire across the street from our apartment building, in a new building that had only just been completed. Though the building was only four stories high, the flames had apparently reached fifteen stories, and the entire building was reduced to debris. All of the streets in our neighborhood were blocked off, and fire engines and cranes with water extensions had been spraying the site all night and all morning. She said that when she had passed by that afternoon while walking the dog, she could still feel the heat coming off it.