Zoomnesia and the Craving for Place

 Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling all around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

--Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust

Did we talk about this before? Was that you, or someone else? I’m pretty sure I’ve talked to someone about this on Zoom—or was it Teams?—but I can’t remember whom.  

If you have been among the fortunate ones who have been able to ride out the pandemic by locking eyes with yourself and others on screen, then you know what I’m talking about.  As Joan Baez's aching lyrics remind us, memories depend on place and time. Zooming (how quickly it displaced the older verb, “to Skype”) severed the essential association of “when” and “where.” “When” leaked all over the old divide between home and work, and “where” condensed into a single relentless point at the same desk, in the same chair, in front of the same wall. The place/time continuum cracked; with no place to anchor our memories, they drift untethered to time. We have all developed zoomnesia, a particularly virulent variant of technology-induced amnesia.

I know that I did in fact do my job this past year and a half because there is ample evidence—students graduated, awards were given, pay received—but I struggle to staple any given activity or achievement to any given day without searching my calendar. Fall semester 2020 began and ended on screen, as did Spring semester 2021. But I do remember how the Spring semester of 2020 began...I walked my students down King Street on a bitterly cold day in January, bundled up and armed with sketchbooks and pens, cameras and phones that our numbed fingers couldn’t grasp. The smells of garlic, baked goods, and stale beer filled the cold air, a mix so vivid that one student produced a “smell map” of the block. We attracted the attention of shopkeepers and tourists, who wanted to know who we were, why we were milling about looking, photographing, and sketching in shivered lines. We were going to build something there—a parklet!

We spent the next month and a half analyzing, brainstorming, arguing, around a big wood table in what came to be known as our studio “war room.” The whiteboard still holds the notes and drawings from these gregarious sessions and still emits whiffs of sharpie when the temperature is just right; I can’t bring myself to erase them. Following our midterm reviews that notorious March, the students left for spring break expecting to return to spend the second half of the semester actually building as the weather warmed and the days lengthened. I remember their faces, the sound of their voices and laughter, but the memory is glazed with wistfulness, because it all ended so strangely and abruptly. On Friday the 13^th--of all things--the world changed and so did our memories. 

We used to have to remember things, complicated things, and be able to recite them. It was the task of poets. Then we invented writing, then printing, then recording, in a civilization-defining quest to off-load the task of remembering. We put the poets out of business. The apotheosis of that quest? You don't know anyone's phone number; you can’t do long division anymore; you can’t find your way to the beach or read a map. Congratulations, you’re free of the burden of remembering.  

In her fascinating and singular book on memory’s foundational relationship to place, The Art of Memory, Frances Yates recounts the story of the poet Simonides from one of Cicero’s orations. The poet, hired as the entertainment for a banquet, steps outside for a moment to meet with two callers, at which point the roof collapses, crushing everyone inside beyond recognition. Simonides, with his professional-caliber poet’s memory, remembered where each of the diners had been sitting and thus could identify the bodies. Imagine if this had been a zoom event, where no one stays still on screen and everyone is in a different place on different screens—Simonides would have to say “I think he was in the upper right; no for a time he was in the middle; someone turned off their camera and he moved to the lower left; someone arrive late and he slid to the second screen. Sorry…not sure at all where they were. I can’t remember. Oh wait, was that the banquet or the webinar?”

So, while I can remember vividly how that semester started, if you ask me to describe in the same detail how it ended, I will be at a loss. I know that it did end, on Zoom, with a final presentation. Our students by then were scattered across the globe--Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, New York, California, Florida—but how could anyone tell? We were alone together, backlit or overlit, slumped on a couch, hunched over a coffee table, intruding into each other’s most personal private places while trying to play the professional. My inner Simonides was no match for this one, but fortunately I have a screen shot. All that was solid melts into zoom.

Vibrations of History

 

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

 

Gillian was frustrated. She had assembled a collection of historic and contemporary maps so she could layer the last hundred years of building and demolition into a single, time-collapsed site drawing. Unfortunately, these pasts and presents were not cooperating; the boundaries of buildings and streets were refusing to align into a clean site plan. She had scaled and measured, chosen consistent set points, overlaid and matched, and yet multiple lines that should have been describing the same edges would not snap into place. The outline of every street, building, and corner of her waterfront site slipped just off register, like a disorderly stack of papers.

During her year at the WAAC as a study-away student, Gillian had discovered the joys of Sanborn maps as she researched the waterfront site of her studio project, A Museum of Histories for the City of Alexandria. The plural in the project title—histories, not history—was a deliberate provocation by the Studio Clio faculty to nudge the students to question singular master narratives. With all the chaos of the preceding year, questioning everything seemed obligatory. With apologies to Marx, even if all that was solid hadn't entirely melted into air, all that seemed solid had at least been shaken off its foundations. The City of Alexandria, like many American cities, had already been cleaning the rosy tint from its glasses and was currently deep into the difficult process of seeing itself differently. Maybe a different kind of museum could help; maybe students could imagine such a thing.

Despite their disobedience, the collection of maps showed that the waterfront site had churned with construction and destruction as buildings and piers rose and fell, burned or demolished, and the shoreline crept eastward, built on the backs and ballast of old ships. Gillian wanted her museum to tell the full stories of the site and she hoped the Sanborn set would be a method to divine which parts of the site were accustomed to bearing buildings and which had spent their centuries unburdened. It was a productive strategy, if you were willing to tolerate such an an astigmatic drawing.

“It’s just a mess of a drawing,” she said in our zoom crit, laughing at the futility of the effort and the unpresentable result of her time-consuming research. But it wasn’t a mess. It was an epiphany, illuminating that the very pluralities we had hoped students would program into their buildings were actually latent, and still vibrating, in situ. This beautiful mess of a drawing invited creative misreadings and more questions than answers: What am I seeing? Are these lines of topography? Multiple layers of enclosure? Evidence of the multiverse? And what are we supposed to do with all the stuff histories leave for us if we can’t bring them into focus?

A beautiful mess of a drawing, by Gillian Wilhelm

 

We named our studio "Studio Clio" for the Muse of history. As daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Clio was blessed/cursed with a father who possessed more strength than judgement and a mother who never forgot anything. According to some, she was also the Muse of the stringed musical instrument, the lyre, because she is associated with celebrating achievements. Great moments of history have often been memorialized in song. That said, our modern minds don’t usually mix history with the arts of dance, music, and poetry, because we have come to think of history—singular master narrative-- as serious business. History is thick books and slow documentaries; it’s the recitation that this great man followed that great man followed another great man in umpteen-forty-nine; that this place invaded that place and burned it to the ground, so a new place takes the old place's place.

Histories—plural narratives-- are more like the lyre itself than it might seem at first. As with all stringed instruments, there are many different ways to play the same chord, and even a single string voices more frequencies than its name suggests.  Clio, Muse of Histories, knows it's the vibrations that make the music.