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 13th--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.
