Art and Memory

There is a mistaken assumption that memories are reasonably accurate movies, little pieces of trustworthy journalism, reliable reporting about prior events. It’s a comforting, if false assumption. I’m afraid the truth is much less comforting. Truth is like that.

            Believing that memories are reliable helps us cling to the notion that there is a clear and linear continuity binding together the moments of our lives, both as individuals and as society, into a knowable whole. Everything – history, identity, even our very notion of truth – is built upon the foundation of memory. So if we’re wrong about memories, if they’re not as reliable as we think they are, then we might be wrong about everything else too.

            Memories are simplistic portraits of highly nuanced and complex phenomena, like children’s drawings of quantum fractals – phenomena that cannot be reduced to a single narrative and painted with crude brush strokes.

Memories cannot be objective. In fact, they are the very definition of subjective – everyone has their own private memories of even the most communal events. And the way we perceived that event was largely filmed, so to speak, through the lens of our own prejudice and conditioning. It really is true that we do not see the world as it is – we see the world as we are. At root, memories are projections of what we think we saw, not what happened. They are creative acts. And we’re the artists.

            What’s most troubling is this irrefutable fact: when you are indulging in a memory, you are not going back to the past. Here’s why. A memory is a thought, and thoughts by definition exist only in the present. In other words, the past doesn’t exist, except as a thought occurring in this present moment. You can never return to the past. There’s no such place.

            All of this leads to the next question. Have you ever wondered why so much art is about memory? From Proust’s madeleine to Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, art looks back. Think about how many songs and movies and novels and plays and paintings and poems and short stories and television shows are anchored to an earlier time. Why is that? For a lot of reasons. Sometimes artists are genuinely trying figure out how we got here. Other times it’s pure escapism. People simply want to swim in a dream world of a past that never really existed. The same dynamic applies to so much of fantasy literature and film.

Even the world’s creation myths can be seen through this lens. Many people believe that the world’s creation myths are attempts to answer the question: How was the world made? But Joseph Campbell and others suggest that a far more personal question is in play: What am I? The idea is that if I could understand the creator’s essential nature, I might begin to understand my own essential nature.

All of the world’s creations stories, if read as history, are of course patently absurd. Did any of the people who wrote these stories witness the events they describe? Obviously not. How can human beings be reliable witnesses of their own emergence?

            And yet stories of the past, creation stories included, have enormous power and purpose. And what is the fundamental purpose of this kind of art? What are we really after when we write a song or a myth about the past?

            It depends. Creation stories, as we have seen, have a largely investigative purpose. They are poetic attempts at metaphysics, and if read metaphorically, have much to teach us. Or at least they help us raise beautiful and profound questions. Creation stories allow us to confront and frame the ineffable forces of the cosmos itself. But if you’re writing a song that simply draws the listener into an idyllic vision of a lost world, whether that world be “Dixie,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” or “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” you’re trading in nostalgia. Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, the songwriters of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” taught us all how to sing “Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River,” but neither of them had ever set foot in West Virginia. They made the whole thing up.

            Maybe Plato was right when in The Republic he warned us to be wary of artists. Artists, he argued, don’t deal in truth or reality. They lie for a living. They weave threads drawn from real experiences into entirely fictional but comforting burial shrouds. They don’t lead us to the light, but to the comfort of the coffin.

            But there’s another side of the coin. There always is.

            In his essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelly wrote that poetry (and by extension all art) strengthens our capacity to empathize by exercising our imaginations, for it is our capacity to imagine that makes empathy possible. If you cannot imaginatively put yourself in another’s life, another’s circumstance, another’s skin, then you cannot experience their suffering. And if you cannot feel their suffering as your own, you cannot experience compassion. Without empathy we are sociopaths – no one but ourselves is real. Art then has an enormously important and therapeutic role to play – it is an instrument of global awakening and social justice.

            Still the fact remains that art trades in illusion. Artists create artificial worlds where they, like gods, ascribe value and meaning to everything in them. Depending on the artist, this can be a benign process, or a simply enjoyable one. But it is also how pedantic, manipulative, and dangerous propaganda is constructed.

When in the early 20^th century, some 40 years after the end of the Civil War, white supremacists in the American south began to push back against the enormous strides freed slaves had realized during early Reconstruction, they concocted and propagated a false narrative about the war that served their racist agenda. Racist white leaders reframed the war as a noble cause that had little or nothing to do with enslaving African Americans. And they erected statues of Confederate generals all across the south as totems of their self-serving nostalgia. For generations, every black child walked past these statues on their way to school – schools named after prominent slave holders. The paradigm of racism and inequality got codified into the consciousness and baked into the structures of the community through art, song, and even curriculum. This is how a lie takes hold, with art as the glue that holds it together. Can you whistle “Dixie?” Yeah, I can too.

“Dixie” was written by a white northerner in the mid-19^th century and quickly became a standard on the minstrel circuit, the most popular form of entertainment at the time – white singing groups in black face depicting black people as infantile simpletons. Songs like “Dixie” wistfully portrayed slavery as a bygone age of bucolic happiness. The lie of the happy slave salved white conscience, and made possible all the horrors to come – black codes, Jim Crow, lynching, and institutional racism.

Who owns the past? Who gets to sing about it? And what is their agenda? These are important questions we ignore at our own peril.

The Evolution of Music

I was five years old in February 1964. The Ed Sullivan Show was a 7:00 p.m. Sunday night ritual in our home, followed by Bonanza at 8:00. There I was sitting cross legged in front of the black and white television, ready for the evening’s entertainment.

            And then it happened.

            The Beatles. The Beatles happened.

            Jangly electric guitars. Ringo’s slap-dash on the drums. The matching suits, the Beatle boots, those innocent, devilish grins. And the faces melting off of every teenage girl in the audience. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was difficult to breath.

            A lot of things came to the surface in that moment, truths I’m still trying to process after all these years. But the clearest truth of all was this – that rock and roll was a community experience – it shattered who you were and dragged you dancing and twitching toward what you were becoming. And we were becoming together. It was tribal. What happened to that?

            Last night I was watching the director’s cut of Michael Wadleigh’s ground-breaking 1970 documentary Woodstock and it all came back – that sixties ethos of music as communal experience. But even more evident was the unmistakable quality of abandon. On the Ed Sullivan show the Beatles exhibited just enough recklessness to make the music seem dangerous and spontaneous, like they were discovering it right along with you. It was anything but canned. But five years later, at Woodstock, the undisciplined, frenzied side of rock and roll was starting to unravel. The performances at Woodstock were notoriously uneven. There were moments of transcendent magic, and if I’m being honest, puddles of pure mediocrity. Those fields weren’t the only things getting muddy. Too much Dionysus and not enough Apollo. Too many drugs and not enough sleep. Trusting the muse to carry you through your performance is one thing. But it helps if you can at least tune your guitar.

            But here’s what really struck me: no matter what was happening on stage, or not happening, the audience was into it 100%. No one had a cell phone – they hadn’t been invented yet. Everyone simply paid attention. To the bands and to each other. Over that three day weekend on Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York a remarkable community sprung from the soil like mushrooms after a spring rain. A community of presence and immediacy. And it was all shockingly uneventful, non-violent, and loving. People took care of each other. Because it’s the right thing to do. And because the music showed them how.

            But back to the abandon – a quality that poured off of every frame of the film, both on stage and off. The frenzied surrender of the music, the limitless faith that no matter how bad I stumble, I will be held aloft by the gods of rock and this band of merry-makers around me. It was almost frightening how raw and authentic the music was. This sense of abandon is a quality that has been completely sanitized out of all contemporary music, at great loss. Everything is so aseptically perfect now. In 1969 there were no click tracks, no tuners (let alone Auto-Tune), and very few effects pedals. It was just raw, primitive amplification and raw, uncaged talent, skittering on the edge of disaster. Nobody does that anymore. Everyone’s so careful. Everything’s so planned. Sure, the results were mixed. Some of the music was a little too rough. That’s what happens when you take chances and play naked without a safety net.

            In the planning stages, Creedence Clearwater Revival was the first big-name band that signed on. Then all the other big bands followed. Because of the reigning chaos CCR ended up playing at 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Who knows how it sounded. None of their music made it into the final edit of the film – notorious perfectionist John Fogerty wouldn’t allow it. Jefferson Airplane had so such qualms however, and forgive me Airplane fans, but it shows.

            Fast forward to today. So much has changed. All of the old streams through which music flowed into our lives have run dry. We used to learn about new bands and new songs on the radio, but radio’s abandoned that role. We used to line up at the record store to buy physical albums on the day they were released. Then we’d listen to them over and over in each other’s houses on giant stereos with huge speakers, dissecting every note, learning every lyric, and memorizing the liner notes. Then we’d argue about all of it all day at school. None of that happens anymore.

            Radio has been replaced by digital streaming and subscription services like YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and the rest. You build your own private playlists. We all walk around with our ear buds in, lost in our own little world. Music used to bring us together. Now it isolates us.   

Sure, people still go to concerts. But it feels different now. You’re either talking to the people around you, or videotaping the concert on your phone to show all of your social media friends that you’re at the concert without really being at the concert at all. How ironic.

            Every time I go hiking I come across people blaring music out of the tiny speakers on their phones – speakers the size of pencil erasers – music so crushed by compression and so diminished in its dynamic range that I’m pretty sure Marconi himself had higher audio quality on the first radio ever invented. We’re going backwards.

            Those of us who are recording artists are struggling to figure out how to position ourselves in this new reality.  Why record albums anymore? No one buys them. People who listen to my music do so through streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. I get paid pennies for those streams. I hear Apple is doing alright. The CEO of Spotify has a jet.

            It’s no one’s fault. Technology changes. We will always make music, we will always love music, and we will always need music. We’re just not sure how to connect all the dots anymore.

            Digitization, software, and hardware have taken over everything. And we’ve accepted it. Now, people pay top dollar to go to a “concert” where pre-recorded tracks are played over the PA and five or six rappers amble around on stage performing their spoken word pieces. When it’s good I actually love this stuff. But it’s hard to be spontaneous when you’re locked into a prerecorded track. Where’s the danger in that?

            Rock and roll needs to be dangerous. It needs to be bat-shit crazy. It needs to ooze sexuality. Even the practiced ribaldry of Cardi B seems tame – corporatized, commodified, and stripped clean of all its humanity, the essential element of all authentic sexual attraction. Say what you will about the sloppiness of the performances at Woodstock – you knew you were watching actual human beings doing amazing things in real time. You could feel it.   

            I don’t know where music’s headed next. It isn’t for me to say. But whatever it’s doing, and however it’s doing it, I’ll be listening.

When the Music Fades

I wanted to cry, but I had to laugh. Sitting in a sound proof room at my local Costco, the results of my hearing test in plain view on the computer screen, the evidence was incontrovertible. I need hearing aids.

            It seems that all those years playing in rock and roll bands has finally caught up with me. And all that loud music in my headphones and ear buds. And some staggeringly loud rock concerts, like X at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara, circa 1982, to this day, the loudest concert I have ever attended. And that’s saying something.

            And the fact that I’m 60 years old. That isn’t exactly helping.

            I didn’t notice anything dramatic, just steadily increasing difficulty following conversations in loud places like restaurants, bars, or parties. I found myself reading lips. You do what you have to do. I’m fine one on one in a quiet place. I only play the TV slightly louder than Lori does. And the background music of TV and movies sometimes seems to drown out the dialogue. Uh oh.

            All the little things were adding up. Word discernment, loss of higher frequencies (you know, women’s voices).

            Anything taking my world away from me is going to get a fight. I started reading everything I could find online, even though most of it is written by people trying to sell you hearing aids. Still, I began to realize that this was a much more complicated process than I thought. It wasn’t simply that the world was getting softer. I was hearing it differently, as well as less. When the dialogue in a movie seems too soft in relation to the background music, you know you’ve got more than volume problems. Turns out there are many different kinds of hearing loss. As one of my friends put it, you don’t hear with your ears, you hear with your brain. Your ears are just the microphones. All of the signal processing occurs in the brain.

            So I walked into my local Costco one Tuesday afternoon and talked to the receptionist at the Hearing Aid Center. It just so happened that there was an opening the next morning. So there I was at 10:00 A.M. ready for whatever’s next.

            But I wasn’t. Ready I mean. I started to feel overwhelmed. Would I really need hearing aids? Hearing aids are for old people. Really old people. Is this the beginning of the end? Maybe I was being a little over-dramatic. But still. Once you make the switch to hearing aids, there’s no turning back.

            But I was tired of asking Lori to repeat half of the things she said. Not nearly as tired of it as she was I’m sure. And a conversation I’d had with an old friend, the artist Douglas Schneider, kept ringing in my ears, so to speak. He’d led a life pretty much like mine – hard living and loud music. Too many long nights on stage in the deafening din of rock and roll clubs. That whole invincibility thing. Except it turns out we’re not.

            He paints to music in his studio in Oakland, California creating big, brilliant, beautiful works that fly out of high-end galleries in San Francisco and New York and into the hands of a growing cadre of discerning collectors. Like me, he knows he lives a charmed life – not an easy life, but a charmed life. There’s a difference. And that by grace and love and dumb luck he found his way through the crazy years and into a beautiful middle age. But then the music started fading. He noticed a certain dullness. He went and had his ears checked. When he got hearing aids in an instant the world sparked back to life. The brush work on the cymbals of his Coltrane records suddenly emerged from the dark. It’s not that everything was louder – everything pulled into focus and was restored to its proper proportionality.

            I wanted that.

            So I stepped into the soundproof booth. After a long series of detailed tests my hearing specialist showed me the results. Mild to moderate hearing loss, especially in my left ear, especially in the higher frequency range.

            In the meditative stillness of the hearing test a long-forgotten memory arose. When I was about seven or eight years old a neighbor boy threw a firecracker at me. Not a run of the mill firecracker, an M-80, a small stick of dynamite. I didn’t see it coming. It detonated in the air right next to my left ear. In a flash I was knocked off my bike and everything went silent, except for the ringing. A small trickle of blood came out of my ear. Parents were involved. A doctor visit. It’s blurry.

            Ever since then my left ear hasn’t worked so good. Whenever I strain to hear something I cock my head like a dog, turning my right ear in the direction of the thing I’m trying to hear. Now I remember why.

            So it’s no surprise that the high frequency capacity of my left ear is nearly gone. But even without that incident, the die is cast. I am losing my hearing.

            Hearing loss, like alcoholism, is a regressive disease – it never gets better, it only gets worse. Unless you do something about it.

            And here’s the most interesting part – if you wait too long to get hearing aids, no matter how effective your new devices are at delivering the proper frequencies to your ears, your brain is no longer capable of processing them. A kind of brain apathy sets in. In other words, you still won’t hear. Remember, you hear with your brain, not your ears. The average person waits ten years between the first experience of hearing diminishment and getting hearing aids – far too long. The damage is done.

            This was chilling news, a new, sick twist on use it or lose it. It turns out the brain is not just a machine waiting for the right signals. It is a living, responding, conscious organism that evolves and adapts in conjunction with its environment. Take away the surrounding environment and the brain’s usability fades. This is why hearing specialists strongly recommend getting hearing aids sooner rather than later – to keep the brain’s hearing centers fully engaged and active at all frequencies.

            I don’t have hearing aids yet. I’m going to go see a real audiologist and get tested again. But I’ll probably buy my hearing aids at Costco. Word of mouth is good about their product and service, and as everybody knows, their low cost and return policy set the industry standard. Their main product tucks right behind the ear with a tiny, clear plastic tube into the ear canal – virtually invisible – and goes for about $1,600 a pair. Or you can spend twice that much for even fancier models with all kinds of additional features like full device compatibility. But whatever you do, if you even suspect minor hearing lost, go get a free test. And this is doubly true for all of my professional musician friends. Don’t jeopardize the most important instrument in your quiver, your ears. And don’t jeopardize your relationships either. Those beautiful people you share your life with are really sick of you saying, “What?” all the time.

            There are rustling leaves and lapping waves and the sound of the wind on raven’s wings overhead. We’ll all be gone soon enough. But until then, I don’t want to miss a thing.