The Reenactments: A Memoir Read online

  Hidden behind Julianne, just out of sight of the camera, behind that wall, is the guy that turns the lamp on (Tom), and the guy who found the lamp (Ryan), and the woman who will adjust her hair (Monica). My mother looks utterly alone, but they are lurking around her, just out of sight.

  Dillard goes on to note that, in Buddhism, it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

  MY god, what have I done?

  OR did the copilot say, My god, what have we done?

  TWO

  WHEN an arm or leg is amputated, the patient often continues to vividly feel the presence of the missing limb as a “phantom limb.” Most patients with phantom arms feel that they can move their phantoms, but in many the phantom is fixed or “paralyzed,” often in a cramped position that is excruciatingly painful. According to Ramachandran, every time the patient attempts to move this “paralyzed” limb, he or she receives sensory feedback that the limb isn’t moving. This feedback stamps itself into the brain circuitry (cells that fire together, wire together), so that, even though the limb is no longer present, the brain has “learned” that the limb is paralyzed.

  UNTIL I was about Liam’s age, when we would still do things as a family, my mother would drive us into Cambridge, maybe once a year, to go see the animals at the Agassiz. Years later, when I tried to find it, it was difficult—it turns out that it isn’t called the Agassiz at all. It’s called the Peabody. Or the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Or the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Or the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Even now it’s a little confusing—one building bleeds into the next, so what you call it depends upon which door you enter. But, for some reason, we called it the Agassiz. When I asked people in Harvard Square, no one knew what I was looking for, until I said, The museum with all the stuffed animals. Then they knew.

  INSIDE, as I remember it, is room after room of wooden cases, with glass sides and tops, or cases set into the walls with glass fronts. Inside some are dioramas (an eagle fighting a rattlesnake, big-eyed lemurs lined up on branches, a gorilla beating his chest), but most are just the animals themselves, stuffed and looking blankly, or menacingly, out. A lot of birds, so many in each case that it is hard to distinguish one from the other. Appropriately, the birds are kept above the rest, up on a balcony, all four walls lined with glass-fronted cases, and inside the cases the bodies of every bird that ever flew or hopped—their wings pinned open, some with their beaks aiming straight down to the ground, some aiming up, their bodies arranged into patterns, which seems to have little to do with what their lives had been like. A little card next to each, with its Latin name, followed by, what do you call it, its popular name? Zenaida macroura (mourning dove). Rynchops niger (black skimmer). Grus americana (whooping crane). Some pinned with their wings open as if in flight, some arranged on a branch as if sleeping. Everything that had ever flown, or at least everything that was flying at the moment they sealed the cases.

  OF course, there is also the case displaying the birds that have vanished since the museum started collecting them—now this is our only chance to see them, though they can no longer see us. Step right up: The dodo, the ivory-billed woodpecker (also known as the Lord God bird), the great auk. The Eskimo curlew, the spectacled cormorant. Gone.

  One theory about our experience of memory is that it is less like a movie (a permanent emulsion of chemicals on celluloid) and more like a play (subtly different each time it’s performed). In this view memory arises from a network of cells, stored in various parts of the brain, or even in the body (body memory), constantly being reconsolidated, rewritten, remade, reenacted. Is this still true when the thing we remember now only exists in a glass case marked EXTINCT? Isn’t that the one play that is always the same, night after night?

  NIETZSCHE offers this:

  A human being may well ask an animal: “Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?” The animal would like to answer, and say: “The reason is I always forget what I was going to say”—but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent; so that the human being was left wondering.

  In some ways all museums of natural history are like stage sets, though as we wander past the corpses it is as if the play has not yet begun, as if it will never begin. In this they are different than zoos, where the animals, though trapped in their sad dioramas, at least contain the potential to break the glass, to rip our throats out.

  IN his work with those suffering from phantom limb syndrome, Ramachandran found he could relieve the pain by placing the subject within a specially constructed mirrored box, dividing the body along the breastbone, which reflected the remaining arm (or leg) in such a way that it appeared, to the subject, that his body was whole again. This is what the subject would see, when in the box—his body, his arm, returned. This is what his mind would see, this is the image of himself (whole) that he hadn’t seen since the accident, this is the image he’d never stopped seeing. I always forget what I was going to say. Ramachandran has discovered phantom limb syndrome among animals as well, yet whether a mirrored box could relieve their symptoms remains inconclusive.

  ONE room in the Agassiz is darker than the rest—the room of the Glass Flowers—from the outer hallway you cannot see what is inside. Unlike the rest of the museum, where you can wander freely from room to room, you must choose to enter the room of the Glass Flowers, through one of two doors. Inside it is quieter, the air moves slower, the lights dimmed. The cases are placed at waist level, you must lean over, if you are an adult, to read the descriptions, to see the filaments, the petals, the veins in each leaf. If you are a child the cases are at eye level, but you will want to be lifted up, to see the flowers as your mother sees them. But you cannot lean against the glass cases, a guard will insist you back away, insist you simply lean in closer. Inside each case are the flowers, not real but exact replicas, some over a hundred years old, yet each (well, most) petal as bright as when it was pulled (pinched?) from the hot glass. In some ways this is the inverse of the animals in the hallways outside this room—the animals were once alive, and these flowers will never die.

  THREE

  HEADLINE: Scientists Use Brain Imaging to Reveal the Movie in Our Mind (UC Berkeley News, 2011)

  Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences—in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

  As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed [in the lab]. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.

  “This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today in the journal Current Biology. “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”

  (2011) On my phone is a fifty-seven-second video clip of a stretch of sidewalk in an unnamed city—dusk, snow on the ground, the sidewalk glistens wet (the brain creates the mind by creating images). An ambulance passes, with its red siren and twisting lights, adding a sense of chaos. Several people walk to or away from the camera, a man on a bicycle comes close and passes. In the last few seconds one man walks toward us, briefly fills the frame, then continues on, so it seems he is the one being filmed all along. He appears, he reads, as homeless—two coats, a paperbag seemingly held together with duct tape, tissue tucked under his hat.

  THE man walking through the snowy city in the final seconds of the video clip is the actor (Robert De Niro) playing my father in the film version of his—my—life. It was, it became, the first day of shooting, though it was weeks before filming was due to begin, weeks before my mother—Julianne—would show up. They needed my father—De Niro—in the snow, and it was
snowing, so Paul threw together a guerrilla crew, and now, now that the filming is done, we can see him, walking beside a snowy graveyard. My father did walk a city (maybe not this city), wrapped in layers of coats, through snowstorms, through freezing rain. He did sleep outside, years on end (at the time it seemed it would never end), nearly losing his toes to frostbite, at least he told me he was losing his toes, when I found him one night, or one of the hundreds of nights I found him, outside. In the film we will hear De Niro in voiceover say, I am losing my toes to frostbite due to not taking my shoes off at night. These are the words my father told me, when I found him, or perhaps he wrote those words to me—all I know is that I can still hear them.

  The snow, in this scene at least, is real.

  The snow-covered graveyard is real.

  WE are opening a window into the movies in our minds. Neuroscientists had, a few years earlier, succeeded in reconstructing static visual patterns, such as a black-and-white photograph, by studying brain activity. In the laboratory, strapped into a machine, you (the subject) looked at a black-and-white postcard of, say, a field with a single bare tree in it—the computer wired to your brain was able to spit out a photograph of something that looked like a bare tree in a field. It reconstructed what you saw. What the Berkeley neuroscientists have done is to push it even further, and now they have reconstructed a movie, solely from what happens to the visual cortex as we watch a movie.

  (2005) Paul Weitz and I meet for the first time at a café in L.A. (Ammo). It’s lunchtime, we sit outside, and as we speak I notice, over Paul’s shoulder, a guy who is living out of his pickup truck. To most, I’d imagine, he wouldn’t read as homeless, yet to me it’s obvious. I watch as he subtly sponges his armpits off in his front seat, then he dries himself, pulls on a shirt, steps out, gets a few things out of the back. Checks the meter. Goes for a walk around the block, comes back with a coffee, checks the meter again. His jeans are a little dirty around the pockets, slightly too long, the cuffs stapled up—all of these are signs. I point him out to Paul, I point out the signs. Most of the homeless are like this guy, I say—invisible—my father was like this guy. I tell him that the one thing I don’t want is to stereotype “the homeless”—I tell him I could care less how I end up being portrayed.

  I could care less how I end up being portrayed—is this even true? By saying it am I trying to suggest I’ve escaped the cage (or is it a zoo?) of my own ego? Unlikely—after all, who talks about how they are to be portrayed in the film version of their life? But it is true that when I catch a glimpse in a mirror I almost never recognize myself, and when I see my name written out it takes me a moment to realize it refers to me. This could all suggest I’m simply lost in my own hall of mirrors, that I haven’t escaped anything. I could care less. Perhaps what I mean is that at times it seems I barely know myself, so how could I control how anyone else sees me? I simply try to track the things I find myself doing, feeling, the circles my mind orbits, perpetually. In a few weeks, during the filming, red signs will be taped to a staircase of the building meant to be the former strip joint (Good Times) I once lived in, the words NICK’S BEDROOM printed on them, beneath an arrow pointing up—even as I stand in the doorway I will know enough not to lie in that bed.

  IN Incognito the neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes that we are unknown to ourselves: Most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. Eagleman invokes the German philosopher and psychologist Johann Friedrich Herbart, who introduced a key concept: There exists a boundary between conscious and unconscious thoughts; we become aware of some ideas and not of others. Through various experiments in the limits of our powers of perception, Eagleman concludes that we are not perceiving what’s out there, we’re perceiving whatever our brains tell us is out there. This gets into the argument of whether there is even such a thing as free will, of whether our unconscious impulses determine all or most of our actions, if we are in fact able to make any rational decisions. For most neuroscientists, Eagleman included, the concept of free will is uncomfortably close to the idea of the homunculus, of the ghost in the machine, which drifts into the dangerous realms of what is named the soul.

  WHEN I was Liam’s age something (depression?) draped a wet wool blanket over our house—it threatened to suffocate us all, I knew the only way I’d be able to breathe was if I found a way to poke my fingers through it. Virginia Woolf, in Moments of Being, offers this: Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art, but I hadn’t yet read Woolf. In my little cage I could feel the cotton wool push in on me, and the idea that I was simply a small part of a larger pattern, that I could push the cotton wool aside—if briefly—peer out through a finger-sized hole, put my mouth to it, breathe, would have given me hope. Years later Stanley Kunitz would echo Woolf: I believe very strongly in the web of creation. I think we are all part of it and if we disturb it at any one point, the whole web trembles.

  I meet another screenwriter in those first few days in L.A.—over the phone he let me know that he’s the go-to guy for class issues in Hollywood. At a café we talk a little about how class has been portrayed in American film (Midnight Cowboy, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Norma Rae), how it died off in the early 1980s. We talk about the way John Travolta, in the opening shot of Saturday Night Fever, struts (lopes? parades?) down a Brooklyn sidewalk, swinging a can of paint, using what working-class people have always used—his body. Some American independents go there now: The Wrestler, Winter’s Bone, Blue Valentine, Wendy and Lucy. Fellini used to go there: think of La Strada, or Nights of Cabiria. The French still go there: the Dardenne brothers (La Promesse), Jacques Audiard (A Prophet). Films like Biutiful, or Lilya 4-ever, or Gomorrah still go there. All these films, all these bodies, slowly crushed under the wheel of a brutal system. The Hollywood go-to guy for class issues gives me a lift back to my hotel in his Porsche, and gives me his latest script, which I read on the plane home. The working class as cavemen, it has mine workers literally smearing their own shit on walls, speaking in little more than grunts. Go.

  (2011) That first day, with De Niro in the snow, also happened to be my birthday—my plane flew between snowstorms in from Texas (where I teach) and somehow landed in New York in time for me to see him walking down the snow-filled sidewalk (here we go again). The crew is just a handful of people, shuffling the cold off beneath a freestanding art deco clock on lower Broadway. A few I’ve already met, a few I haven’t. I shake everyone’s hand, the cinematographer (Declan) says, It’s real now. It’s my birthday, I tell him. CUT. Paul turns to me, asks, You got anything? This is the first time he will ask me this, at first I don’t know what he means, then I realize I’m supposed to do more than simply film De Niro on my iPhone. After the next take I tell Paul, Maybe De Niro could be muttering to himself as he walks, telling the story that is keeping him afloat. In the years after he made it off the streets I got to know all my father’s stories—the one about robbing banks, the one about him writing his masterpiece, the one about his father inventing the life raft—but back then, when I’d see him like this, shuffling toward the shelter, holding himself against the cold, I had no idea what he was muttering to himself—my mind was full up with my own mutterings.

  EIGHTY to ninety percent of the known universe is what we call dark matter, simply because we do not know what it is. Similarly, what the brain is doing when we are apparently doing nothing (daydreaming, say) has come to be called dark energy. Like the universe, this dark energy takes up an enormous amount of what goes on in the brain, and we know almost nothing about it. On the radio I hear a Rumanian mathematician (Mario Livio) being asked if mathematics are invented or discovered—if invented, this suggests that the laws of the universe are inside us, generated wholly from between our synapses (no ghost in the machine). If discovered, then they are outside of us, connected to something larger (what?)—Plato felt that these truths, these natu
ral laws, were out there, and all we do is discover them. Livio gently posits that it is sometimes both, “a complex mixture of invented and discovered.” Mathematics explains the physical world, which is definitely outside our consciousness, which in fact created our bodies, which in turn created our minds, our consciousness. Then, like some Ouroboros, it is our consciousness that then either invents (or discovers) the world. Yet, as Livio points out, no matter how much is discovered, or invented, so much is still inexplicable (the whole web trembles).

  DARK matter, dark energy. Beckett, in a letter to a friend about the limits of language, offered this: Drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through. Or, as my therapist always interrupts me to ask, What are you feeling right now?

  SHINJI Nishimoto, lead author of the Berkeley study (Scientists Use Brain Imaging to Reveal the Movie in Our Mind), offers this: Our memory may be like watching a play, but our natural visual experience is like watching a movie. If you go online you can see the clip the subject watched, playing beside the clip generated by his brain activity. It is a split screen, the whole thing is twenty-nine seconds long. On the left side is the clip the researchers put together for the subject to view—it’s not exactly the trailer for a film, but more of a surrealist collage of images. Steve Martin moving across a living room, then the title of a movie (All Bets Are Off), then a blob of what looks like black ink, then back to Steve (this time in The Pink Panther), then to elephants walking across a desert, then to a parrot flying, then to an airplane landing, then to a young man with a stethoscope, then to a talking head. On the right side of the split screen is the corresponding film generated by the computer studying the brain activity of the subject as he watched the clip. It is eerie, in that it is almost frame for frame an impressionistic version of the left side of the screen. Steve Martin becomes a blurry talking head, the title sequence generates some unreadable text, the spreading black ink looks like spreading black ink, the elephants are pure motion, the airplane becomes a landscape of light, the parrot is a red-orange smudge, the talking heads are bleary heads. Does this mean that inside us is a film, vague and blurry, of everything we have ever seen? Does this mean that in thirty years we will be able to project our dreams onto the ceiling as we sleep? What does this say about the stories we tell ourselves to keep ourselves afloat?