Theories Of Forgetting

The Chateau
Berkeley, California

"There is only experience and its decay." - Geoffrey Sonnabend.

"Memory is nothing but a gimmick." - Col. Bruce Hampton (retired).

There stands a higher than normal chance that Geoffrey Sonnabend is an entirely fictional construct, and - likewise - that his epic three-volume work "Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problems of Matter" doesn't actually exist, but his theory - presented in an elaborate computer display and monograph at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles - is quite interesting nonetheless. Summarized: memory is an illusion. Experience is a plane passing through a cone. When it's gone, the experience is over, and its total departure from the mind is complete.

"Sonnabend did not attempt to deny that the experience of memory existed. However, his entire body of work was predicated on the idea that what we experience as memories are predicated on the idea that what we experience as memories are in fact confabulations, artificial constructions of our own design built around sterile particles of retained experience which we attempt to make live again by infusions of imagination -- much as the blacks and whites of old photographs are enhanced by the addition of colors or tints in attempt to add life to a frozen moment" (Worth 3-4).

Jon and I have been out on the road for a little bit over a week. In that time, we've made it from Chicago to Omaha to Denver to Green River to Las Vegas to Los Angeles to Big Sur to Berkeley. It seems that we've spring-loaded a goodly amount of experience into the past few days. One of my impulses is to write it all down, try and capture it in some definitive way. Another instinct, though, is to just let it flow -- pass effortlessly through the experience plane like a hot knife through butter. For now, the former is winning out. As I sit on an old ripped out car seat at a CO-OP in Berkeley, the sounds of tonight's Sector 9 gig ringing watery in my head, I'm going to try to drift back down the coast before it melts away into nothingness.

***
The desert on the western side of Vegas is a scary place. One wouldn't want to stop the car there. As we shot Loretta through the desert, punching her down the asphalt like a coal walker determined not to land for too long on any ember, the thermometer on the car rose steadily -- mostly when going up hill. From time to time, we would flip off the air conditioner, blast the heat up, and grit our teeth 'til she calmed down. Somewhere on the edge of the desert, near Barstow, I rolled the window down a touch and stuck my hand out. Despite the fact that wind was whipping around it, I felt like I was dipping my hand into a syrupy, burning liquid. I recoiled and turned up the air conditioner.

I have a weird fascination with Los Angeles. I'm not sure quite what it is. On many levels, the city bothers me. However, it also intrigues me to no end. I suppose there's still a large remnant of fascination with the utter glamour that surrounds it. But it's more than that. I think it has something to do with the life that exists around that glamour. Two of my favorite films - "the Big Lebowski" and "L.A. Story" - take place in L.A.. The two are about vastly different things, but both are utterly fantastic in the conceptual sense of the word. More, there is a compatible kind of weirdness to them. While the events of both films are highly unrealistic, it's not hard to imagine them taking place in the same universe.

That's what gets me -- that two films could derive the same fantastic universe from the same place. I almost feel like there has to be some kind of truth to it. Each time I visit, I get tiny glimpses into it. Until recently, a house around the corner from aunt's was guarded by two highly territorial trained emus. No shit. Things like that. On the night we arrived in L.A., we headed out to the Santa Monica Promenade and the Santa Monica Pier, both fairly touristy and/or yuppie-like attractions. Both were moderately souped up affairs -- precisely what I expected. Each seemed to have a strange underlife, though.

The Promenade was filled with street musicians, exactly the kind one would expect from a city on the move. They seemed to be mostly sanctioned vocal groups, blues guitarists, world ensembles with cheesy beat boxes, and the like. Each one had a sizable crowd around them, pagers and cell phones going off constantly, providing a clamoring counterpoint to the music. In the middle of one of the blocks though, there was a lone musician that no one was paying attention to. A small Asian man sat behind a toy - or, at least, small - drum set. He pounded out an unreliable 4/4 rock rhythm. He sang indistinguishable lyrics, almost under his breath, into a small microphone that he wore around his neck like a harmonica. I gave him a dollar.

I'm not sure what to make of the Pier. Approaching it from the beach, it seemed like a thousand sparkling and spinning Christmas lights in the distance. As we climbed the stairs, we found ourselves in a sort of Coney Island west, though much more gentrified than the real thing. Still, there were just enough closed down shops and seedy video arcades to make it real. At least, it was quite real in contrast to the sterile amusements of New York, New York and Circus Circus. Light erupted out of dollar photo booths, pairs of legs appearing just beneath the dirty faux-velvet curtains, left dangling in the moment as the torsos got sucked into the infinite.

***
The next day, we visited two very different art museums. The first was David Wilson's Museum Of Jurassic Technology in a dingy storefront in Santa Monica. The second was the extravagant J. Paul Getty Institute situated high in the hills overlooking the city. The two institutions couldn't be more different but, seeing one right after the other, the experiences couldn't help but be bonded.

The former is a curious place dedicated to preserving relics of what the curators refer to as "the Lower Jurassic". As near as I can tell, this means full-on explorations of various theories and ideas related to primitive conceptions of the sciences. It's like an attempt at a proof of Aristotle's four elements with footnotes, bibliographies, and other source material. A representative exhibit was about a medieval scientist who published treatises on a number of topics -- one of which was the truth behind the mythical Tower Of Babel and its place in the origin of language.

If the Tower existed, he concluded, it well could've caused the division of languages its legend claims it did. The building, reaching for the "heavens", would've had to have neared the Moon. If it did so successfully, it would have been so heavy as to tip the Earth's balance, causing an environmental disaster of, well, Biblical proportions. The catch is, of course, that the guy who came up with this theory probably didn't exist. Most likely, he was (and is) a figment of the Museum's creation. That doesn't make "his" theories any less interesting, though. On the contrary, they become all the more valid as metaphor.

Geoffrey Sonnabend's theories, for example, come awfully close to Stephen Hawking's attempts at mapping the fourth dimension, the space-time continuum, in "A Brief History Of Time", though they certainly have their differences. Hawking's cones of future and past light track events - pulses of light - through time as they spread out form cones. One application of the cones is to demonstrate the way that the Earth begins to absorb light emitted by distant stars, often taking many light years before the Earth enters into a star's future light cone. Like Sonnabend's model, this maps the way information is diffused over the course of time -- it just happens in a vastly different way.

Through the whole trip through the gallery, one becomes intensely aware of the mental processes involved in learning. One's disbelief is, at first, ignored. Why would anyone lie about this stuff? Gradually, it becomes stretched so far that it hardly matters. After a point, one excepts it all as truth because, well, there's nothing else that he can do really.

There's a certain kind of movie out there that I classify as what I call "blink" films in which the filmmaker so successfully immerses the audience in an alternate, usually disturbing, universe that the viewer walks out of the film in a kind of daze, blinking at the alien light of reality that he is bathed in when he enters the theater lobby. Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" falls into this genre (as do most of his other films, come to think of it). Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's "the City Of Lost Children". Ken Russell's "Altered States" (and, to a degree, "Tommy"). Godfrey Reggio's "Koyaansqatssi". Walking out of the Museum Of Jurassic Technology is somewhat similar. One staggers out of the dark chamber into the blinding sun of Venice Boulevard.

Going to the Getty Institute immediately afterwards was definitely a drastic change and a potentially dangerous jolt to the system. Both museums encapsulate something interesting about the passing of time. The MJT drops the viewer into a world of archaic theories and obscure intellectual histories, ones that have long since dropped into the dustbin of history -- only to be dug up, created, or recreated, at the MJT. They all seem quite dated, though. Likewise, much of the Getty's collection has this feel to it as well. Much of it seems highly stylized, permanently connected to the periods in which it was created.

The centerpiece show - an exhibition of Eugéne Atget's photographs, taken in first part of the 20th century - concentrated on this theme in a much different way. Photographs of urban life from any period short of our own have always been eerily interesting to me. The people depicted in them are victims of time, long since gone. Not only that, but they are frozen in precise moments in their respective cultures. They are like a one-dimensional keyboard sound on an old Emerson, Lake, and Palmer album, flat but strangely full of life.

The architecture of the gallery itself seems to comment on this in a perverted fashion. It's not rooted into any one period. Instead, it is a melange of formal styles, carefully sewn together in a manner not entirely unlike that of something that might appear in Las Vegas if only Vegas had taste. It's clean and it's white, water rushes serenely through fountains and surprises abound at every corner. Or is this the modern dilemma? In its refusal to accept any one historical style will it too seem dated in a few decades?

The last time I was there, one could look out over the city of Los Angeles, positioned safely just above the smog line. On this visit, though, the Getty was deep in the middle.

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage. Previous tour journals are located here.