Outtake: Mrs. Brown (you've got a lovely daughter)

Mrs. Brown (you’ve got a lovely daughter): an Outtake

from Stuck on Replay

Twice I remember sitting on the settee in the living room on a day of celebration, my back to the window, unwitting. A sudden visitation would change everything. In 1991, I was turning forty-two; my birthday was on a Sunday, and there I sat, indulged by my family, ready to receive presents. As I commenced unwrapping my gifts though, the children exclaimed that the sky was turning black. And indeed it was. This was the grim banner of the Oakland Hills Firestorm that would destroy so much property in the Bay Area, and too much life, however statistically insignificant the numbers may have been.

Would the fire reach our home? We were advised that it might. We spent the rest of the afternoon assembling our precious belongings and a survival kit, which we placed by the front door. The birthday celebration was at an end.

They say you can’t go back and retrieve the past. And most of the victims of the fire moved on, either literally moving to safer, less forested, less hilly (and also less beautiful) locations, or moving on by rebuilding on the same spot where their house had burned to the ground, but rebuilding there in a forward-looking way. What forward-looking meant in the aftermath of the Oakland Hills Fire was the construction of homes that were larger than their antecedents. These new homes filled up more space than the destroyed cottages and bungalows that had graced the hills. The new houses sometimes reached nearly to the edges of their lots. They were constructed of concrete and other materials that had the appearance of stone. These homes, inelegant shelters for the traumatized, were fortress-like and forbidding, their small, mean windows winking in the sun.

There was one family, though, that lost their home in the firestorm, yet succeeded in returning to it, and so to the past. How I admired their handsome house, large but not overbuilt, with its generous picture window, as I walked up to their door, ready to interview them about hosting a foreign student. The family consisted of a shy, brainy teen-age boy living with his grandmother. I didn’t inquire as to the whereabouts of the rest of the family and they didn’t tell me. What they did tell me, when I remarked on the lucky chance of their home having been spared––fire can do that, inexplicably leaping over some houses and burning down others––was that this stately home, with its wood paneled walls, bay windows, and sunny rooms, was an exact replica of the house that had burned down. The architect’s plans had been kept in a locked metal box in the basement. After the fire, the molten tin rendered the charred, frangible plans unreadable. So they took the plans in the tin box to the Chemistry Department at UC Berkeley, and had the plans re-hydrated. A modern miracle! The plans were now readable! Scientists had saved the plans, and insurance money rebuilt the house.

The second occasion of sitting unwitting on a day of celebration was Valentine’s Day 2010. Though not black with boiling, billowing smoke, the sky was heavy with molten clouds, the day cold and uninviting. I sat at one end of the settee, my husband sat at the other. Our mood was as heavy as the atmosphere. There wasn’t much to say. Our son had just been admitted to a storied but autocratic hospital in New York. His episodes of severe apathy and disorientation that had begun just days before would later be attributed to a reaction to his medication, but we didn’t yet know that. We had thought of going to New York to visit him, help out, until we learned that we would not be allowed to see him once arrived. It was not a good Valentine’s Day.

Suddenly, someone rattled the locked front gate. Looking out the window, I saw the tall figure of our daughter’s former boyfriend. When I went to the door to tell him she wasn’t there, he handed a large bag over the gate. The bag contained ten or so books she had loaned him in happier days––before the break-up. He wouldn’t come in for tea, he said. He just wanted her to have her books back. We chatted a bit, and I congratulated him on his recent graduation, which had been achieved against considerable odds.

Not long after this visit, the familiar signs of an earworm began to surface. Phrase by musical phrase it haunted me hither and yon, until I began to piece it together. This time it was a familiar song from my teens, and so clearly identifiable from early on in the game.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Herman’s Hermits! rips the Emcee. At which point five impossibly young boys, looking gawky and new-minted in their jackets and trousers, appear on the stage set of a British street on America’s Ed Sullivan Show. The earworm isn’t “Henry the Eighth,” though that’s a good song (“I’m ’er eighth old man named ’enery, ’enery the Eighth I am.”)  The earworm is “Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter.” This bittersweet lyric was first performed in 1965:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv8k0VI9tBc

The song is a dramatic monologue, so it’s a one-sided story. We only hear the boy’s side of things––his thoughts, his feelings. The other side of the conversation is missing. No, I don’t mean the words spoken by Mrs. Brown’s lovely daughter. The lovely daughter is off somewhere with her friends. I’m talking about Mrs. Brown. Did Mrs. B. just stand there, agape, listening? I don’t think so.

How would the conversation have gone if someone had included Mrs. Brown’s part in it?  Oh, I know, it wouldn’t have made as good a song. That song has pathos, especially as performed by the Hermits, grinning at the audience in their unaccustomed jackets; especially as sung by the sweet-looking kid with the overbite. But just for the moment, imagine Mrs. Brown. She’s not at the center of the drama––the boy and the girl are. But she’s the third character in the play, there for confirmation. Confirmation of what?  Mrs. B. is there to give us a few vital clues about who this girl is.

So imagine Mrs. Brown as I would have done, eager as I was to exorcize the earworm, had I known that the insistent quality of this particular haunting was related, somehow, some way, to the meaning that this long-forgotten song had to my present-day life.

Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter…

Yes. Yes I do.

Girls as sharp as her are something rare…

            (Yes, she’s sharp. That used to mean ‘smart’ when I was your age: ‘smart’ and

‘cool.’ ) Oh, she’s smart. Did I tell you she won the fifth grade math prize? Oh, I did?

But it’s sad…

Sad, to be sure.

She doesn’t love me now…

(Children move on, don’t they?)

She has to follow her path.

She made it clear enough…

She would––I mean, she has a way of doing that.

It ain’t no good to pine…

(No good. No good at all.)

She wants to return the things I bought her

Tell her she can keep them just the same

Things have changed…

(They certainly have.) She crosses the street by herself now. Makes her own lunch...

...she doesn’t love me now

(Believe me, I know all about it. First it was her father, then a teacher, then a playmate, girlfriends, and just when you least expect it––before you’re ready for it, really—the boyfriends. And then the confidences end. Everything so private all of a sudden. And all you can think, all you can tell yourself is, like you say, “Things have changed.”)

She made it clear enough,

(Yes. Yes. She makes it clear enough.)

It ain’t no good to pine

(You won’t change her mind, if that’s what you’re thinking. Nothing will.)

Walking about, even in a crowd, well

You’ll pick her out

            Yes, she does stand out, doesn’t she? Especially when she wears heels.

            (Mind you it wasn’t always the case.)  Did I ever tell you about the time

            I lost her at the market? (Huge Marks and Sparks it was.) Oh, did I?

Makes a bloke feel so proud

            Yes, (You two always did make a nice-looking couple.)

            (I guess looks isn’t everything, poor lad.)

If she finds that I’ve been round to see you–

Truly. I won’t tell her. (I’ll try not to.)

Tell her that I’m well and feeling fine,

(That’s what I’ll say. And she’ll want to believe me.)

She cares for you, you know–respects you.

(Not what he wants to hear, of course.)

Don’t let on…

(Your secret is safe with me.)

Don’t say she’s broke my heart…

(That’s just between us.)

Love is like that.

(There, now…)

I know her.

(Please…)

She didn’t mean to.

I’d go down on my knees––

            (I know how you’re feeling, but trust me–)

            –It wouldn’t do any good. Not now.

(Not ever.)

 But it’s no use to pine

We know her, don’t we?

She’s honest. Says what she thinks.

And once she makes up her mind…

Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter…

Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter…

            (Give it time. He’ll be all right.)

            So nice of you to come round.

            (I won’t see him again.)

Here is a classic drama, with its bare bones cast of three––two actually, if you take into account the fact that Lovely Daughter remains off-stage. Yet it is she that they are talking about. And who is she? She’s not the girl next door––she’s the one that got away. Even her mother can’t say where she is, or where she’s going. (Especially her mother.)

There’s always a girl who got away. And when you see her ten or twenty years later, or a lifetime hence, the question you want to ask her is always the same, “How far have you been?” When the music has changed from rock to pop, the songs from sweet lyrics to dark satires, still, the question is the same. Did you get no further than King’s Cross, or did you get as far as the Finland Station? Did you live a life more ordinary? Or did your arrival signal some kind of revolution?  

We've got no future, we've got no past
Here today, built to last
In every city, in every nation
From Lake Geneva to the Finland station
(How far have you been?)

–– “West End Girls,” Neil Tennant

Sometimes when a young man loses his girl there’s sour grapes. Literature is full of derisory sequels presenting the exceptional woman, once lost, as merely ordinary––or worse. And this regardless of how the affair ends. Thus the protagonist (or the author) reminds himself: she didn’t get far, after all. At the high end of the literature of love and loss, Frédéric, hero of Sentimental Education, remarks, years after his affair with the beautiful Rosannette: “I met [her] in a shop the other day…She’s the widow of a certain Monsieur Oudry, and she’s become terribly fat, not to say huge. What a decline! When you recall what a slim waist she had in the old days.” Just so, Herman Wouk imagines the ambitious heroine of his middlebrow novel Marjorie Morningstar at the end of her story as a very ordinary housewife (much as Tolstoy has Natasha waving a diaper at the end of War and Peace). In popular fiction, independent women often inhabit the treacherous terrain of Looking for Mr.Goodbar, eliciting that truism: we know what happens to girls who stray too far from home.

But none of this sour grapes business for Lovelorn Boy (let us call him Herman). He knows Lovely Daughter is out of his league––she’s “sharp” and “rare”––but he isn’t bitter. And he isn’t afraid of admiring her still. Even in a crowd, she’s a standout: makes him feel so proud (as though he had something to do with it, rather like a parent). Does the boy worship her? He says he’d go down on his knees, if only…But Herman is no troubadour, no proselytizer for Mariolatry. He’s’ just the boy-next-door, heartbroken to be sure, but toughing it out like a stalwart.

Herman might have wandered off to a cliff overlooking the crashing waves of the sea. There, on a promontory, he might have bethought him to strike a pose: man against the elements, heartbreak against the drama of nature. But Herman is no Romantic, as we can see from the fact that, barring any evidence of cliffs, he takes his heartbreak straight to Mrs. Brown.

Who then is Mrs. Brown? We have made her up. The Mrs. Brown we have made up is in every sense common. No one would bother to disparage Mrs. Brown for being a housewife or a clerk, for she is, after all, only Mrs. Brown. Nevertheless she has an aura about her. She is the one boys like Herman confide in. Do they speak to her because she is kind? Perhaps. More likely the young, with their heartbreak, speak to her because this common woman has somehow managed to raise Lovely Daughter. Moreover, she “knows” her daughter, and young people generally.

She isn’t much use of course, beyond serving as a sounding board. Mrs. Brown has her own issues, and keeps superimposing them on the dialogue. Sometimes she and Herman are having two separate conversations. When Herman speaks of crushed romantic dreams, Mrs. B. mutters something about crossing the street and a child making her own lunch. At best, what Mrs. B. has to offer is comfort and a few obscure words of wisdom that sound a lot like clichés: “She has to follow her path” and “Love is like that.”

More than a sounding board, that listener, that silent interlocutor, Mrs. Brown, is a kind of mirror, reflecting back Herman’s sadness at being left behind, but also his parent-like pride, and the secret of his continuing love and admiration.

When the Mrs. Brown earworm came upon me I didn’t invent a character called Mrs. Brown, or have any thoughts about the meaning of the song. Why ruin a good song by overthinking it? I had liked listening to the song once, but the intrusiveness of the earworm was getting on my nerves. Now I hummed the song, sang it, watched videos of it on YouTube, and listened to other songs to get rid of it. As usual nothing worked. Then one day it was gone.

They say you can’t go back and retrieve the past. The family that re-hydrated their architectural plans and built a replica of the house that burned down lived in a copy of the original house. Undoubtedly they lived differently in the replica house, because of the intervening fire, than they had lived in the first house––the house that was, till the very end, innocent of disaster. They were pleased with the new house––proud of it––and rightly so. For a long time, every new visitor must have been given the tour, shown how one feature was an exact reproduction of its original counterpart, how another feature made use of newer materials: different tiles, shorter planks––because builders’ materials change, handpainted tiles change, trees are cut down sooner. Yet with every new visitor to the house, with every tour, the family would have the opportunity to reconsolidate the memory of the original home, making its loss a little less unfathomable, and less painful.

Our children, originals all, are also replicas, as are we, of parents and ancestors. We all wear the family face:

                        I am the family face

                        Flesh perishes, I live on

                        Projecting trait and race

                        Through time to times anon

                        And leaping from place to place

                        Over oblivion.

                        The years-heired feature that can

                        In curve and voice and eye

                        Despise the human span

                        Of durance – that is I;

                        The eternal thing in man

                        That heeds no call to die.

                                                - Thomas Hardy

Our loves, too, are replicas, always, of other loves, of loves nearly perfect and of loves less perfect. If you are a Romantic, you will spend your life searching for, or regretting the loss of, the one perfect love. A Platonist, you will seek your missing half. The one perfect love isn’t the same as the one that got away. The girl that got away––Lovely Daughter––belongs to the future. To love her is to let her go, without bitterness or repining. The one perfect love belongs to the ever-inaccessible past. That is why Romantics are always disappointed in the loves life has to offer; to a Romantic, love is always a replica that recalls that absent love: perfectly whole and complete.

If you are, instead of being a Romantic, a Practitioner of love, you will practice it. Practice is what Practitioners do.  Prince Charles famously remarked of the announcement of the marriage of his son William to Kate Middleton, that the couple had certainly had enough practice. Well, yes. They had. We all practice, as Mrs. Brown said, on parents, on playmates, on girlfriends and boyfriends, all the while reconsolidating our memories of the original. What is the original? Is it God? Is it our capacity to love? No matter. Every love that we meet with, every love we practice, though it be a replica of perfection, is precious. Love is our perfectly imperfect, most vital connection to the perfectly imperfect human condition.

So can I get a refill?
Can I get a refill?
Can I get a refill?
Yeah, of your time
Cause you’re intoxicating my mind
Feel like a conversational lush
Cause I don’t know how much is too much, yeah
I feel like the girl at the bar who’s been there too long
Can’t stand up!

                        –– “Refill,” Elle Varner,  Perfectly  Imperfect

The Blazing Butterfly

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"But these are flowers that fly and all but sing"

Robert Frost, Blue-Butterfly Day

Tracking Music in Performance, words, and memory

Camp Follower

When I signed on as a chaperone for the Crowden School string orchestra’s Italian Tour, what I most looked forward to was traveling with one of the musicians – my daughter – and exploring Italy’s culture and countryside. As it turned out though, my daughter, busy with her music and her friends, was not in the group of girls I was asked to chaperone, so we couldn't spend much time together. What, then, would absorb my interest? The landscape? Cuisine? The music? I liked music, of course, but didn't consider myself especially musical.

To my surprise, what enthralled me from Rome to Ferrara was following the development of the orchestra. Relieved of the distractions of their busy American lives, immersed in the music, the students played in a school in Rome, in Gubbio’s community theater, in a small church in empyrean Assissi, at Perugia’s Santa Giuliana, a convent turned language school, at Florence’s Conservatory Luigi Cherubini, and in the courtyard of Ferrara’s Estense Castle. In those venues the music moved and entranced with its unexpected metamorphoses, subtle ripening, and powerfully deepening contours. It was illuminating to study how, in concert after concert, the conductors elicited fine performances in ascending order; how they polished pieces by Bach and Tchaikovsky, Lou Harrison and Ralph Vaughan Williams. But my recollections are scarcely of the music, and only selectively of the conductors. What I most vividly recall are the emotions that music associated with the diverse architectures in which it was played. Connected to my images of these spaces, I recall the little communities temporarily formed by the audiences, and the young musicians whose mastery made them seem like adults when they performed.

As the music surprised and delighted me I was surprised by my delight – surprised, because music, though it had always provided enjoyment, had never before commanded so much of my attention, as if it had a story to tell, chapter by chapter. As a traveler in a bustling caravan, I took an interest in all of the incidents that made up the biography of the orchestra. How unfortunate that a player had to sit out the first concert when his bass didn’t arrive in time. How disappointing that the audience in Gubbio didn’t get the avant-garde piece by a student composer. How wonderful that the audience in Ferarra got it! How brilliant the solos performed by the two Davids in Perugia! There, at the Santa Giuliana, the story the music seemed to tell was happily confounded with the most memorable human-interest story of all. There, on June 20 – the festival day on which Perugia celebrates its independence from the Holy Roman Empire – guarded by resplendent soldiers from the language school for the military, the orchestra performed on behalf of the Associazione Elena Marino, a foundation created to honor the memory of a girl who had died before she could fulfill her dream of becoming an opera singer. Elena’s mother – this remarkable woman who had lost her daughter – devoted herself to organizing this tribute to Elena. The concert featured masterpieces of classical music performed alongside Primavera, a poem by Elena that had been set to music by one of the American students. The singing of Primavera was the heart of the concert. But that is simply a story, a wonderful story, about the music I followed on the Italian trail, for in truth, music does not tell a story.

Butterfly...
What dreams does it see
Fanning its wings?
Chiyo-ni

Music gives Wings to the Spirit

Music is transformational. It can lift us outside of, and beyond, our mundane preoccupations, as it lifted the audience that day in Perugia. Music is transitory. Music’s audiences are not congregations, they are provisional communities, joined together on this occasion only, joined not by liturgy, but by shape-shifting sound waves that envelop them, by voices that speak indistinctly to some and clearly to others. Music is holistic. When musicians in an orchestra are firm in their technique, free of the need to focus on getting the right notes, they can hear the ambient music, and take part in the whole that was engendered by the composer’s mind. In this respect, musicians are like readers: they can comprehend the whole when they have mastered code; when they attain fluency they can become imaginatively absorbed in another mind. But though they learn to read music, musicians are not like readers of books, who gain useful information, who identify with characters. Music has no useful information about the world to impart, unless it is coupled with words and becomes a song. Music has no human representations to share, unless, again, it is set to words and becomes a musical or an opera. Music without words is syntax without language that reaches beyond semantics to a larger reality that is yet in synchrony with our sentient core.

Words about Music

In her novel Appassionata, Eva Hoffman imagines the thrill of listening to a gifted pianist perform Chopin and the struggle on the part of the audience to become fully absorbed in the composer’s world.  The thoughts of very different members of the audience are now of the music, now of the pianist, now of their intimate and even mundane concerns. For Ricardo Lopez, the music calls up an autobiographical memory that intermittently displaces the music:

…ah, listen, thinks Ricardo Lopez, chromatic delicate like powder / all senses at once / Alicia / yes, I wanted her in that room, the powder, the gesture of her hand coming up to her face, the musk of her body and then / how could they do it, her wrist, broken, shattered / how could they / cold metal the pain how much pain did she feel / ah, listen, that phrase, the elegance, the grandeur, the grand arc / the bend of her neck, the curve of an arm, Alicia / her wrist, broken, the cruelty, where is the music for that! / the torment of it always //

For Lopez, language embodies the double images that shape the experience of hearing Chopin. The word “powder” conveys Lopez’s sense of the quality of the music only to lead him away from it to a world of personal torment. Moments later, the “arc” of the music recalls the bend of a woman’s arm, the curve of her neck.

Because members of the audience use words to think about the music, to parse Chopin, they are vulnerable to the power of words to lead them away from pure music. Hoffman demonstrates this diversionary power of words in the stream-of-consciousness of Fernand Mercier:

Chopin, incomparable / it’s in me, weaving through me, she’s poured it into me / directly into the veins, the soul / what is it we exchange? the Exchange early morning, must read the figures, damn it bloody figures, must catch up / ah, the modulation, where are we, C-sharp minor, the snag on the soul/the economics of the soul//

The word “exchange” causes Mercier’s thinking about the music to pivot away from thoughts that reflect the experience of hearing Chopin and towards Mercier’s mundane, indeed materialistic, concerns. The music calls him back, but it is clear that he will continue, at a conscious, language-inflected level, to be torn between thinking about the music and thinking about the world. Is thinking about Chopin listening to Chopin? Hoffman does not portray a single member of her audience as listening to the music in a way that bypasses stream-of-consciousness association. In effect, the entire audience experiences music as necessarily mediated, always at risk of becoming a metaphor for something else.

What kind of listener hears pure music, music without any language but the language of music itself? Can full musical absorption, in which the listener is with the performer, and the performer is with the composer, note by note, be sustained throughout an entire piece? When we know music, what do we know? Do we know it in the hearing, in the remembering?

More intelligent people than I have asked such questions, and have not come up with any definitive answers that I know of. But I doubt that anyone more intelligent than Proust has ventured out on this mist-covered terrain. If the answers Proust suggests, in the course of his exploration, are not definitive, at least they may be good. For music plays a signally important role in Proust’s narrative about experience and memory, love and loss, time and art.

Swann in Love with Music

Swann in Love is Proust’s tale of the compulsions of romantic passion acted out intimately and in the drawing rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where listening to music is both a personal and a finely grained social adventure. The refined Charles Swann falls in love with Odette, a woman of modest intelligence and culture. She’s not even his type, but she has him in her thrall. Before falling in love with Odette though, Swann falls passionately in love with music: in particular, with a little phrase from a sonata by fictional composer Vinteuil. Proust’s account of Swann’s relationship to “the little phrase” represents music as the great modulator of mental states – percepts, feelings, thoughts and memories – both conscious and unconscious.

Proust’s account of Swann hearing the Vinteuil sonata for the first time suggests a philosophy of mind as much as a philosophy of aesthetics. Swann’s integration of the musical phrase into consciousness is built up over three separate moments of listening. Proust describes these moments as follows:

·       “But at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish a clear outline, or give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to recollect…the phrase or harmony…that had opened and expanded his soul…But the notes themselves [had] vanished before these sensations [had] developed sufficiently to escape submersion under” [the sensations awakened by the succeeding notes].

·       Swann’s memory provides him with a “ ‘transcript’…summary…and provisional…he had before him an object no longer pure music, but design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the original music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase that emerged for a few moments from the sound waves. It invited him to enjoy intimate pleasures of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed…”

·       “He hoped, with a passionate longing, that he might find it a third time. And it reappeared without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him a less profound pleasure. But when he was at home he needed it…this passion for a musical phrase seemed to bring the possibility of rebirth into Swann’s life.”

When he first hears it, the musical phrase enraptures Swann. By the time the music surprises him, however, the moment of hearing it has passed, overtaken by succeeding notes. On the first hearing, the phrase has no graspable syntax, and certainly no semantic value. Swann must recapture the phrase retroactively by creating a mental template: a “facsimile” or “transcript” of the fugitive notes.

Because Swann recreates his first fleeting experience of the notes that moved him with a facsimile, the line of notes recurs as a coherent phrase. The phrase, then, is heard in all its immediacy when it occurs the second time: it comes together syntactically. Now Swann can distinguish it clearly. The music speaks to him, inviting him to enjoy pleasures unknown to him before this moment.

When Swann recognizes the motif a third time, his sensory response and emotional engagement are less intense: the phrase brings him a less profound pleasure, and speaks to him no more clearly than it did on the second hearing. Just at this point of diminished resonance, the little phrase – recollected in tranquility – reveals its meaning to Swann’s conscious awareness. Removed from the scene of the concert, Swann recognizes the semantic significance of the phrase of music in the word “rebirth”. Music calls him to a new life of purpose.

In Proust’s analysis of Swann’s relation to music, music is the discoverable, translatable language that activates percepts, draws forth the deepest unconscious feelings, and inspires the listener to integrate percept and emotion consciously with meaning.

The fugitive notes – which Swann hears so peripherally that they must be configured by facsimile – are part of an infraconscious process, one in which perceptions occur under the radar “at a far simpler level than what philosophers have been accustomed to thinking of as ‘thoughts’.” (Horst, Steven, The Computational Theory of Mind, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003)

Music offers Swann an invitation to enjoy “intimate pleasures of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed.” The experience of listening to the music and making it his own allows Swann to receive it as meaning and value: the little phrase stands for personal rebirth. Music becomes, at this moment, Truth.

Memory and Mind

Proust’s philosophy of mind and memory is of course attested in the episode of la petite madeleine. A little teacake and a cup of tea reawaken the childhood memories of Proust’s autobiographical character Marcel. As Swann is surprised by music, so Marcel is surprised by memory.

In the world that Proust wrote, involuntary memory is catalyzed by sensory experience. Sense memories crest in waves of emotion, leading to sudden recognition, to epiphany. Marcel’s cascading moments of joyful recollection are as revelatory as the moments in which Swann is recalled to life by a phrase of music. New representations of Marcel’s past, activated by involuntary memory, make up the elements of his authentic autobiography. The autobiographical narrative that becomes Proust’s novel In Search of Time Past replaces a stereotyped childhood memory: the bedtime drama, that had blocked Marcel from recalling the full, rich panoply of his childhood experience.

The butterfly is perfuming
Its wings in the scent
Of the orchid.

Basho

The Literary Understanding

In the world imagined by Proust, memories exist in a complex network of interconnected meanings. Fallible, mutable, susceptible to repression, memories, like unconscious desires and aspirations, can be redeemed, at the right moment, through sensory experience. What is the right moment? The moment when the young Marcel is ready to revisit childhood. The moment when the jaded Swann is ready to open his soul to music. 

In Proust’s literary world, memories are weighted according to their emotional significance. A flower is not just a flower. The orchids that Odette wears the first night Swann makes love to her elicit a pun from the lovers: to “do orchids”. For Swann and Odette, the word “orchid” is forever changed. Proust’s world is indeed one of intricacy, of nuance.

 The rich, nuanced quality of human experience reflected in so much of literature suggests that man, for all his fallibility, possesses an inner world that cannot easily be calibrated. Time and again, great literature argues for the reality of the inner world. This inner world is not a soul, God-given, destined for the hereafter. Nor is it an ineffable something that survives the death of the body. Great literature has done a rather good job of understanding the finality of death. Just so, literature understands the unique, irreducible entities that comprise its characters’ inner worlds. Great literature has a great understanding of the human mind.

What is the future of the human mind? In discussing the prospects for technological augmentation of the mind, cognitive scientist William Bainbridge estimates that “Each adult may have no more than 50,000 episodic and autobiographical memories.” (Bainbridge, William Sims, Denaturing Humanity) Add to this the adult’s acquisition of words, abstract facts, and non-verbal skill memories for a total of 200,000 memories, each of which could be represented “in a computer…by something like 10 neuronal connections. In a computer, each memory could be stored as a string of perhaps 10 numbers representing the addresses of other strings in the set.”

Accessing 200,000 memories in cold storage: the task of some future Proust? Access would not be through the retrieval device of involuntary memory. No need for the madeleine and the cup of tea. Indeed, if the future lies with brain augmentation, the search for time past that wends its way through the labyrinth of repression, forgetting, and recollection would be rendered obsolete. Bainbridge envisions a day when human limitations in the area of memory may be overcome by augmentation systems providing “time stamps”. Time stamps would create the equivalent of “timelines or calendars in our brains”, enabling us to sequence autobiographical memories.

Cognitive scientists like Bainbridge assume that there is no unconscious mind. Autobiographical memories represented by neuronal connections in a technologically augmented brain would therefore be stored as conscious memories, presumably undifferentiated in regard to their emotional significance at any given time. Do we really want time stamps for our memories? The percept that remains below the radar may indeed be infraconscious. But such a percept may also be obscured from awareness because the subject is not psychologically prepared to experience it.

Human Enhancement and Musical Intelligence

If some future equivalent of Charles Swann possessed a technologically augmented brain with time stamped memories, what would his experience of listening to music be?

In that future there would be no unknown desires to be brought to awareness, no personal meanings to be discovered.  With all memories sequenced, undifferentiated by repression, and easily accessed, how could music awaken Brain-Augmented-Swann’s sense of self at a particular moment in time? Humans as presently constituted are responsive to music in a fundamental way, even when dementia has deprived them of their memories. This may be due to the fact that while particular areas of the cortex subserve musical intelligence and sensibility, the subcortex is also involved in musical response (Sacks, Oliver, Musicophilia, 2007). Sacks confirms that, “the perception of music and the emotions it can stir is not dependent on memory.” (Sacks, p. 385) Music therapy with Alzheimer’s patients succeeds because music speaks – beyond memory – to the patient’s sense of self. The recognition and remembrance of feelings resting beneath the threshold of awareness enriches our experience of music, but isn’t necessary for enjoyment.

"that damn bird..."

Birdsong and Facsimiles

In the spring of 2010, I enjoyed a series of Saturday morning concerts by the Alexander String Quartet. I couldn’t talk anyone into getting up early enough to be in San Francisco by 10:00 a.m., so I went by myself. The series featured performances of Dvorak preceded by Robert Greenberg’s talks on the composer. Greenberg’s amusing, erudite talks included excerpts from recordings and live demos of key phrases by the players – facsimiles to help the audience identify important motifs when they occurred.

While summering in 1893 in Spillville, a Czech village in Iowa – which, to the end of his days, he considered heaven on earth ­– Dvorak composed the American string quartet. There is much debate as to whether the quartet is European in form, with some American folk and Indian influences thrown in, or bona fide new American music. At work in Spillville, Dvorak was extremely irritated by "that damn bird, red, with black wings" whose song kept interrupting his composing. In the end, Dvorak incorporated the song of that bird – the scarlet tanager – into the American string quartet. Prepared as I was by the musicologist’s talk, I identified the line of birdsong as soon as it occurred.

Some people don’t like or need lectures before concerts: I suppose they have what Oliver Sacks calls musical intelligence. In the weirdly brave new world of the future, science may offer musical intelligence as an optional enhancement of our technologically augmented brains. I would take it, but only if it meant that I could keep the experience of music as self-discovery and self-transcendence.

When Swann hears the complete Vinteuil sonata for the second time, he identifies the familiar little phrase with his love for Odette. As Swann’s tormented love affair proceeds, the little phrase becomes stereotyped as “the national anthem of their love.” When the affair is all but finished, Swann hears the full sonata once more. This time the little phrase speaks to him, telling him that his lost happiness is nothing: “When the little phrase spoke to him of the vanity of his suffering, Swann found sweetness in [its] wisdom.” For Swann, the consolation of music is the consolation of philosophy. Ever since his love of music was born, Swann “had seen musical motifs as actual ideas…ideas veiled like shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the human mind.”

I don’t share Proust’s mystical ideas about music, but I fear that music may all but evaporate when confronted with the artificial general intelligence of the future. What would there be for music to do, if not to stir unknown desires, surprise us with joy, beguile us, and offer the consolation of wisdom wrested from life? Perhaps, though, I simply lack imagination. This more perfect brain of future humanity may have many capacities for sensory and emotional experience of which we cannot possibly be aware. And if, intuiting the hyper-efficient circuitry of that brain, the nightingale is too dispirited to sing for us and flees to the forest, the augmented human brain will be more than capable of making a nightingale to its liking: superb, sensual, meticulous, mechanical.

Mechanical Nightingale

by Jonah Schultz

   

  

  

 

Science Talk

Andromeda

Listening to Stephen Hawking Talk Science

On November 12, 2005, Stephen Hawking gave a lecture in San Francisco on the birth of the universe. I felt lucky to be in the audience. Though not trained in physics or astronomy, I was eager to hear what Hawking had to say. Cosmology intrigued me, my curiosity having been sparked by the likes of polymath Carl Sagan and science writer Nigel Calder, whose The Key to the Universe I’d found fascinating and fathomable (it was a key, after all). About the Hawking event I remember the lecture room, approximate size of the audience, disposition of the chairs, where I sat and with whom, Hawking’s physical condition, Hawking’s delivery, the duration of the talk, the reception afterwards, and a few conversations I had with people at the reception. Of Hawking’s ideas, however, I remember nothing.

What I recall about Hawking’s talk is the experience of listening to Stephen Hawking. Embarkation was smooth, and the audience exhibited high spirits. Hawking’s digitized voice may have disconcerted at first, but we soon became habituated. I felt like a child who is learning to read, and sails through the first simple sentences of her primer. Of the first 10% of Hawking’s talk – call it the Prologue – I believe I understood every word. Beyond the Prologue, however, I began to struggle. Again like a reader who has not attained fluency, I had moments of successful decoding and comprehension, interspersed with increasingly longer moments in which decoding failed, or failed to yield comprehension. Struggle lasted through perhaps the next 15% of the talk. Struggle at an end, for the next 10% of the talk I floundered. Brief flashes of apparent comprehension were engulfed by waves of disorientation, confusion. Respite came during the next 5% of the talk when knowledge of my limitations surfaced and I recognized Truth: I was completely out of my depth. For the remaining 60% of Stephen Hawking’s cosmology lecture, I was not decoding, I comprehended nothing, I was no longer reading the thoughts of a genius. Instead, my mind wandered, I daydreamed, and I wondered idly about such things as the complicated logistics of being Stephen Hawking.

That experience has intrigued me ever since. Similarly, I’m intrigued by the not infrequent experience of listening to a talk or reading a text of which, in the course of listening or reading, I believe I have full understanding, only to discover, while describing the talk or the text to someone, how partial my understanding really is. Regarding the Hawking talk, I could recap a few ideas from the early part of the lecture during conversations I joined in afterwards. Seven years later, I can’t recap any of those ideas. Did I understand something of what I heard that day, and if so, in what sense?  Did I gain knowledge of Stephen Hawking’s universe, or did I merely recognize ideas I had heard before? And what to make of the pattern of my experience of understanding, from smooth comprehension, to struggle, to floundering, to the near-complete dispersion of my attention?

What did I know and when did I know it?

Can this uncertainty about the acquisition, retention, and recapitulation of knowledge be resolved with reference to the properties of consciousness, or more precisely, to aspects of attention?

Did my difficulty in understanding the Hawking lecture reside in an attention deficit? Was it, in effect, a matter of my not having heeded an internal instruction to pay attention?

Of course not.

The insufficiency of the attention deficit explanation is made clear by posing the question: What would best enable a listener to achieve a state of near-complete attention while listening to Hawking lecture? The question can be answered by listing the necessary prerequisites for optimal attention:

·      Relevant background knowledge/ memories

·      Reliable cognitive processes

·      Extraordinary intelligence/ high IQ

·      Ability to identify and appreciate new and novel patterns

Possessing the above attributes, a listener/ learner could indeed pay attention to nearly every word describing Stephen Hawking’s universe.

Attention, then, is conditional upon the possession of, among other things, prior knowledge. Where does this prior knowledge come from? What process of concept formation leads to our being able to think about and comprehend a complex subject like cosmology?

What do we know and when do we know it?

It seems to me that what we know depends crucially upon the time during which we know it. Knowing depends on memory. To help me clarify my understanding of knowledge and memory, I turned to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a high-level handbook, the encyclopedia offered reassurance and information, not unlike Calder’s Key). Unsurprisingly, I was not the first to associate knowledge with memory. But it turned out that most philosophers who had pondered memory in its relation to knowledge had done their pondering before the modern era. Hence: “The twentieth century saw rather little work on the epistemology of memory.” (Senor, Thomas D., Epistemological Problems of Memory, 2009, p. 12)

Senor notes the extent to which even our current conscious knowledge depends on memory. Our ability to process an immediate impression like ‘the sunset is beautiful’ depends on background knowledge, or background memories, such as that we are looking west and that it is evening. While 20^th century philosophers gave little thought to memory’s contribution to knowledge, researchers in psychology and cognitive science probed the function and role of memory in numerous contexts. A current research project on concept acquisition and short-term episodic memory describes the neural pathway connecting knowledge to memory (Hassabis, Demis, Combining Systems Neuroscience and Machine Learning to Build AGI, Future of Humanity Institute, 2011). What about high-level abstract concepts like Time, and scientific concepts like the Big Bang? In what ways might our understanding of these ideas be associated with short- and long-term memory?

John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, describes memory as a “storehouse” of ideas. If I accept this metaphor, I might assume that the immediate issues relevant to knowledge concern what ideas are present in the storehouse at any given time, and how I access those ideas. Additionally, I might want to assume a process of concept acquisition – a way of learning new ideas.

What kinds of ideas do we learn? Some of the abstract concepts we learn very early on are perceptual and kinesthetic, like location and place. Later, we acquire high-level abstract ideas like Right and Wrong. Bertrand Russell’s concept of ideas in Analysis of Mind includes ideas as images as well as ideas as propositions. (Senor, p. 6)

Although the 20th century produced little philosophical thinking about knowledge and memory, epistemologists did develop the concept of memory belief. Memory belief is the memory of an event or the memory of a proposition about an event. Propositional memory might also be based on something that is not an event: on reasoning and analysis. “The objects of propositional memory are propositions; the objects of event memory are events.” (Senor, p. 14) Thus high-level abstract concepts are part of dynamic processes such as analysis. Alas, modern philosophy of knowledge has more or less disintegrated the graphic "storehouse" metaphor; if knowledge is dynamic, it becomes less useful to think about concepts carefully stacked away in a repository.

What kinds of memory beliefs are involved in learning? Learning to read, a near-universal experience in the West, is a complex learning project spanning many years. Learning to read requires memory beliefs that are propositional [background memories of the alphabet, phonics, spelling, the decoding process, and semantics] and event-based [experiences over time of being read to, reading aloud, decoding, subvocalizing, etc.] As human learners, we rely on our experiences in the world as well as our reasoning to gain knowledge.

What happens when we transpose knowledge and memory into machine learning systems? Does the learning capacity of AI come primarily from propositional memory beliefs? A proposition is an expression in language – or signs – of something that can be believed, doubted, or denied or is either true or false. In addition to computer learning systems' reliance on code, certain machines rely on a type of event-based knowledge. These self-improving AI operate in such a way as to achieve their goals while preserving their core utility functions (Omohundro, Stephen, The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence, 2007) Self-improving AI might acquire new information from experience and self-improve through access to their source codes.

To our understanding of the limits of knowledge, epistemologists have added the idea of the ambiguity response. (Steup, Matthias, Epistemology, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005, Section 5.6) The ambiguity response asks whether, when I say I “know” something, I am referring to a high-standards concept ({my} knowledge is infallible) or to a low-standards concept ({my} knowledge is fallible). Even by the low-standards criterion, the assertion that I “know” or “knew” Stephen Hawking’s ideas about Time and the universe from listening to his talk is not credible.

Listening to Stephen Hawking talk about the universe, I wondered if a little knowledge, while not a dangerous thing, might yet be useful. On the assumption that my lack of comprehension was due in part to a deficit in background knowledge and scientific thinking, I described my trajectory from focus to dispersion to a computer scientist who had been in the audience. The computer scientist promptly told me that his understanding of Hawking had followed a similar trajectory, even though he had the necessary background knowledge. It’s a reasonable assumption that, as a scientist, he was also in possession of reliable cognitive processes and a high-functioning intellect. He told me in fact that he had easily comprehended the first third of the talk, struggled through the next third, and abandoned all hope in the final third.   

Did the computer scientist possess the gift of recognizing novel patterns and appreciating their potential meaning? He told me about reading A Brief History of Time. He hadn’t written the book, but he could recount it. What did he know of the universe, and when did he know it?  Bridging the chasm between Hawking’s original theory and my limited grasp of it, the computer scientist knew enough at that moment to advance my understanding, too.