Welcome to the June installment of Letter From the Editor — a personal essay from a Solum editor, discussing their current musings and contemplations, shared every other month — this time with a twist. Today’s guest essay is written by
-Logan, a previous reader for Solum Journal Vol. IV.Since I was a child, I bore the compulsion to archive my life. In an attempt to enshrine my treasured memories and experiences, I would collect movie tickets, receipts, trinkets — even sweat-stained wristbands from hot days spent at local carnivals were stowed away. In my mind, a stray artifact neglected was a memory tossed in the trash.
If I wasn’t stashing physical tokens, I would sit with a journal and attempt to meticulously recollect every three-dimensional component of each significant day. This proved to be tiresome, time-consuming, and nearly impossible — I would usually taper off a few paragraphs after the impulse receded.
Although I look back on these tendencies on the other side of an OCD diagnosis with a compassionate chuckle for my childhood self, I believe the core inclination to log beloved moments is common. The mediums and tenacity may vary, but this is how we habitually reckon with our brevity.
When I purchased my first iPod Touch as a teenager, my capacity for accuracy and thoroughness in capturing my life seemed boundless. Suddenly, regardless of circumstance, I had a camera and journal in my pocket ready to be drawn. With this aid to my compulsion always within reach, slowly my experience of my life intermixed more and more with my anxious attempts to remember it.
It wasn’t until years passed that I was able to acknowledge the loss I had subjected myself to: the more I amassed personal memories into the digital ether, the more my lived participation in them flattened.
I hope not to descend into an antithesis to modern technology that has become, ironically enough, overly circulated on the Internet these days. Instead, I would like to examine our technological usage and how this is affecting our capacity for memory — not just our ability to remember, but our visceral, sensory-orientation within them.
As I have increasingly come to depend on my device’s storage rather than my very mind’s, the psychological memory and the digital memory have slowly morphed into one. There is a sense in which, over time, my visceral recollections of memories have been displaced by their representations in my camera roll.
As of now, our most readily accessible technology can convincingly synthesize how we experience sight and sound through photographic, video, and audio recording. As such, these two senses become less particular to sentient beings and, in turn, less rare and precious. To look and hear has become commonplace to both the physical and virtual layers of reality.
In her book How to Be Bored, Eva Hoffman speaks to this loss:
[I]mages can function as a memory-aid — they can remind us where we’ve been, and what we have done. But such reminders of surface impressions are not an equivalent of knowing ourselves in three-dimensions; indeed, our addiction to recording our experiences moment by moment may deflect us from our immediate responses and sensations, and prevent us from experiencing the moment in its non-virtual actuality in the first place. (42)
As we stand unsteadily with one foot planted on physical ground and the other in a virtual ether, we are in a state of chronic overstimulation and disorientation. When I step out into the sunlit forest after working at a screen for three hours, I can hardly recalibrate to the brilliance of the world. The light is too natural and kind, the green too textured and alive, the sounds far too lovely.
The irony here is that while the true fabric of reality becomes unbelievably divine and overwhelming to run my fingers across, I always find myself returning to the artificial. What’s more, I become careless in my attempts to soak up and remember particular memories, as I know they can and will be tucked into the unbound scrapbook of my phone.
In the tenth book of his Confessions, Saint Augustine reflects on the interplay of human senses and our capacity for memory. In tumultuous waves of thought, Augustine is wrecked by the realization that it is a very human thing to remember vividly. This revelation is, in fact, the seed from which one of the most quoted portions of Confessions sprouts:
Vast, my God, is the power of memory, more than vast in its depths, immense and beyond sounding – who could plumb them to their bottom? Even though this is a power of my own mind, it is what I am, still I cannot take it all in. The mind is too limited to contain itself – yet where could the uncontained part of itself be? Outside itself, and not in itself? Then how is it itself? Over and over I wonder at this, dumbfounded by it. Men go out to wonder at mountain heights, at immense sea surges, the sweep of wide rivers, the ocean’s range, ‘the stars’ revolvings’ – and neglect [the spectacle of] themselves. (220)
While there are certainly sentimental and intellectual dynamics for which memory functions, Augustine pushes his curiosity further:
They do not even wonder that when I spoke of all these things, my eyes were not seeing them, though I could not have spoken unless my memory was seeing them internally, and on the same huge scale on which they were seen externally – not only mountains and seas, the rivers and stars which I have seen myself, but also the ocean, whose existence I can take only on trust… I know these in such a way that they are immediately present in my memory.
Augustine’s contemplations completely upturn our common comprehension of past, present, and future. However limited human memory may be, it is undeniably a means of tapping into the infinite; ephemeral moments, thoughts, sensations, language, and experiences are immortalized. Through remembrance, what has already happened can be continually reexperienced in the present — imperfectly, yes, but with irreplaceable depth and meaning.
Is that what we are attempting to tap into when we pull out our phones — the infinite? And yet, perhaps in a self-fulfilling prophecy, our memories of actual life are maimed by this digital documentation.
While two of our precious senses are now also common characteristics to the technology we daily utilize, we must not forget the three that remain. Our ability to taste, smell, and feel have not yet been (at least, not commonly and convincingly) enshrined into the digital landscape. Of course, there are artificial ways these senses are coddled, but there is simply no way to entirely replicate this sort of sensory input on a phone or computer. In other words, these are three marvelous characteristics that distinguish us as embodied beings.
As such, these senses and their unique participation in the world are essential in our aim to both reground ourselves in the physical present and to reclaim the potential for memories to be held in full saturation. We can be reminded that we are not making a sacrifice when we put down our phone, but tapping into a gift we’ve been divinely allotted—a gift so splendid and sentient that it cannot be replicated.
This is perhaps the only way we will be able to effectively disentangle our memory from being merely defined by whatever photographs or videos capture. Amidst the ephemeral, we are daily offered a bounty of sensory miracles.
I invite you to tangibly integrate these ideas into your week. When you find yourself occupying a particularly lovely space, notice: in what ways are your senses of taste, touch (or any sort of somatic sensation), and smell being engaged? What is enjoyable? What is not? How are these sensations positioning you within this unique moment in time? How might you remember this moment more than by what you merely see and hear? How would this moment be flattened by you recording it?
These ideas can dictate any number of decisions in your life. I understand that it can be difficult to engage with writing that lives in ideals — perhaps you do not experience all of your senses in a typical way or often feel alienated from your body. I encourage you to consider your specific body and mind, and pursue your holistic wellness with fervor. To meet you here, I’ll close with an example of how these ideas have tangibly shaped my day-to-day.
I work a full-time desk job, hunched under fluorescent lighting staring at an equally bright screen. I have suffered from migraines, eye-strain, back pain, brain fog, and fatigue due to the nature of my workplace — which is not uncommon for anyone working a desk job. I feel the disconnect between what my embodied self craves and what is expected of me at work each day.
For a significant period, what was meant to be my “breaktime” often looked similar to what I was doing when on duty. I would sit hunched over in a chair inside, scrolling on my phone. After my fifteen minutes were up, I felt even less rested than I did before.
Recently, I have taken to treasuring these times as what they were intended to be: breaks. Instead of succumbing to the allure of my phone, I have started tending to my senses and noticing the particular joys offered to me even in just 15 or 30 minutes.
Here’s what that has looked like:
Enjoying the outdoors
Making myself food at home for lunch that fresh and complex in taste rather than buying myself something premade
Sitting or lying directly on the grass in the sun
Taking off my shoes and socks to let myself feel the earth
Eating a ripe piece of fruit and intentionally letting the juice cover my hands and run down my arms
Climbing a tree
Foraging
Paying attention to the symphony of natural sounds
These enrichments to my work week have been pivotal. Rather than mere happenstance or time to fill up, my breaks have become a treasure trove of delight and refreshment.
In each minuscule moment, we are invited to return home to our senses. Let us tuck their richness under blankets of grateful remembrance, nuzzling their particularity.
 | A guest post by
|
Thank you so much Caroline, a wonderful read. I've been thinking about the 'Platonic ideal' a lot recently which slots in with what you teased out of Augustine's Confessions - our ability to picture and imagine in 5-dimensions (senses) more beautiful versions of things (say, the most beautiful oak tree or the perfect nectarine) shows how we are connected to something higher and wider than our own minds.
Also I've been learning the lesson that scrolling on Substack is no substitute for physical experience!
I’m going to be thinking about the phrase “bounty of sensory miracles” for a long time. This was a delight to my mind to read!