How Long Ago It Feels

 Still on this? 2024 is the year of posts on memory, I guess.

When I was a kid in the 80s, going on rides across town with my parents, the radio was typically tuned to an ‘Oldies’ station, playing songs from the 50s and 60s - stuff ranging from Chuck Berry to Buffalo Springfield. I understood that this was music from when my parents were kids, and I knew enough to know what years were what, and what happened when, what was older or more recent. It was a feeling as much as a knowing - Purple Haze just sounds not-so-long-ago as A Hard Day’s Night, right? And Rockin’ Robin sounds older than any of them.

Even being, I don’t know, ten years old, I knew a basic historical outline of that time period, of the decades just prior to my existence. The presidents, the faces and names you came to recognize - the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War. Then the seventies, and the physical artifacts of that time that were all around: the cars, the clothes, the style and coloration of things that were old but not really old.

What I’m getting at is this: even back then, a kid, I was forming an outline of the recent past, and that involved a combination of knowing and feeling how long ago those things were. Forget the knowings for now - it’s trivial to say that something that happened in 1972 was longer ago than something that happened in 1978 - that 1965 was longer ago than both, that 1952 - the year my parents came into existence - was even longer back. But the feelings were in proper register. Thinking of 1952, about some artifact from that time, felt - it feels - further back than thinking of 1965. And so-on.

Those feelings are something I’ve been thinking about lately. As we get older we all are sometimes surprised at reminders at how much time has passed. In the last few days I’ve been reminded that thirty years have passed since Kurt Cobain’s suicide, a time I recall with some clarity - a few moments, people, associated with that event. Wow! It doesn’t feel like thirty years ago, does it? How time has flown!

But that’s getting close to what’s been bothering me. When I was a kid in the late 80s, thinking of the time when my parents were my age or younger, I would have a feeling of “long ago” that corresponded to thirty years in the past. That’s what thirty years ago felt like then. Honestly, it felt like distant, ancient history - pre-history, something I could only hear about or read about in books. But 1994, thirty years ago now, doesn’t feel distant in the same way. I’m aware of all that’s happened since - quite a lot, two thirds of my relatively full and varied life of changing places and people. But thirty years ago today certainly doesn’t feel like thirty years ago then.

I’ve had these kinds of ruminations lately, like we all do. Nothing special about it. But something more has occurred to me: I have the feeling that thirty years ago then feels quite similar, in fact, to sixty years ago now. The fifties feel about as long ago now as, I suspect, they did when I was younger. The feeling hasn’t updated. Those feelings of the past aren’t really about intervals extending into history. They’re feelings associated with clusters of landmarks. What the 50s, or the 30s, or the 1880s, or the 12th century, or whatever, insofar as they feel like a long time ago, or a very long time ago, feel like when I think about them, doesn’t really have to do with how long ago they were. It has to do with those periods specifically.

Then I start to think, is there really any feeling of “some time ago”? Is there anything left to consider, once I subtract out that cluster of landmarks?

So this line of thinking has actually led me to a new - to me - explanation of this illusion of time flying. It’s not that time-having-passed feels different in some way. It’s not that thirty years having passed up to today feels somehow like ten years having passed up to 1994. It’s more that I am, perhaps, not really sensitive to the interval itself - instead there is just the set of things I know about that time, the time long ago or proximal times, and thinking about that set, or of items in the set, has its own certain content, which varies relatively smoothly if I slide my window of reflection gradually back or forth. If there's anything like the feeling of an interval of passed time, of such a long interval (not the milliseconds and seconds and minutes that the psychologists study), it's really just the comparison of the feelings of now with the feelings of then.

It explains, in some ways, another phenomenon that rears its head once in a while, and which was the topic of the previous post. Sometimes in ruminating over some memory, it can almost feel as though I was just there. It was a decade ago, but if I think of it in a certain way, it could have been a moment ago. What I’m doing there, maybe, is just forgetting what now is, and becoming absorbed in then. There is, there is never, really any feeling of the time elapsed, of the distance in times. 

what i remember

My mind goes to strange places sometimes, for reasons I usually don't understand.

I don't mean strange in that the places are strange. I mean, I don't know why I am there. They repeat, like these little memory attractors, but there's nothing to find there. I get the feeling that there was something incomplete that happened, some kind of expectation that whatever was there might recur, and it never did, and that expectation was like a door left open, that can never close, and once in a while I just happen to wander by, and in I go.

I'll quickly note what brought me here, just now. Rearranging some computer code to plot some data. Wondering, how do I best approach this little model selection problem in python? I am not a great python programmer. I know how I'd do it in MATLAB, that's for sure. I only need to vary one parameter, the slope, since by design the means of the different conditions should be the same. Right? I should print them out just to be sure.

As this process is working through my head, I feel myself wandering with my friend Ian along the wooden boardwalks at Montgomery Bell State Park (I had to look it up just now to recall the name), near my hometown. We were 11 or 12. Ian's mother had brought us there, she was perusing an art fair set up on the boardwalks, Ian and I are just roaming, exploring the place. I remember the green-brown park service paint on the boards. It feels like it was autumn, maybe there were pine needles everywhere.

Why? I am I there? I have found myself back there over and over, just this brief recollection for no reason, no obvious connection to the current moment. Maybe because I've thought of Ian recently? A song stuck in my head that he suggested. I told the story, again, to some friend at Taekwondo of how I started as a kid - with Ian, who quit soon after I started, but I kept it up for many years, and still do, from decade to decade.

Why is that Saturday - I know it must have been a Saturday - at the park still lingering there, more than thirty years later? Why was that door left open?

Hecatompylos

 I did write a post in 2023, but never published it. It will become something later, I promise, and then maybe I will retroactively publish that post. For all of you who were so starved of content last year.

Now, here is something. A story about memory.

I woke on Thursday morning, about 7am, thinking: "Hecatompylos".

This word was repeating in my head. My wife had woken me up, sent me, as on most weekend mornings, to go sleep with the 3 year old while she gets the almost-8-year-old ready to catch the bus. I kept thinking, "Hecatompylos - what is Hecatompylos? Somebody? Some place? Hecatompylos.. Hecatompylos.."

This word repeated in my mind until I slept, and then, I think, it kept repeating. I think I dreamed of wondering what "Hecatompylos" could be. "Hecatompylos, Hecatompylos"..

When I woke up for good, about 8am, it was repeating, repeating, a one-word earworm. I'm not sure I've had this experience before - I'm sure I've awoken with a tune in my head, but a word?

As I ate my breakfast, I looked up the word on wikipedia, which told me that Hecatompylos was an ancient greek name for the Persian city of Qumis, in northern Iran. What? The wikipedia article mentioned that Alexander the Great had visited there.. I did skim the Alexander the Great page a couple of weeks ago. I had come across his name - mentioned not as "the Great", but as "Alexander III" - in an encyclopedia of ancient science I had been reading, and I had thought, who were Alexanders I and II? So I knew I had perused his wikipedia entry. I rechecked it, to see if maybe I had come across his significant visit to Hecatompylos in Persia, but.. no mention of it.

It was still repeating! Like a word-beacon, repeating, "Hecatompylos, Hecatompylos". I think I spoke Hecatompylos under my breath a hundred times. I can still feel it in my tongue, I have to resist mouthing the word now. It's so strange.

I went to the lab and did some things, but pretty soon I was googling "Hecatompylos". I came back to the wikipedia page, and now I saw that 'Hecatompylos" could also direct to Thebes, the famous temple city of Egypt. This felt more right than Persia. And, I realized, just last night, before bed, I had read with the 5-year-old a chapter of the Buildings Book on the monumental temple and pyramid of the Pharoah Djoser. Was it in Thebes? I couldn't remember.

Now I read about Djoser, but found that no, Djoser lived hundreds of miles north, close to Egyptian Memphis (as a Tennesseean I have to distinguish Memphises), and that during his time Thebes was a mere fishing village, no Hecatompylos - no city of a "Hundred Gates". I gave up again and tried to work.

A little while later, I tried once again: "Hecatompylos", into Google - but this time, I felt, I should try "He*k*atompylos". This time, a web page comes up, a page from an online Encyclopedia of Borges - Hekatompylos was mentioned in Borges' "The Immortal".

That was it! I had indeed read The Immortal a few nights earlier, Sunday or Monday night. Maybe I had read two pages on Sunday, then the rest on Monday (I have to squeeze in Borges between bedtime reading for the little ones, who alas do not enjoy my reading The Immortal or The Library of Babel aloud). I don't recall lingering on "Thebes Hekatompylos". Maybe I did? But I've read the story dozens of times before. The last time must have refreshed some habitual circuits familiar with the words and phrases of the story, and then again, as dozens of times before, they were dormant.

Then, on Thursday morning, dreaming, one of those circuits was randomly touched - maybe it was the previous night's reading about Djoser and other Egyptian temples and tombs - and the word "Hecatompylos" popped into a dream, without any context or explanation. So free of context that it followed me from one dream into another, into waking, back into dreams, and back into waking life, until I reconnected it with its origin. Once I understood why the word was there, it dissolved back into unconscious memory and the compulsion to repeat it was ended.

***

After an introduction, Borges story begins: 

"As far as I can recall, my labors began in a garden in Thebes Hekatompylos, when Diocletian was emperor."

https://www.borges.pitt.edu/i/tebas-hekatompylos