DIPTYCH: PHOTOGRAPHY, BRAIN by Katharine Haake

1. The Evils of Photography

Do you remember when time, once the slow tormenter of us all, went from expansive to fleeting? Did it happen in a season, come upon you all at once? Perhaps, like me, you were dimly aware of some creeping alteration of perception – it’s the first day of school already again, the holidays so suddenly upon us – but in truth, nothing can prepare us for what’s coming.
For myself, this must have happened sometime when the children were small, although already not so small as they once had been when they were tiny infants in my arms who had become now, in a heartbeat, two sturdy little boys marching off to meet their teachers on the first day of school or determinedly charging down some soccer field, boys somehow related to me. All this happened fast, so fast it took my breath away and made me mourn the passing of their childhoods when they were still in grade school, at least until a friend reminded me that this was hardly a good way to enjoy the time I did have with them then.
The man who is the father of these boys – now men – and the husband of my twenty-two-year marriage was a man of strong opinions which, when I was young and not well formed, I eagerly adopted as if they might fill in the missing blanks of me, those spongy inner parts where something had yet failed to cohere. I had trouble, especially, with first person pronouns and remained on lookout for containers I could fill to give me form, ideas and words to use, attitudes I might assume to make me seem, like other people, pleasant and moderately informed.
One of the opinions the man I later married held at that time concerned photography, about which there was considerable buzz in those days.
Naturally, I did not know that then.
Of course, I knew almost next to nothing then, just slightly less than I know now.
But how is it possible even to imagine a time when such nothingness prevailed, when people like my parents – both teachers, with college educations – who’d had their own excursions out into the world when the war – their war – was pulling everyone along on paths they never dreamed of at the natural time of dreaming paths but who, just as suddenly, after everything was over, pulled back as far out of the world as they could and still count themselves here. Provincially cocooned, they viewed the outer world as a looming threat and kept a steady eye on the all-new Doomsday Clock, as if such vigilance might somehow save us. And on the rare occasion that we ventured out into the world beyond to visit San Francisco for a dose of culture, there was an air of stern resolve in the car and palpable anxiety that whatever might await us was sure to be expensive and degrading. Our place, our parents taught us, was here – in our house, on our street, in our town – each of which provided another layer of protection against what lurked beyond.
I’m just trying to make you understand how it would be years before I’d hear of Susan Sontag. Maybe if I’d heard of Susan Sontag before I eagerly embraced the strong opinions on photography the man I later married held when he was not a man yet but only a boy with intense, almond eyes and a wounded air, everything would somehow be different.
But because I had not, the nature of photography soon became a topic of discussion between us. To stand before a waterfall, a cathedral, or a junk heap, he taught me, was an opportunity to take in the world, to have lofty thoughts and deep feelings – to see. And so we believed, he and I, in looking. As a natural consequence of this condition of looking, we honed ourselves to embrace the wondrous and transitory nature of experience and things.
Among things we used to watch: other human beings as they unpacked cumbersome photographic equipment and set about taking their shots – snap, click.
This was long before our cameras were our phones. We were still wholly human, not yet emergent cyborgs. We thought cyborgs were evil back then.
In part I loved this boy for having made his way to California, through Montana, from one of the big important cities to the east, a site of both power and culture. His people – his family – seemed to me at the time not just educated – my family was educated – but urbane, smart, connected – okay, sophisticated – which made everything about him alluring.
His opinion on photography was that it was bourgeois and fetishistic, and also that, in distancing you from the moment, it created not a memory of the moment, but a memory of the image of the idea of the moment, which in fact, because of photography, never really existed. Since this is what he thought, I thought so too. Completely on our own, we were against photography, although now that I consider it, he probably knew all about Sontag by then.
Live your life, he said. Be present.
Actually, that’s not what he said – presentness not having the kind of cultural currency then that it does today, nor one, if it did, he’d have espoused – but that was the idea. Embrace the moment and all that.
This inspired me to embrace, instead, his opinion, which I found, in all ways, brilliant, and, because I coveted his approval, to go out into the world keen to memorize everything I saw and did and felt.
I suppose we must also have believed in memory back then. We believed if we paid close attention, we could remember it all.
Today, Haitian-born Canadian writer Dany Laferrière – the first Haitian, the first Canadian, and the second black person to be inducted into the Académie Française – writes that he’s never owned a still camera because if it’s just to take a picture he’ll never look at, it has to be the “stupidest invention ever. And anyway, [he] has one that works very well: this skull where [he’s] stored fifty years of images, most of them repeated until they’ve become the fabric of [his] ordinary life.”
Looked at that way, it’s hard not to envy such a skull: a full skull, an accurate skull, a confident skull just fifty years old.
After college, I traveled six weeks in Europe and shot only one roll of film. I want to call the camera a Brownie, but that seems unlikely. It would have been cheap. Now, all I remember of the grand sites of that trip – Chartres, for example, or the Tower of London – is my anxious indecision as to whether or not this site, where I stood, should be one of the twenty photos I was allowing myself. But even then, my heart wasn’t in it, as if something in me already anticipated a future in which taking photographs of important places in the world would have become irrelevant because your phone contained them all and where what I could not anticipate then would be the longing I sometimes feel now for an image, one good image, of me – my younger self – when I was there.
I was traveling alone. The word “selfie” would not be introduced to the language for at least a quarter century. Shy, tentative, and dogged, I trudged daily out into the strangeness of that world and did my best – worked hard – to register and remember it all.
In other respects, the practice of attention I developed then could not be called pleasurable.
What I mean is: in the beginning, when you are young, your brain is large and ripe, and everything seems lush and full of possibility. And, for a while, maybe it is. These are the years of ah-has! which feel so crystalline and satisfying. Then a lifetime passes – a lifetime that may already exceed the lifetimes of the people you loved best – and although your brain may no longer be ripe, it is a virtual scrapheap of remainders.
Perhaps this is why, desperate for a little peace, we take to yoga in our middle years. Oh, please, we may pray, let us empty our minds.
A point comes in everyone’s life when what lies ahead is already less than what lies behind, and this is our midpoint. Not knowing the end point, we can’t know this midpoint, although some of us may sometimes contemplate it. As the milestone birthdays pass – thirty, forty, fifty – it’s hard not to worry: are we half way there? weren’t we supposed to have done more by now? the one-hundred-year-olds we know, would we really want to be them? Until at last, we settle in to the more sanguine acceptance that if there is a point we can know, it really is just this, the raveling present that perpetually brings into being the past and the future.
I thought about midpoints, too, when I was a child, and calibrating other such paralyzing puzzles as how long between now and when the Chinese get the bomb and what happens when you shine a flashlight up into the sky. Maybe the ideas that stick with us are banal because our brains, less elastic as they age, grow nostalgic for their points of origin. Either way, my preoccupation with the midpoint of a person’s life – like the stone’s stoniness – persists.
Recently a student – a science fiction writer with a sharp and curious mind – was trying to explain something to me he called phase space – a hypothetical space in which all possible states of a system coexist simultaneously. An excitable young man by nature, he was completely beside himself.
Do you know what that means?
I did not.
It means, he forced himself to slow down for my benefit, time doesn’t exist. Time’s an illusion; there’s no time at all.
But who needs physics for that, I prodded him gently. We already learned this from Borges: we are the river, the tiger that time is; time is the “fire that consumes [us], but [we] are the fire.”
Or does it mean, instead, that all time exists at the same time?
As the late poet laureate Mark Strand observed, “We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”
My younger son had a classic case of the ADHD – did you lose your sweatshirt again? (no I gave it to a friend); settle down now and pay attention, you can do this – a condition for which we did not have him diagnosed or treated until he was in high school. Sometimes, when I worry the problem of time, I reflect, as many do, on the experience of my grandparents – born to train and ship travel from New York to California, and lasting all the way to the man on the moon. Will a day come, I wonder, when we look back on the pioneer days before we had drugs for our moods or turned pushers for our children?
These disorders run in families, and while I can still sometimes summon that intensity of focus that marked my early years, it’s not so easy anymore, although I’m less convinced my own distractibility is a factor of brain chemistry than of time.
Once I complimented Mark Strand on his socks, which were red.
Thank you, he said, I bought them in the Cardinal’s Shop in Rome.
Am I always complimenting Mark Strand on his socks?
Of course, when you are young, the past is the root beer ice cream float your mother let you have last week, or what your best friend told you on the bus this morning just to let you know you weren’t her best friend anymore. The past is immediate – right behind you, visceral, and so close you can taste it – when you’re young.
But because I was convinced that my own midpoint lay prematurely fixed somewhere in the short time I’d already spent on earth, it wasn’t the past that obsessed me when I was young, but the future, which I knew to be already almost over. So seize the day, I thought, and all of that. Nor did I concern myself with the dreaming of paths – the hope that one day I’d do x or be y, the college I would go to or wedding I would have, the man I’d marry, daughters I would raise – but set my own internal Doomsday Clock, instead, to how long it would be before we blew ourselves to bits. My most fervent hope was to finish middle school, maybe even high school. Beyond that, it was anyone’s game.
We are each of us born to the last days of earth, but death, writes Wallace Stevens, is the mother of beauty, and even if I did not know that then, I somehow knew enough to cherish the world around me. And my concurrent, unwavering belief that I was somehow fated to bear witness to the end of human time lent a kind of heady saturation to my days. Maybe this warm rock would be the last warm rock I’d pick up from a dry and sunny creek bed. Maybe this harvest moon would be my last, this algebra exam my last, this hard-boiled egg – cool, smooth, and serene – the last egg on earth.
Later, I’d complain to my mother about having been born at the dawn of the nuclear age.
We were the first, I would say. Can you imagine what that was like?
I don’t know what I expected her to say. Maybe: you poor thing. Maybe: I’m sorry.
Instead, a rare flash of anger: you don’t think, my mother said, the Depression didn’t feel like the end of the world to us, the war didn’t feel like the end of the world?
Then she added, as she often did: think of someone other than yourself.
It especially galled me that some prominent Los Alamos scientists were not convinced their “gadget” was going to work. Even though it probably would, they were worried, if it didn’t, it might ignite the very atmosphere of earth. Poof, we’d be gone in a blast like the sun, taken out by our own hubris. But, still it was full steam ahead, as they bet their precious math and physics against the very future of the planet.
Now that the word is out that it never was a done deal, they want to take it back. After more than seventy years, they’re trying to assure us that the risk of total planetary combustion had been calculated to be less than zero. What is less than zero? When my first son was three, my father, a bit in his cups, posed the following problem to him: well if you’re so smart, my father said, what’s nine take away ten? And my son didn’t miss a beat: Grandpa you gave me one below zero. Is one below zero, a fat and satisfying number to a three-year-old child, not still a chance then? When does a chance become, definitively, no chance at all?
“The whole country was lighted by a searing light,” General Thomas Farrell, deputy commander of the Manhattan Project, has written, “with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. . . . It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described . . . that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.”
I think about that beauty now – a beauty that exceeds the grasp of the world’s greatest poets, the offspring of death. I don’t think that’s what Stevens meant, but it’s what happened.
Today, I don’t envy my students, who are so different from my students than when I first started out. They’re younger, for one thing, but with faces carved by worry, they look and act older. Even the bland Valley girls, their hair tied back in ribbons and in embroidered jeans, have pinched brows and lips and write stories not of childhood or love, but of apocalyptic savagery and families forced to live underground on an uninhabitable Earth. They’ve seen the future and they are scared, my own childhood anxieties gone viral, but worse. Doomed though we were in our time, at least we’d have gone out in a flash. Who wouldn’t want to go out as a star?
In addition to weird weather and financial devastation, my students are preoccupied with zombies and other catastrophic plagues.
Looking back, it’s hard to know when the imminent apocalypse lost its grip on my imagination, not that it ever completely went away, but there were years – years and years – when I was too busy to give it much thought. I remember one night not long after my first son was born – he could not have been more than two or three weeks old – and I just sat there holding him in that static part of time somewhere between midnight and dawn, staring down at his dark and knowing eyes, and seeing myself, maybe for the first time, as someone who had willfully brought such a tiny, miraculous being into this world. This not being the kind of self-knowledge we’re built, as human beings, to endure, what choice did I have but to let go of it?
Three years later, a second son was born.
And so, with apologies to Mark Strand, who always seemed like he would live forever, one day when you’re not paying attention, today becomes the day they turn one, and you are the luckiest person on earth because you get to be his mother. One day one of these sons will grow distant, move to the other side of the continent, marry, but on this day, you are his mother and he is turning one.
And then, just like that, the second one turns one.
One day, they break their arm, their teeth, their promise to always wear helmets.
One day they suffer their first heartbreak.
All this happens if you’re lucky.

       Naturally, as time went on, because our opinion of photography belonged, originally, to my former husband, he managed to forget he ever held it. A man who abjured diminution in all things, ill at ease with children (also small) and inclined toward competition with his sons, he focused instead on recording their progress, and, like the other dads, assembled a collection of large cameras and video recording devices, complete with the same bulky cases we’d once shared a sense of farce over; I believe there was even a tripod or two. I used to watch him at birthday parties or on the soccer sidelines, all that gear slung over already slumped shoulders, and marvel at how he could have been the same man who had taught me, in our younger years, the evils of photography.
For myself, it’s clear in retrospect I clung to his original beliefs all the more stubbornly because they were never my own, as throughout his snap and click years, I ran along sidelines after the boys, heady with life and utterly oblivious that this – all this – was as fleeting as the waterfalls and monuments before which we’d once stood in reverent attention.
So this is how it happened that most of the photos I have of the boys were framed by this man, but when I left the family home I took them anyway, every one. It was years before I could face the task of divvying them up, spreading box after box of small boy on the living room floor and sorting them out.
Well, certainly it’s true the children were once small, with downy heads and swollen lips. However impossible it was to imagine then, their lips would not always be swollen.
My parents, now in their nineties, still rise every day, as they always have risen, to days that come as they have always come – sun rising from behind Mt. Lassen to the east, teeth brushing and eating of cereal and toast, bill paying and television and biweekly bridge. How slowly they work their way through the hours of their routines, but how quickly the days must go by. My mother begins each one with a small meditation of gratitude, slipping from one day to the next, in and out of her quiet reflection and grace.
Unaided by photography – for the snapshots they have of my sisters and me would fit loosely in a small box – me holding a daisy, pudgy and round-cheeked at two; me at my middle school graduation, braces gleaming in what might have been a grin but looks more like a scowl; me, fist raised to show off my black armband in an honors club high school yearbook entry – what do they remember, I wonder?
Now, you visit friends who regale you into the night with perhaps a thousand photos of their most recent trip displayed on their big screen tv. No, no – that was so last century. They send you their blog. Your phone lights up and you are no longer here; you are already elsewhere, with them.
Sometimes, my former husband emails me photos of his current life. Just last night, for example, he sent me one of his current lover smiling on Mt. Lassen in the snow. She’s bigger than I am, a natural blond with wideset eyes and a generous smile, and I am a little bit in love with her too for having delivered him into what may count as peace.
And last year he sent me a photo he’d just taken of the first house we lived in together, a two-story clapboard bungalow in a part of the country where the winters are harsh. I study it now, entranced by its cupolas and windows, the small covered porch with the once red door, its peeling paint, which maybe is the same paint that was already starting to peel when we lived there together so long ago.
Here’s what he remembers: that we lived in this house for “a couple of months.”
Here’s what I remember: in fact we lived there closer to a year and a half, although it’s hard to calculate because of the time we lived apart even then, our relationship already failing before we ever married; that we had friends over to watch the Reagan/Carter debate on my six-inch television who still, when I visit them now, refer to that night as the “there you go again” night; that he picked his nose and flicked his snot from the bed to the opposite wall which, in time, we referred to as the “snot wall”; that once after we’d argued, he slammed that same bedroom door, which was warped in such a way that, from the inside, I could not open it to take care of the nosebleed the argument had caused and that when he came back hours later, he walked in and woke me to say, “what happened here – did you have an abortion, or what?”; that we had a claw-foot bathtub, but no reliable hot water; that I taught myself to knit there and wrote my earliest stories in a closet alcove beside a window that looked out at low mountains on an old library desk I picked up at a thrift store and still have here now; that after Mt. St. Helens blew, we were ashed in for a week with nothing to do but drink and have sex; that none of what happened there was kind.
Well, there’s a lot more I remember, but I remembered none of this until I started writing it, and for none of it do I have photographs.
If writing, more and more, has outgrown its usefulness for telling stories – and I don’t know, I suppose we can argue about that – what conclusions should we draw about the stories I wrote in that alcove which, at the time, I was fervent to tell?
Here, though, is a paradox: the sheer accumulation of our own thoughts over time will in the end defy all measure of coherence, not because they are so rich but because their metonymic field has grown so expansive, even as the memories that populate this field grow sketchy and depleted. What remains are the triggers and their synaptic firings that deliver us from now to then with no order or warning.
Unlike Dany Laferrière, I have owned more than one still camera, but never really took to them, resenting the sense of obligation they created to interrupt the moment by recording it. But in the absence of someone who both shares and can confirm the memories I disdained taking pictures of then, it’s hard not to feel I might have been wrong.
And so it is I find myself unexpectedly dependent on the photos I took with me from the failed marriage that were taken by the man who was my husband and who had shared this disdain with me. In them, as in phase space, the boys are still boys – leaping, sullen, naughty, grimy, grinning, gorgeous boys. They start out small, these boys, in the images of them, but how quickly they pass through their various stages. Here’s the older one already standing on his hands in front of a grade school mural, dressed up in his first white collared shirt and chinos because it is his fifth grade graduation; and here, the younger one squatting determined and grim in catcher’s gear at ten. As much as I cannot remember from that time – when, oh, it seemed, how could I ever forget their mutable faces and malleable forms, the adorable things they said and did? – all it takes is for me to pick up a single photograph my former husband snapped from the box where they remain as disorganized as ever, and watch out, here comes the flood.
But are they real memories, I wonder, or – as my husband taught me years before he ever was my husband – poor substitutions and replacements?
A sentence, too, is like a photograph and can transport the mind through time and space. But although I never turned against the sentence as I did the image, and although I can still bring them up, more or less, at will, I can’t help but sometimes long for one last real glimpse of my son’s lips – either son’s – swollen in anger, or hunger, or hurt, or love, and just on the verge of forming a word for something he needed, or wanted – from me.

2. A Circuit in the Brain

Here’s something we used to believe: we used to believe writing would heal us. It’s not clear why we believed this. We believed it the same way we believed drinking orange juice for breakfast would improve our health or wearing comfortable shoes would protect us from bunions. We believed in good health and healthy feet.
Or I did.
At that time, the time of these beliefs, most of us also had such powerful capacities for hope. Hope was what sustained us then. Naturally, all this took place in another time – long, long before hope would become a failed mantra and collective political embarrassment.
In the time I am talking about, you could plant your feet on the ground right at the point – the point right beneath where you stood that marks, or so the Hupa Indians believe, the exact center of the earth, each of us a different center, presumably the earth the same – and look up into the night sky where not long before an American man had walked on the moon.
The first man to walk on the moon, we said, our voices hushed, our imaginations stunned. If we can do that, we thought then, oh what can’t we do?We could not even begin to imagine what it would be like to think now: how could we have been so naive?
Today we know that memory is just a circuit in the brain, as prone to faulty wiring as the electric motors we made in middle school.
Who, then, can say what we truly believed?

       Of my own failed motor – the one I made when I was twelve – I mainly remember the wire, which was wrapped around a giant spool either on the teacher’s desk at the back of the room or on the high lab table at the front. The wire was copper and we had to wait in line for it, poking and prodding as the teacher measured and snipped for one child after another. Here is your wire, here is your wire – here, at last, was mine.
Or maybe we had our own much smaller spools at our own lab tables, lower than the one in front because we were still small, although this being middle school, some of us were not.
I want to say I remember all this with the same exactitude that I recall the boy who thrilled me that same year with a sudden pretend chokehold in the hallway – his arms, from behind, an unexpected vise around my neck, my body shoved against the wall – that would turn out to be the most erotic attention I’d receive from a boy – any boy – for years. The chokehold lasted only seconds; the boy was popular. What possessed him, I wonder – my quietness? Was he curious, or cruel?
I remember that.
But the memory circuits of the brain are elusive, most susceptible to damage when we first lay them down, and later, when we try to retrieve them. Now in the retrieval stage, all I remember of the motors we worked on for weeks is my own hapless fumbling, the wire so shiny and seductive as the teacher doled it out, so resistant to my small and clumsy fingers when I finally got some, my own hands now strangers to me. Perhaps a little quiet outrage too. I could sew, I could embroider; I was learning to crochet. My hands were hands, a lover would later observe, that could make things, nimble and quick. But the wire, unlike thread, was not pliant, and it kinked when it should have spooled. I may also have lost track of the poles as I struggled to coil the copper – the conductor – around whatever it was we were using for a base in what would turn out to be a poor facsimile not just of the teacher’s larger motor example at the front of the room but also of those of the other students all around me. Finally, I remember frustration and, hot as ever, shame, and the acrid scent of heated rubber as my little motor labored – labored hard – to spin.
The truth is that I don’t understand any part of this memory. I was shy but not clumsy; my grades were good. Did my contraption fail because I’d made it badly, or had I misperceived its basic principles? Or because, let’s admit it, motors were for boys? My father, having fathered girls, had trained us, when construction was involved, to fetch and carry – I need this, bring it, now.
Looking back, it’s not clear the other students’ motors were handsomer than mine, but I know for a fact that at least some of them worked. Was I destined to be bad, I wonder now, at mechanical things all my life?
Was I destined to fail?
Later, I would parent sons. Copper being expensive, no one was building motors when they were in school.

       Let us imagine the lives we have lived at least approximate the lives we imagine ourselves having lived, as if the people we inhabited inside those smaller younger bodies were still intact today, the trace of them indelibly fixed. We are old enough now to be the grandparents of those prior selves, but what could we ever have offered them anyway, haplessly trapped as we are in the raveling present? But as my friend Wendy used to say about her job in Florida, “It’s not so bad for a foreign posting.”
Or, as science fiction writer Charles Yu says, “Enjoy the elastic present . . . but don’t turn the last page yet, keep stalling, see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment.”
Later, much later, for example, I fell in love. Most people do; it’s probably hardwired, what with the hormones and all. These days, it seems people are more cautious, but back then, ooh-la-la! It can be gradual, everything changing little by little, but sometimes it all happens all at once. You are one way and then, like that, you are another.
So in this part of my life, I am a graduate student instructor of technical writing. I am teaching technical writing because I have failed at the most basic of courses, first year composition. Although I will go on in later life to promote the connections between first year composition and creative writing, I will never teach first year composition again. First year composition, the most maligned of writing courses, has turned out to be way too hard for me. But since my graduate school fellowship requires that I teach something, they have put me in technical writing because it has a textbook and rules. Any moron, they think, can follow a textbook with rules. In their view, in this context, I am a moron: who can’t teach first year composition?
Tonight is the first night of class, so I’m nervous; but I have my textbook, so everything is cool. Also, there’s a roster. You begin – you always begin – by calling the roster. I’m pretty good at reading out loud.
So this is what I’m doing – I’m reading off names from a roster – when a man walks into my class and sits down at a desk. That’s it: he walks in and I’m different forever.
Naturally, he is a little bit late and I’m already calling the roster, but still I look up and I think: ooh-la-la, what’s he doing here anyway?
This man has a good ten years on all the other students – the same ten years I am relying on for the only authority I can muster at this time in my life. And there’s something about him – an attention – sharper than the others, or possibly bemusement. Not a large man, thin but muscular, with strong features, he has an air of messy distraction that I’ll soon enough come to see as an effect of his habitual tendency to be managing a host of competing obligations at once, a man in demand.
Okay. I already told you about my motor. I have now introduced you to both the concept of love and this man, who clearly did not belong in my class. If you are an astute reader you will already have recognized this as the moment of falling in love, but do you think its proximal association with my failed motor means this love is also doomed?
If this were a novel, I wonder how I’d tell it, although most likely I would not, love not much being the stuff of novels these days: falling in love, thwarted in love. These days, it’s all about true life traumas and the terrible future. Who writes love stories anymore?
Back then, though, in that time, I did.
Don’t let anyone tell you, I wrote then, stories are about language; stories are about love, for love is everything, and so are stories.
Maybe it wasn’t writing we believed would heal us, but stories; or maybe, love.
We kept our motors in small white cardboard boxes, all of them alike, the failed ones – mine – in exactly the same kind of small white box that contained, as well, those beautiful and humiliating motors the slow-witted boys had built at lightning speed that spun and whirred and hummed and could even run things. We put our motors and their disparate parts – the battery, the base, the magnets – away in our boxes, serene and white, and capacious enough for all that equipment, which, once it’s inside, no one can tell if it failed or not. So maybe there was no giant spool of wire or impatient line of children, but only last year’s box, its copper in a clump we had to untangle before we could even begin. Maybe my wire was knotted to start with; maybe my battery was dead.
A man walks into my class and I fall in love.
You can’t really get much more clichéd than that.
And it is for this reason what I long for is a box, like the box I kept my motor in or keep photos in now – white and serene and capacious – to put my brain in for a while, relieving it, if only briefly, of all the lived clichés and doomed experiments, real and imagined, the stories and the memories that are wired deep inside it, the brain, but over which there is no on/off switch. I’m pretty sure there was a time when I’d have also liked to exchange it, if only temporarily, for someone else’s brain, less prone to these attractions and distractions, a more pliant and resourceful brain than mine. But now it’s just the box I want, a desire very likely not unrelated to the impulse that prompted a friend, on the advent of her fiftieth year on this earth, to purchase an extravagant jewelry box. Like my friend’s jewelry box, my box would be a nice box – an empty box to hold the brain – my brain – which once was young and ripe but now sits stuffed and obdurate inside my skull – for a while, just to let things settle out and rest a bit, a little respite for the brain while, meantime, the part of the body where the brain normally nestles would also be transformed, in its unfamiliar emptiness, to soothing quiet, vaster, in its emptiness – the absence of its normal brain – than all of outer space.
This would be like sleep but not sleep.
But not like death either.
Or maybe it’s the heart that needs a rest, this old, too fierce, stubborn heart I came with. I should have had a different heart, an easier, more flexible heart, more forbearing, less stubborn in its singular attachments.
But in this, as in in other respects, I was born wrong: my brain, my heart, wrong from the start.
These days, I no longer teach technical, but creative writing, and because my students were not born to marvel at the man who walked on the moon but only at the myth that this walk was staged by NASA, and because their futures seem grim, they’re crazy for fantasy stories, like Star Wars and the zombie apocalypse, and big ideas like phase space, a hypothetical space in which all possible states of a system coexist simultaneously. Believe me, I’m with them in this. Maybe in phase space everything I’m telling you now is different. Maybe the universe is somehow not indifferent vis-à-vis puny human suffering and you can change the past after all because somewhere in phase space the past remains the future forever. Maybe this happens instead: a man walks into my class and because our futures already also exist, we turn away from them right at the start and walk away together while we can.
As it happens, I was right to wonder what this man was doing in my class, as he far outranked me with a tenure research line in our computer science lab. But this being back in the cowboy days of computer science, you didn’t really need to graduate from college to get a job in one, you just needed to promise you would. So he hadn’t quite managed to get his degree yet because he didn’t like to write and was also prone, throughout his life, to procrastination. Some colleges let you hold on to your units forever, but some – like the high-end east coast one he had gone to years before – only give you so much time before they wipe your record out. Which is to say that without this class of mine – the class I was teaching because it had a textbook – his entire undergraduate career was due to expire at the end of the term.
Poof. Like that. And him stripped of credit, like a boy just out of high school, not even admitted to college. And this was an anomaly the university could not overlook. I.e., his job was in my hands.
Within seconds of him walking into my class, I knew that I wanted to fuck him and that he was married.
I think that is an expression people use: to fuck him. The feeling, in fact, was hardly sexual at all. I don’t know how to think about falling in love.

       Despite everything we know about memory – the parts of the brain that encode and contain it, the synaptic firings that trigger it – we are pretty much still in the dark. The lowly weak electric fish stores and uses memories in ways that may approximate our own. A plain nocturnal fish, it has been shown, in lab conditions, to return to missing food locations with high degrees of spatial accuracy: it remembers where its food was and goes back for more. But the feel of the lap of a parent or grandparent – firm and steady and secure beneath our squirming buttocks – remains in those buttocks for the rest of our lives, just as the feel of our babies’ bodies remains in the crook of our arms long after those bodies have turned into men.
All this happens in a blink.
In other respects, it can also be said that we are all memory experts: I have mine, you have yours, and we are the fiercest guardians of both.
But what of those people whose memories loop, or fail entirely, or thrust them into a time warp where no one can reach them? To date, I have worked with two students who suffered traumatic brain injuries and whose memories went haywire after. One of them wrote down everything I said, the other lost track of details; each engaged in extreme athleticism – one did an Iron Man, the other bought a CrossFit gym and became a trainer. And both were extraordinary writers, almost as if their injuries had fired up the language centers of their brains.
When people remember things that never really happened, we call them false memories. Some people think that people with false memories are lying; they think there are true and false memories, and you can tell them apart.
When I was young, I had prodigious recall, a capacity my family attributed to my imagination. They thought I was making things up. Later, as a young professor, I could remember not just the names of my students, but all of the stories they’re written and who wrote what. Oh you, I would say, you wrote the one about the boy whose mother abandoned him and his father in a Paris Metro station, you wrote the one about jellyfish, you wrote the one about underground battles on a planet where if your skin touches air – what counts for air on this planet – your whole body bursts into flame and explodes. When I told you the story had promise, you told me you just wanted to blow stuff up.
I should have treasured the razor sharpness of this brain, but my sons were small then too. You can only pay attention to so much.
Now, a boy in my current class wears a hat like a boy in my class from another century and suddenly I call the current boy by the prior boy’s name, unable to recall the name of the boy before me who looks puzzled, then hurt.
Kyle, I say.
Zachary, he says.
McDowell, I say. A name I’d never have been able to retrieve if I had tried.
Now, I come back from Thanksgiving break and they are all strangers to me. Their faces, like moons, regard me opaquely from their desks.

       One day, the memory of a story I didn’t write sprang full blown into wherever it is the brain stores such things, and while parts of that story have faded now, on that day – the day it sprang full blown into my brain – its details were so clear I could have recited its first page, described exactly where it fell in the book where I had read it, the yellowing roughness of its paper and slightly smudged print. At the time, I was walking in the hills around my home, and my brain, as it normally does when I walk, was wandering too. The memory came upon me all at once with the force of a sudden desire – to read it again, yes, but something else, too, something more insistent, and I wonder now, was there maybe something in the story I couldn’t quite bring back even then – a gap at the center of the otherwise intact and powerful memory?
But who had written it? As crystalline as the story was in my memory, the author was a total blank.
The force of this enigma was very strong – a gnawing physical feeling just short of a burn. So even before reaching the top of the hill, I turned back to go back and read that story. But when I got home – I walked fast – and pulled out a book, the story was strangely missing.
Impossible, I thought.
But no, I checked again. And not in any other book I owned either, neither at home, nor at school, nor even on the Internet where Google, as it sometimes does, would fail me.
The story exists – detailed, palpable, compelling – but without a text or author. The opposite of a gap, or an absence, I often feel it hovering in my consciousness, a thing, or a presence, that is nowhere I can locate in the world.

       In the story without an origin – or no known origin, or not for now – a young art conservationist begins a new job in a city museum where she is charged with restoring artifacts from the museum’s neglected collection – Civil War-era holdings, I think – muskets, tattered mess or shaving kits or other personal effects soldiers might have carried in their child-sized backpacks, maybe the backpacks themselves. The worker has her own little backpack in which she carries a kit of gleaming tools that she removes each day when she arrives at work and spreads out before her on a high wood table.
The work really is painstaking, and she is very good at it, proceeding meticulously throughout her long but oddly pleasurable days. At night, she returns to a small dark apartment, but each morning, she is back, ascending the great stone stairway to the old museum with a feeling of both purpose and anticipation. For there is an exhibit in the museum, not in her purview, that has captivated her imagination and affection:
It’s a vitrine.
In the vitrine: a bedroom where a girl figure from about the same era as the Civil War – perhaps the museum is a Civil War museum – is preparing, at her vanity, to retire for the night. She wears a long white muslin gown and, seated on the round stool of a vanity, gazes down at a gleaming silver mirror and a comb and brush set of burnished tortoiseshell. Behind her, a four-poster bed.
The expression on the girl figure’s face – for the figure is not quite a doll, and not a mannequin either, so lifelike is she – is enigmatic. She is thinking something, but what can she be thinking? Is she contemplative, or sad, or possibly – could she be in love? If she is in love, the lover must be absent – a soldier?
The expression on her face is opaque.
But it’s not exactly a vitrine. If it were a vitrine, the scene inside would resemble that of a dollhouse, and it’s much larger than a dollhouse, the girl many times the size of any doll while still smaller than an actual human – an in-between sort of display, a diorama in a great glass box.
And so begins a daily visitation between the young art conservationist and the girl figure in the vitrine for whom the conservationist begins to feel an oddly physical attraction and what might be a different kind of love. She covets, for example, the girl figure’s objects, imagining the feel of the comb and brush, the tender precision with which, should they fall to her professional dominion, she’d clean and polish them. Certainly, she longs to hold them in her hands. This longing – like my own longing for this story – is powerful and visceral. It consumes her and she is it: she becomes her desire.
Also, I believe the girl figure in the vitrine looks vaguely familiar.
In the introduction to Labyrinths, Borges defines four conventions of the fantastic in literature: journey through time, story within story, contamination of reality with dream, and doubling. I do recognize the degree to which the story without an origin I am describing reflects these conventions. Of course it does. I’m just trying to make you understand how palpably it came to me, as if I had read it somewhere, which no doubt I have.
These daily visitations between the young art conservationist and the girl figure in the vitrine continue for some time, even as the feeling of attraction grows stronger, strong enough, even, to distract the worker from her work, which has progressed to sabers. The sabers are beautiful – long and sharp – but she has thoughts only for the girl figure in the vitrine.
At night in her small dark apartment, the same.
Until at last, the young art conservationist decides to hide in the museum after hours so as to be alone with the figure and have her all to herself.
The day before the night she does this is slow and tortuous – it’s so hard to wait.
But when at last it’s over and the young art conservationist emerges from her hiding place into the closed museum, everything is dark and hushed. There is some light, though, enough to see the girl figure in the vitrine, still seductively brushing her hair. So the young art conservationist just stands there for a while, just watching. The feeling of being on the outside, looking in, is almost overpowering, but yet, not powerful enough. It will never be enough, she realizes now, and then, in that same moment, the moment of realization, somehow she is inside the vitrine with the girl figure. I’m not sure how this is accomplished, nor what to do about my inability to be precise about the actual dimensions of this bedroom, for I understand it introduces a spatial dilemma. Does the young conservationist dwarf everything as she crams her larger, human body into this still indeterminate space? Or, perhaps, like Alice, she herself becomes smaller as she slips inside, her own body transformed in the velvet darkness of the after-hours closed museum.
One thing I do know is that as she enters the replica of a bedroom inside the vitrine, the feeling of familiarity that has dogged her only increases, as if she has entered a room that is hers, or once was, or one day will be. Also, as she at last begins to touch the objects on the vanity she has coveted for so long, something happens to alter her heretofore somewhat detached professional curiosity about them. Her hands, as she touches them, are no longer those of an art conservationist, and the touching itself provokes an uncanny sensation of familiarity, even – bizarrely – intimacy.
And it is now that the expression on the young art conservationist’s face begins to change, which really – it’s hard to know exactly how to put this – but somehow her expression slows. She can sense it, but she can’t stop it, even as she feels it becoming the same as the one on the girl figure and recognizes her own perceptions – the weight of the brush in her hands, her pale reflection in the vanity mirror – to be the same as those experienced by the girl figure until the two become one, indistinguishable, each from the other, as if there never was a girl figure – doll or mannequin – at all, but only the young art conservationist preparing to retire for the night in the vitrine, to brush her hair with the little brush, to slip into the high four-poster bed where the soldier is not.
In this way, the young art conservationist takes her place at the vanity and, smoothing out the rough muslin of her long white gown, reaches for the dainty brush to begin her one hundred strokes before bed. Her hair is long and the brush is soft and the museum behind the glass of the vitrine is hushed in its velvety darkness.
But just as we’re convinced that there is nothing enigmatic anymore about what the girl is feeling in this hushed darkness of the closed museum, she hears something for the first time, a sound in the museum, which is odd because it’s water, water running in the night, but not like a creek or a river, but a spigot – water running to fill something which, by the time she understands it is not a vitrine, after all, but somehow an aquarium, it’s too late for her not to be in it.

       After a while, I stopped looking for that story, and slowly, over time forgot all about it until, suddenly, it sprang into my memory again, although maybe not so full blown as before. Before, it was all so immediate I felt as if I might have been able to recite the first page, if only I could have retrieved the words. Before, I could remember the exact nature of the artifacts the young art conservationist was charged with restoring, each of her tools, the name of the museum engraved above its massive entryway, and of course, the dimensions of the vitrine – or glass case. Now, what I know: the museum is brick, approached by a wide stone stairway.
Other things, curiously, are more distinct – the museum showrooms, for example, so large and lush, with vitrines of all sizes and shapes scattered throughout and great walls of gilt and brocade. Who could have written these rooms in such detail?
But while over the years, the story has become both less and more distinct, the feelings it stirs in me are every bit as powerful as they ever were, with this one exception: did I really read it?
Perhaps, instead, I dreamed it.
Naturally, if I dreamed it, I should write it.
But what if someone already has?

       Alternatively, a man walks into your class who will not become the husband of your twenty-two-year failed marriage or the father of your sons. You are twenty-nine years old; he is twenty-nine years old. Your birthdays are so close they could kiss, but one of you has just passed your midpoint.
Because in phase space, time does not exist, it may be some comfort to know that this same man – the man who will become your husband only in your heart – will be walking forever into your class. He’s skulking a little because he is late. He will always be late forever.
In the other part of space – the space we can know – it’s humbling, really, how quickly a human life passes.
In addition to my early preternatural memory, I had premonitions – for example, waking one hot summer morning in my fourteenth year to a feeling of crushing disappointment that I was destined never to have daughters, only sons. That’s okay, I tried to soothe me, still just a girl myself, your sons will be fine, they will become men. I also foresaw clearly that, despite a range of clear successes in my life, I would remain, throughout, unlucky in love.
And this is how I also knew the man who walked into my class and did not become my husband or the father of my sons was married before I saw the ring or exchanged a single electrified word with him: first, the desire, then in the same breath, the crushing disappointment.
I don’t know where I learned this. Maybe I learned this in my family: desire is dangerous and can crush you.
When the man walked into my class, I was still a young woman and could not know then that the immediacy of the desire we felt for each other would settle deep inside me where it remains to this day, despite the relative parsimoniousness of the time we’d have together.
At some point – far, far too late – we would become lovers, but by then, I would long since have run out of hope for the life I was going to live and adapted myself, instead, to the life that was mine.
As for whether writing really, really heals us, a lot of people think so these days.
Why, just the other day, The New York Times ran a story on a multitude of studies that have proven it can. From struggling black college students to married couples in conflict, the results are the same: writing – and re-writing and revising – your personal story can make you happier – happy. Write your story, the story concluded, and you will be happy. How happy we would all be if only everyone spent their lives writing!
As for me, I’d say the verdict’s still out.
I got bunions anyway, despite my years of ugly shoes. Yoga was the only thing that ever cured my feet.
Same thing for the orange juice. We squeezed it and drank it and popped it in pills, never mind organic diets, meditation, exercise. We did all the good and right things we could, and some of us still got cancer and died.
“We all have two lives, at least,” Dany Laferrière writes. “One that settles into memory like a stone at the bottom of a well, and another that disappears as it unravels like a vapor trail.” In writing, these lives, as in phase space, are the same. But are we diving in that well, or drowning? And how will we know?

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Katharine Haake’s essays have appeared in The Santa Monica Review and Crazyhorse. She is the author of the novel The Time of Quarantine (What Books Press, 2016); a hybrid novel, That Water, Those Rocks (Nevada, 2003); and three collections of short stories: The Origin of Stars (What Books, 2009), The Height and Depth of Everything (University of Nevada, 2001), and No Reason on Earth (Dragon Gate Press, 1986).