Yellow highlighters and the art of memory maintenance

While we were vacationing in France, I had the pleasure of meeting Jan Spreen, an occasional commenter here. He allowed me to publish a couple of his pieces, here and here, while we traveled, and I have put his blog up on the blogroll. I advise caution, however, as much of his blog is written in French, and those French, as Steve Martin once reminded us, “have a different word for everything.”

Jan and I discussed books of importance, and I told him that I have a problem with retention, that I had read many book and that after I remembered nothing. This came to the fore this year when I put great effort in transcribing portions of the book Public Opinion, by Walter Lippman. I use 3m flags to highlight important passages, and then use a transcription program to read those passages into a Word file. I have accumulated scores of such files, and I occasionally consult them.

I have too many books and not enough space, and so was thinning them out and selecting many to give away to our local Community Nest. Or to toss. I came across another copy of Public Opinion. I had flagged that copy as I had the other, but had not transcribed it. I then realized that I had read and flagged the book twice, transcribed portions once, and not retained a word of it!

Something had to give, so I decided to stop using flags, and instead now use memory to retain things I read. That, and a yellow highlighter. No more transcribing! That brings great relief. It’s not that I will lose anything by doing less busywork. I’ll just stop being so goddammed anal. At least in that part of my life.

Jan’s method of retention is better. He doesn’t just read books, but if he finds them important, rereads them. He said at one point that he thought a good book had to be read at least three times. (Five?) I won’t be doing that, but think he is on to something.

One of the books that he mentioned was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by the late Robert Persig. I recall he said he had read that book five times. I had read it once when we lived in Bozeman, but here we connected on a small detail. My wife took me on a drive on the country roads by our home, and stopped by a mailbox on one. She suggested I look at the name on the box. It was “DeWeese”. In the book Persig and his son arrive in Bozeman and stayed with the DeWeeses. This was a hook and Jan and I had something to talk about. Persig and son had stayed with our neighbors, though we did not know them.

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That brought back memories of the book, and I had retained a small part of it. I am going to cite memory, and later during my rereading of the book make corrections as necessary. I’ll add notes here. I recall that Persig once taught at Montana State University, Bozeman, and had to leave for some reason, and that he suffered from schizophrenia. Psychiatrists tell us that we don’t recover from that disease, but Persig wrote the book after all of this, and he is completely lucid and self-aware. So, he got better.

When I was ten years old, I was in my bedroom reading when I heard a loud banging outside the door. I got up and opened it a crack and there in the hallway outside was my brother Tom, and he was beating his fists against a closet door.  They were bloody and he was in agony. I have never, to this date, seen a man suffering as much as that. My dad was there, and he had his arms around Tom trying to restrain him.

We didn’t talk about the incident. It was that kind of household. Tom was taken away. Later I learned that he went to Denver, and while there underwent electroshock therapy. He stayed with relatives, and then came home.

The new post-shock Tom was different than the man who once decked me when I was four, he thirteen, with that with a vicious left hook. I had woken up in our living room alone. Where were Mom and Dad? I remember nothing else about the incident.

The new Tom would deck me again, me ten, he nineteen [more like 14/23, as Tom had graduated college and it was post shock]  so the electroshock did not completely cure him or make me less annoying. The new Tom was deeply religious, and terribly alone. He went to Catholic mass daily, and would do so until his death in 2011, me at his bedside reading psalms to his unconscious body. He died before my eyes. I never confronted him about the knockout punches. He would never be compos mentis enough to remember anyway.

I have never known an unhappier man. What did the electroshock accomplish? I don’t know. It changed him, for sure. Did it save him? Was he on the road to suicide? Perhaps. Or maybe he would have recovered.

Psychiatrists really don’t know much about the human brain, though they pretend otherwise. We go through phases, some worse, some better. Perhaps Tom would have suffered in agony and withered away to a self-inflicted end, or maybe he would have happened on someone, a woman perhaps, who entered his soul and healed him. He would not have been so alone, and so would have joined the rest of humanity. He would have been happier, and would have worn a mask of sanity, you know, like the rest of us.

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I am rereading Zen now, and believe, though I could be conflating memories, that Persig was at MSU Bozeman during another memorable incident in my life. It was January of 1962, so I was eleven. I believed in the Communist conspiracy, and deep down felt that commies were infiltrating government. (I was eleven, OK?)  The governor of Montana was Donald Nutter, and he and some others were killed in a small plane crash enroute from one part of Montana to the capital, Helena. A rumor circulated that he was on his way to Helena to break up a commie cell. I believed it. I was eleven, OK? [This may be tangential … I am not sure that Persig mentioned the Nutter event, and the rumor may have been about cleaning up commies at either MSU Bozeman or UM Missoula … we’ll see. Memories are unreliable for the most part.]

Those kinds of attitudes and beliefs haunted my childhood, along with growing up in the wake of Tom. I was told later by Dad, who prefaced his remark by saying “When Tommy got sick”, that Tom suffered from manic depression. It now goes by the name “bipolar” and it is one of those mental diseases that psychiatrists vote into existence in the DSM.

I do not believe in manic depression. I only believe in pain and suffering. I know there is depression. I’ve experienced it. I think of it as my brain signaling to me … “please, make changes.” At that time I was married, as unhappily as unhappy can be, so that change was in order.

We divorced, and I was set free, and got better. The depression went into remission. It returns on occasion, but only because I am normal. I face it square on, and do not treat it with drugs or alcohol, and it resolves, and the end result of that resolution is always this: I am human, ergo, I suffer. So does everyone else. It’s part of life.

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Meeting Jan was a treat, and his reintroduction of Zen to me was a welcome trip down memory lane, and perhaps this time I will retain a little more of the book than before. Yellow highlighter in hand.

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I searched for contemporary accounts of the death of Montana Governor Donald Nutter online, and came across an AI response that said there is no reference to him in Zen (he is mentioned but not by name) okand that Nutter actually died in 1970, and a NY Times account that said he and five others were killed in a crash onboard a Montana Air National Guard C-47 Skytrain that took off from Helena at 3:11 PM on January 25, 1962. The 47 means nothing by itself, but it coupled with 3:11 (33) and AI saying he did not die until 1970 gives me some indication that the event may have been fake. The published time of takeoff is way too specific and too minor to publish. Saying 3:00 PM would not have compromised the journalistic integrity (sic) of the Times piece. Nutter was said to have been intent of firing some radical college professors at that time, which gives the story a slant that says “hint hint,” a coded message to zealot anti-commies? Hmmmmmm …