philipmartin’s posterous

all of the time. It’s heavy and what’s worse,

it wouldn’t leave room for much else . . .

-Miller Williams, “Memory” There are some songs that, if my guard is down, knee me in the gut. A lot of them are usual suspects, but at least one of them is one you’ve likely never heard, a song called “Karen Carpenter” written by Matt Witte, the frontman for a New Jersey band called New Blood Revival.

The title has little to do with the lyric, which is really about the sentimental education of a guy not unlike myself after his divorce from a woman he refers to as “Miss Oklahoma.” Even though he’s gotten over her and he wishes her the best, her memory still snags on pointed moments.

It’s a simple, eloquent piece of music I wish I could play for you, or at least direct you to (you’d think someone somewhere would have posted it on the Internet, but apparently they haven’t) but at the same time I understand it’s unlikely to affect you in the same way it strikes me. I can’t dissociate Witte’s craft from my perception of the work as something authentic-it feels to me so naked, painful and honest that I have a tough time believing it’s notautobiographical, and that the specifics aren’t true. It feels like extruded memory rather than an alloy of experience and imagination.

I could be wrong, Witte might have made the whole thing up, but I recognize his grudging details as the sort of things people remember, random artifacts pulled from the ruins of a devastated civilization.

We are built to forget, to let go of the overwhelming vastness of the past, retaining only the barest impressions-often misshapen or fetishized-of our past. Forgetting is a kind of knife that shapes our history, that whittles away all that is deemed superfluous, the way we begin to make sense of the world. In order to function, we forget almost everything.

We do this automatically, and instantaneously. Most of the data perceived by our eyes is dropped before it ever registers in our brain. We catch a flash that resolves into a blur that we recognize as a black dogtrotting down the street in the rain. Thing come into focus because the interference falls away, because our minds suppress the ambient noisiness of the natural world-we tune into a narrow channel of “reality,” and we reconstruct a narrative that conforms to the selective evidence we admit.

To be unable to forget would be unbearable; we would be rendered paralyzed by detail. In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Funes, the Memorious,” the title character receives the dubious gift of perfect memory after he falls off his horse and hits his head:

“He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of Quebracho . . .”

Funes is tortured by his perfect memory-he recognizes the second-by-second aging of his own body because he is able to compare the present appearance of his hands to how they seemed a moment ago. Perfect recall has rendered him incapable of generalizing, of ignoring the differences he necessarily perceives between one thing at one particular moment and another (or the same) thing in the next moment.

“With no effort he had learned English, French, Portuguese, and Latin, ” Borges writes. “I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”

Funes had no way to organize the world into broad classes, only the myriad particulars of a world constantly reconstituting itself in slightly different ways. He was strapped in a world of experience, an onrushing stream of facts and details from which it was impossible to extricate himself. He could not pull himself out of the flood, to gain higher ground and perspective.

Maybe this is a long way to get around to what is essentially a book review, a fascinating work of social and technological criticism by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, $24.95). The book explores the ways various technologies have altered the human relationship with memory, shifting us from a society where the default was to forget (and consequently forgive) to one where it is impossible to avoid the ramifications of a permanent record.

Our ability to forget, Mayer-Schonberger notes, is being challenged by the explosion of easily searchable digital memory. The Internet has become a limitless warehouse for storing any and all sorts of information, no matter how trivial or potentially embarrassing.

This has some rather obvious implications-most of us have already learned to censor ourselves in e-mails and any other communications we imagine might be stored eternally on the ’Net. But more importantly, the digital off-loading of recollection from our fallible, imperfect minds to cybernetic sources threatens to change the relationship we have with our memories. We might begin to trust them less, to impute more power to the digital record than the emotionally encoded ones. We might begin to recognize our memory for what it is-an unreliable, self-aggrandizing witness susceptible to self-pity and rationalizations.

Mayer-Schonberger has a lot to say about what we might do to “humanize” our technology, and to switch the default back to forgetting from remembering, and a lot of it makes sense.

As for me, I prefer reality filtered through the necessarily distorting lens of the mind-weather-beaten, mortal memories that flap like prayer flags until, like the rest of us, they are gone on the wind.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Perspective, Pages 80 on 10/25/2009

LITTLE ROCK — “We’re sore in need of matches.” - Leonard Cohen, at the Isle of Wight, Aug. 31, 1970

It was 4 in the morning when they came for the Jew. They took him from his trailer and led him onto the stage - Ratso Rizzo in a safari suit, armed with only his acoustic guitar, his compassion, his pitchy baritone, a couple of hours sleep and a few Nashville cats Bob Johnston had rounded up.

Johnston was a record producer; he’d worked with Johnny Cash, Simon & Garfunkel and, most famously, Bob Dylan (it’s Johnston Dylan’s addressing when he asks, “Is it rollin’, Bob?” at the beginning of “To Be Alone With You”). But he loved Leonard Cohen, whose second album, 1968’s Songs From a Room, he’d produced. When Cohen asked him to put together a touring band, he was happy tocomply.

Johnston promised Cohen the world’s best piano player, but Ratso said no, he didn’t want that, he wanted Johnston, and that it was a deal breaker. The European tour was off if his producer wouldn’t go with him.

And so Johnston became a piano player, although it probably cost him the chance to work with Dylan again; even though he didn’t play all that well. He could only claw out chord forms, fill in with a crescendo, nothing fancy.

But maybe that didn’t matter since Cohen didn’t sing that well either. He needed the backup singers - Corlynn Hanney, Susan Musmanno and Donna Washburn - to prop up his tender, wandering warbles.

Cohen was all right on his own with his guitar and his eccentric sense of timing in a coffee shop or on TV, with the camera sitting at his feet and staring worshipfully up. But for an outdoor show he’d need, at the least, Johnston’s session pros to make a grander sort of noise. The little band that took to calling itself The Army (as in “you and what army?”) consisted of Charlie Daniels (yes, that Charlie Daniels) on bass and violin; Ron Cornelius on lead guitar;Bubba Fowler, who played bass when Daniels didn’t and otherwise added some banjo; and Johnston, who couldn’t play, on keyboards.

At the Isle of Wight, they’d face a crowd of (allegedly) 600,000, more than were at Woodstock. Furthermore, there was an ozone of militancy in the air. The ’60s were over, Sharon Tate had been butchered and the middle-class pilgrims who took the ferry from the English mainland felt entitled. Less than a tenth of them actually paid the 3 pounds (about $7.20) admission for the five-day festival. The rest had stormed in, tearing down the fences and leading one of the festival’s organizers, Rikki Farr, to launch a tirade from the stage: “We put on this festival, you [expletives] with a lot of love and you want to break down our walls and want to destroy it,you go to hell.”

During Joni Mitchell’s set, an anarchist charged the stage and seized her microphones, reducing her to tears as she pled: “Listen a minute, will ya? I get my feelings off through my music. You’re acting like tourists, give us some respect!”

Kris Kristofferson, obviously wounded by a crowd that alternately ignored him, jeered and pelted him with bottles, stormed off the stage in the middle of “Me and Bobby McGee.”

Even for the louder acts, it was hit and miss - The Who had matched the crowd’s ferocity, turned it back on them. The Doors looked torpid, but Jimi Hendrix seemed to machine-gun them into submission. But, near the end of his set, they (literally) set the stage afire.One of the things that they burned was the piano Johnston was intending to play.

Cohen was standing by the stage watching the commotion. When he saw the piano had been destroyed, he told Johnston he was going to take a nap, that they should come and get him when they found a playable keyboard. He went to histrailer to take a nap, leaving the crowd stirred in the dark, roiling in bad feelings and black rain.

When he came out, he was unkempt and shambling. He was 35 years old - a few months older than Elvis - that morning. On the just released CD and DVD, Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 (Columbia/Legacy, $21.98), he looks sacrificial, like Isaac under old Abe’s blade.

We can see what Cohen looked like because Murray Lerner’s cameras were grinding that night. Lerner was at the Isle of Wight at the invitation of the organizers, who wanted him to screen Festival, his Oscar nominated documentary of the Newport Folk Festival.They’d invited him to film the proceedings (although it wasn’t until 1995 that he finally cleared all the legal hurdles and was able to release his feature film Message to Love).

Cohen is introduced as “a novelist, a poet, an author, a singer” and he takes his time coming onstage. He lifts and cradles his guitar, with his back to the audience, and says a few words to the band. Then he turns to the crowd, adjusts the microphone and begins to softly talk to them, starting off with a brief story about his childhood and his father - who died when Cohen was 9 years old - who loved the circus.

“He had a black mustache and a great vest and a pansy in his lapel,” Cohen says.“And he liked the circus better than I did.” But there was one part of the circus that young Leonard loved, when the ringmaster would come out and ask the crowd to light matches, so that they might “locate one another” in the dark. Lerner’s camera searches the pitch-black field, picking up only a few flares here and there. Cohen remarks that there seem to be a lot of people who don’t have matches.

He gazes out and observes, “It’s a large nation, but it’s still weak. Still very weak. It needs to get a lot stronger before it can claim a right to land.” And then, very slowly, he begins to sing the words that Kristofferson once said he wanted as his epitaph: “Like a bird/on a wire/Like a drunk/in a midnight choir/I have tried/in my way/To be free ....”

Some people speak blithely of “miracles,” mistaking statistical improbabilities for special acts of grace. Cohen is probably not a miracle, just an unlikely survivor of dangerous times. It is difficult to imagine a poet - a writer more in the tradition of Mordecai Richler, Saul Bellow and Abraham Moses Klein than Mick Jagger - holding sway over a mob in these days of escalating sensations and callused sensibilities, when pop entertainment skews to the loud and vulgar. But Cohen abides and, at 75, he still performs and they say he is more energetic onstage these days than he ever was as a kid.

He’s funnier now than he was then. He has lightened up even as his voice has darkened. He has seen a lot of miles and acquired the seasoned timbre of an ancient violin. He no longer encounters wild young crowds he has to charm; his people come to him grayheaded and pre-smitten.

But he did it once, nearly 40 years ago. He communed with more than half a million. Call it what you want; he soothed them.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style, Pages 29 on 10/20/2009