On ‘Recording’
Occasionally, these days, I am in deep conversation with a trusted confidant, and their genius begins to appear. Overtly. They start making with the real magic, the stuff no one else they can speak to will ever hear, because they don’t have someone… who is me to converse with.
And I feel the compulsion to record it.
And the same is true of me, as well. With the right person and situation, with unusual goals and intentions… it’s as if we can get to or even become another… what, exactly?
Something we ordinarily cannot achieve, at least. Another universe? Perhaps. The person I am with changes the nature of my mind. And. I. In. Turn. Theirs.
Together, it as if two separated wings suddenly form a bird. And that bird, invariably, becomes the sky.
Much of the nature of the transformation that happens, every time, in fact, has to do with something we usually negotiate, outside of business, subtly.
Outside of business, it’s more nuanced. A kind of liason, a dance, where we invoke the situation rather than declare it. And declarations, while common in business, or maybe law … would be considered crude, if not a reason to depart relation altogether.
When we’re actually together.
Because it’s all in the invitation.
I have long paid unusual and curious attention to the act of recording. Writing, is, of course, one mode of this. But as a vocalist, a musician, a sometimes comedian, and a human being… the possibility of recording stood out to me as something magically unique as compared to… well, not recording.
There was that incident in my childhood, where me and one of my best friends, Mark Tallman, had, by virtue of colored pens and many boxes holding microscopes, legoes, hot wheels, and other ephemera, transformed my room into a spacecraft. We were playing ‘space opera’, and we had a cassette recorder running the entire time. After our ship crashed on an alien world, and we were running systems checks and trying to recover… the haunting voice of my mother calling me in her habitual vocal music was heard. And I said to Mark, ‘Did you hear that?’.
He replied in the affirmative.
So we paused our space travel and wandered around our small duplex to find my mother. She wasn’t there. She hadn’t been there for an hour. It was physically impossible that we heard that.
Yet it was on the recording.
And when my mother heard the recording, she turned white.
Because she knew, the same way that I knew … it was her voice.
But it couldn’t have been.
In order to write this, in a way entirely dissimilar to any possible AI language model, I am structuring memory. You can see this, yes? To ‘generate text’, I must collapse a manifold. What do I mean by such a declaration?
I have to go, in my mind, from everything to something. Imagine a bubble of many bubbles. Thousands, perhaps. Now we start popping them, and we do this along the intersections. The lines between where the bubbles meet…
This is a model of how we think. And we do this every time we emit a sentence. I am doing this right now. But in an unusual way. I am emitting sentences about the process of forming sentences.
So am am structuring memory, on the fly. Think with me for a moment about how fundamental this feature of our experience is. Without it, it is impossible to make sense of sensory information. One cannot integrate it. Some of you have been drunk enough to have such experience. Did it ever occur to you that it might have been, in part, because the alcohol disoriented your access to … memory?
Probably not.
But not because this wouldn’t be a useful move. You were actually having more pressing problems, whenever you were that intoxicated.
Consider the power of images. And recordings. How much effort is made to create and sustain, copy, sell, transmit, analyze… recordings. Really stop and think, for a moment, circa 2023, about how much energy and effort is required to maintain a situation where 4.7 billion electronic photographs are made per day… (nevermind video and audio recordings)…
But let me rewind, here, and speak personally. Throughout my life as a peculiarly curious person, a passionately curious person… I was looking everywhere for anomalies. The places where the status quo narrative about ‘what is going on’ and ‘what are things and beings really’, breaks down and shows it’s truer colors. And it always seemed to me that any kind of recording, be it visual or audial… was a place where one kind of situation branched off into a different kind of situation entirely. I experimented with many kinds of recordings over 40 years. Not just with making them, either, but with unusual purposes for making them.
William S. Burroughs, for example, set forth a recipe for bringing imminent disaster to any place you wanted. Simply record, on one day, the audio of goings on around that place, return to it at a later date… and play it back. He had determined something like the fact that this activity produced a problem in TIME. And that the resulting consequences were, most often, devastating.
Of course, no one believes William S. Burroughs.
Consider the word ‘recording’ with me. It has the same connotations as ‘religion’. The PIE root of this word is ‘heart’ but this means something like the memory of before. Here, the word before refers not merely to previous time, but to all situations previous to this one. The memory of the similarities in … over the entire continuum of time.
The memory of origin.
Without being too didactic, the connotation tree of these two words: re-cord and re-ligion, is strikingly similar. Consider re-cording and re-liganding, that is, to bind the strands that were separated… back together.
Or imagine, with me, the import of the moment when the umbilicus to your mother was physically severed.
What would it mean to have that restored?
Throughout my own experiments, I learned to distinguish the difference between situations I recorded, and those I didn’t. Obviously, once you have the capacity to record, easily… at first it seems like it’s not even a consideration. After all, wouldn’t you rather have the recording… than not?
But, in situ, this is not anything like what one expects. If you’re curious, and actually paying attention. Something disappears when one is recording. The physical implementation of audio and/or visual data being captured… changes the dimensionality of experience. It collapses part of a manifold that is otherwise robust. And this is, in part, why privacy is fundamental to human learning, joy, and development.
If we’re taking a photograph, or video… we’re speaking to the world and the future in a very specific (representational) way. This is a change from private to public. And changing that dimension… changes everything.
In our interiority, there is a crucial distinction between the private and the public. This is fundamental to what it means to be human, or even an animal. A plant. And probably microorganisms. In nature, some features have to be kept properly distinct. Our own immune systems evince this principle, and it’s obvious that COVID, for example, is a situation where there’s a public problem that has to be privately handled… not merely for the sake of argument, but of survival. Literally. Our immune systems make hard determinations of Us and Them. And our bodies enact those decisions.
But ordinarily, there’s ambiguity in memory. Like memories of dreams. The memories do not pose history explicitly, but instead compose figures from a living perspective of someone participating in them. Memory of experience is characteristically malleable. It transforms, like all of experience, according to the concerns we organize our inquiries with. What ‘stands out to awareness’ in our retrieval of memory is determined by our perspective and purpose… it isn’t, as we might rationally imagine, written in stone.
Sometimes when I am talking with someone and we are really going deep, and I am seeing their prodigy reveal its wings, directly, I have the sudden urge to record. Something in me feels that this must be preserved, and I want to stop and actually start recording. But that would not be the same situation in which their prodigy flashes her colors.
A kiss is an intimate experience. It’s not for ‘people in general’. Is it? Consider the problem of learning ‘the stage kiss’, used by most actors. Once you’re aware of this principle, it becomes obvious (and thus disenchanting) that… those people on the video are not (almost always) actually kissing.
See the problem yet?
Mimicry. Performace. Misdirection.
Faking it.
There’s a crucial distinction here that is so old that it radically predates…
Religions.
No matter how hungry you may become, no recording of food will ever affect you. In fact, it will harm you. So, too, with one of the driving forces of internet development: porn.
Whenever I tried to record various things… thoughts, dramatic improvisations, my songs, my compositions… something changed. It wasn’t the same as if I was playing freely, yet even when I was… there was an audience there. Not in the commonsense ideas. Not a physical audience of humans. Something more. If I was truly getting some air, if I was being true to my muses… an audience arose with me. But when I was recording… it was not the same at all.
Perhaps I am unusually sensitive. Perhaps I am partly mad. Perhaps both and more are true (and this, I think, more likely), but something changes when we have the intention to record. Many times I failed to record situations that were partly magical. My best performance of a song, or a particularly inspired improvisation. And look, I admit it, sometimes that was because I had a kind of bias, a concern… a strange, felt sense that this wasn’t for recording, it was for something far more deep.
Edmund Carpenter, author of Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me, and They Became What They Beheld, describes an African aboriginal tribe who had, for possibly thousands of years, held an initiation ceremony for the males alone, in which ritual scarification of the skin took place over many days. No women had ever been allowed into the compound during this ceremony. They brought a female videographer, and the tribe agreed to have the ceremony filmed. After this, the men no longer engaged in the ceremony; they sat around watching the film of it.
To moderns, this might sound a bit like the common idea of progress, but that polemic is, formally, dead inside.
And that’s only a tiny fraction of the problem…
I’m not going to sing the endless virtues of memory and the catastrophes that occur when it becomes explicit or represented. Many old people’s have severe admonitions against recording. This is, in part, due to the propensity to preserve the representations rather than the living beings, relationships, and spirit of communion. It’s also due to the problem of worshiping them. And worship isn’t merely acknowledgement or uptake, celebration or ceremony. It’s the replacement of those with dead images. The bird of recording has two wings, it isn’t only bad. But where it is, it’s severely bad. And this wrongness magnifies over time.
Living memory as relationships has power.
But so, too, does the dead stuff.
And the latter is far more contagious in a world where we’re increasingly isolated from the actual experience of memorable activity-in-relation.
The experience of personally meaningful… roles.
My friend N. Might be thought of by some as autistic. He’s a genius of honesty, though. I remember him remarking, once, that, as a child, he couldn’t understand at all why his family would stop whatever it was they were doing, to take a photograph of something they were not actually experiencing. And here, I am making a recording. Of a memory. Of my friend N. But one of the recordings is more profound than the other. The photographs of joy he was not experiencing were, fundamentally…
Duplicitous.
Why would the adults be engaged in pretending to have an experience they were not having for the sake of a representation???
The purpose is, primarily the problem. And this is almost always the case, though even wise purposes may sometimes lead us wildly astray. The results relate with the purpose in a very astonishing way, which often seems to include a liberal portion… of irony.
But be that as is.
This entire essay arose as a side effect of a conversation I feel privileged to have this evening with Ryan First Diver. He told many stories, and we were not recording the conversation…
One of them was about attempting to assemble many Blackfoot elders to record the stories that were being lost to their people, over time, as the elders died and the moderns’ ways that primarily grant value to physical commodities (and representations) were silencing. One Blackfoot man, early on, objected that (paraphrased) ‘We should not be recording these things; traditionally, they are transferred through relationships, and vocal memory, if we record them, we are in danger of producing frozen replicas that would be seen as canonical, explicit, written in stone. But our traditions are not like this, each person adapts the stories to the relationships they are in, the time they are in, and so on.’
This introduced a serious conflict in the gathering, and many of the participants didn’t care about this problem, because they were far more concerned about the catastrophic loss of culture over time.
And both perspectives are crucial to preserve.
I watch a lot of old televisions shows. Danger man, The Avengers, Perry Mason, Ultraman, Get Smart. I am aware, when watching them that it is like watching ghosts. And shows and movies… are a way of making ghost media. Media about things that never happened, and never mattered, actually. We get involved in fictional dramas that never happened to anyone, including the actors and crew that produce the films. It’s as if it’s a great big ghost-generating industry, and it makes ghosts in our minds and hearts. Why is this compelling?
Partly because we are not having meaningful lives and adventures, roles, and opportunities to experience depth and meaningful drama in our own actual lives, which are rendered more mundane by existing in the shadow of films, shows, and presentations on social media. There’s a difference between recording something actually deeply meaningful and real… and the presentation face situation that so often arises in social media.
And all of this…
… is food for memory.
So which kind of food is actually nutritious?
There isn’t a simple answer. But part of the answer involves careful selection between… demonstrations and actual presence in relation and adventure.
