by Andrew Stark
Mark Johnston bases his consolation on the idea that we are each merely an “arena of presence” in “quasi-space.” If we each simply place humanity on into the future at the center of our arena, and generate thoughts, feelings, plans, and hopes focused on all others yet to come, then we can live on in their lives. And, as a bonus, we can come to know whatever they learn about God or the universe or the deepest mathematical truths in exactly the way they will. After all, our connection to their lives would be no weaker than their connection to those lives, since all there is to making any given life one’s own is the decision to place it at the center of one’s arena.
But for most of us early twenty-first-century bundles of ego and anxiety, I suspect, that idea will simply fail to take hold psychologically. We are not arenas in quasi-space. We are selves in real time. We ourselves move ever forward into the future—until we stop. And so we can never gain the kind of precious knowledge we would if our selves continued moving on endlessly in time. Mortality cannot intimate what immortality would give us. Johnston’s lovely consolation cannot work.
eight
MAKING YOUR MARK
In the Concise Biographical Dictionary, the biography for Ramses VIII is—even by the Dictionary’s standards—remarkably concise. Ramses VIII, we are told, was “one of a number of ancient pharaohs about whom nothing is known.”1 Yes, we know his name, but we know nothing else: not a scintilla of his biography, nothing about the marks he made on the world while he was alive. Do we, then, “remember” him—do we keep his memory alive—when we read his bare name?
Think of all the memorial plaques on church walls or park benches—“Donated in loving memory of so and so”—which, for the vast majority of viewers, convey nothing but a name; they conjure up no further recollection or biographical information. Does so-and-so continue to live on in memory whenever someone reads his name? Certainly it was with the hope that he would that many, perhaps most, such plaques get dedicated. “Call it an answer to the yearning for immortality,” says the New York Times; for “a price, universities will carve the name of a generous benefactor in limestone or on an imposing building.”2
Now think of the reverse situation: where we know the marks a person made. We know something, maybe even something important, about his biography. But we don’t know his name. In his book What Price Fame? Tyler Cowen muses over veterans who buy license plates indicating that they’ve received a Medal of Honor or a Purple Heart. Other drivers, Cowen writes, see the “car and the back of somebody’s head and conclude that this head probably belongs to a war hero.” But really, they “merely see that someone is a war hero”; they “never know whom they are looking at.”3 Although they might later remember the license plate, and reflect on the profound mark that the driver had at one point made on the world, how—without knowing his name—could they keep his memory alive whenever they do so? At most, they would be keeping the memory of “someone” alive, not him in particular.
In many cases, of course, we know both the name and a mark the person by that name has made. We might, for example, know that Nat Bailey (1902–1978) was the founder of the White Spot hamburger-restaurant chain because, say, we read that information on a plaque when visiting Nat Bailey Stadium in Vancouver. Both the name “Nat Bailey” and something that the person by that name did, a mark he made on the world—he had been a successful restaurateur—would have jointly entered our consciousness for the first time at that moment. But would we thereby have been remembering him, Nat Bailey the person? Or is he something separate and apart from the name and the mark, so that we can know both of them—that “someone” named Nat Bailey was a successful restaurateur—without really thinking of that man, of him?
After all, knowing a mere name like Ramses VIII is not enough to call a person to mind. And knowing a mere mark someone made—that “someone” was a war hero—is also not sufficient for us to remember him. So then why should knowing both a name and a mark the person by that name made be enough, all of a sudden, to somehow keep his memory alive? Nat Bailey is just a name attached to a mark. As far as we’re concerned, that name and mark could have belonged to any of a countless number of people with widely varied biographies: so varied that we couldn’t possibly be thinking of the actual Nat Bailey when we read his name and about the mark he made.
Certainly, though, getting visitors to remember him was the point of naming the stadium after Nat Bailey. And yet, although we do use the word “remember” in this context, it’s a funny term to employ in cases where we have never actually met the individual concerned and so have no memory of him. I would guess that many visitors in fact do encounter Nat Bailey’s name and mark for the very first time when they come to the stadium to watch a baseball game. So how could the mark and the name alone remind them of him—call him to mind, make them remember him—if he had never been in their mind before? Why do we even speak this way?
We are drawn to immortality not only because we seek to know what happens, what human beings will experience, will learn and discover, on into the future. That’s certainly a motivation for endless life, but it’s a passive one. We also harbor a more active impetus. We seek immortality for our self so that we can forever keep on doing things, acting in the world and making our mark, in ways that we enjoy and give us meaning.
But, in the absence of true immortality, we settle for a faux version. We do things that we think will last forever, we act on the world in ways we hope will mark it forever, believing that we’ve thereby bestowed immortality on our self. We embark, in Unamuno’s words, on a “tremendous struggle to singularize ourselves: to survive in some way in the memory of others” since we can’t actually do so on the surface of the planet.4 We seek immortality in a subjective sense because we can’t achieve it in an objective sense.
Think of this idea as the “existentialist consolation-plus.” Our mortality is a blessing, the existentialist consolation says. It’s the only thing that spurs us to get off the couch. It impels us to make a name for ourselves and our mark on the world before time runs out, thus crafting a vivid and distinctive self. But there’s a bonus: our self can then gain a kind—an intimation—of immortality through the vivid marks we have made and the distinctive name attached to them.
Because we die, we get out in the world and make our name and our marks. And then because we made our name and our marks we don’t, in a way, ever die. Mortality cheats itself.
So how many marks do you have to attach to your name on a plaque or epitaph or obituary until it is you—your actual self—whom people will be remembering when they read it, thus keeping alive your memory? Suppose you have even more information about the marks Nat Bailey made. Suppose you discover that he was a freemason, that he worked tirelessly to raise the profile of baseball in Vancouver, that he co-owned the Vancouver Mounties baseball team, and that his hamburgers were served with a secret sauce rumored to be concocted by pouring the juice from dill pickle containers into empty mayonnaise jars, then decanting the resulting mixture into depleted ketchup vats, then adding the residue from relish bottles and combining the whole lot with a load of Thousand Island dressing. Is there any number of marks such that—once you know them—you will have finally got to the man himself, and would be actually thinking about him, remembering him, keeping Nat Bailey’s memory alive, when you view his name and read about all he did, all the marks he made?
Imagine that, on top of reading about Nat Bailey on a wall plaque, you wander over to a television screen mounted in a nearby console. There, you press a button and watch a five-minute video of Bailey reflecting on his restaurant career and on how happy he was to be able to play a role in Vancouver’s baseball scene. You get a view of his facial expressions, how he carried himself; you hear his voice: all the subtle cues that give us a sense of someone. Would you, then, be remembering Nat Bailey as you viewed the video, or whenever it crossed your mind on subsequent occasions?
I’m not sure. Freud once said that he wanted never to be filme
d and recorded at the same time. His concern was that people would mistakenly think that the resulting audio-video somehow captured his essence.
Freud’s caution was understandable. Suppose that you’ve simply viewed a film image of someone. Think of an old silent newsreel depicting an immigrant holding a passport bearing her name as she lines up for admittance on Ellis Island. Surely you won’t be calling her, that person whoever she was, to mind when you view it. She herself, whoever she is, wouldn’t be living on in your memory. She’s just a name and an image.
Likewise suppose your phone rings, and when you answer you hear a man say, “My name is Joe Smith, and I’m calling to tell you that you have just won a trip to the Bahamas.” As you recall the incident later, will you be remembering him, thinking of him, whoever he was? You will know only that somebody by that name had that voice. But no one in particular would enter your mind; as far as you’re concerned, that name and that voice could have belonged to any number of people.
Now think of yourself viewing and listening to Nat Bailey’s audio-video. If just a name and an image, or just a name and a voice, do not suffice to call a person to mind, why then should a combination of name, image, and voice mean that the particular person who possessed them is now, all of a sudden, living on in your memory?
What could be missing?
Remembering Someone You Never Met
In his famous theory of names, the philosopher Saul Kripke dealt with a kissing-cousin issue. Take as an example, Kripke said, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman did pioneering work in quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, superfluidity, and particle physics. Now think of somebody who has never heard of Feynman before, somebody who knows nothing about any of the “marks” Feynman made, anything he did in the world. She will, Kripke says, still be referring to the person Richard Feynman and no other by uttering the name “Richard Feynman” as she reads it for the very first time, even if he has never entered her mind before and she has no idea who he is.5
Why? Because, Kripke said, of the original “baptismal” act by which a particular name is made to attach to a particular person. At one point someone—say Feynman’s mother—referring to the in utero or infant Richard Feynman, said, in effect, “This is Richard Feyn man.” She did so long before Feynman made his marks on the world as a physicist, long before there was anything to him. For all she knew, he might have become a stone mason.
Such initial acts of naming have to use the indexical term “this,” meaning that there is normally some spatial proximity or orientation between the namer and the person being named.6 As Heidegger said, the “function of naming” entails “a pointing, a referring.” It involves our saying “this, namely the one here, i.e., that which we now point out,” will from this moment forward be called (say) “Richard Feynman.”7 Suppose that such an original naming act, a spatial act, has occurred. Then, Kripke says, people ever after will be referring to that person, and that person alone, whenever they speak his name—even if they know nothing of him, including any marks he may have made on the world.8
But reference is not remembrance. It may be true, as Kripke showed, that I would be referring to the particular person Nat Bailey when I speak his name as I encounter it on a plaque for the first time, even if I have never heard of him before and know nothing about the various marks he made on the world. But even if, after reading his name, I then read as well about all the marks he made on the world, I still wouldn’t be remembering him, the particular person Nat Bailey, who after all remains an entity separate and apart from both his name and the marks he made. He still could have been anyone.
But why not? What about Churchill? I never met Churchill either. And yet now, whenever I see his name, and/or read about the various marks he made—from the disaster of Gallipoli to the magnificence of Blood, Sweat and Tears, to the triumph of D-Day, to the misery of Yalta, to his joke about drinking poisoned tea if he were married to Lady Astor, to the moment when, observing a forced parade of captured German officers in North Africa, he caught the eye of a Nazi commandant and they both could not suppress bursting into giggles at the absurdity of it all—my doing so does call up a third entity, separate from name and marks, that has insinuated itself into my mind: a distinctive personality, indeed a person. He could not have been just anyone.
Why does that work with Churchill but not with Nat Bailey? Because I have spent enough time thinking about the marks Churchill made such that, taken together with his name, they have formed a kind of Adam’s rib in my mind which, over the years, has grown into a distinct persona. Most of us have given Churchill and some others we have never met—Freud, too, for many of us—“a soul,” to use Proust’s words, “which they afterwards keep and which they develop in our minds.”9 And it is this persona, this personality, namely an entity separate and apart from both that long list of marks and the name “Churchill,” that I am keeping alive in my memory. It is what I remember when I remember Churchill.
And so while reference to someone regardless of the marks he might make is at its origins a spatial act, remembrance of someone through the marks he has made is a temporal one. I can begin to remember a person I have never met only if I spend enough time pondering, dwelling on, and marinating in the marks he has made in the world such that, over a certain period, those marks “develop,” as Proust says, the qualities of a full-blown persona in my mind: and “development” is a temporal process.
In a way, the process of remembering someone we have never met resembles the process of forming false memories, which has been so much studied lately. Oliver Sacks once discussed a graphic memory he had long held of a bombing raid during the London Blitz. Late in life, though, Sacks discovered that he was away at boarding school at the time the attack occurred. What happened is that right after the raid his older brother David wrote Sacks “a very vivid, dramatic letter” about the event and Sacks was “enthralled by it.” “Clearly,” Sacks elaborated, “I had not only been enthralled, but must have constructed the scene in my mind, from David’s words, and then appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of my own.”10 That took time.
In a similar way, I too have taken Churchill’s words and acts and voice and images, the marks he made in the world, and—enthralled—have spent enough time with them that I have hatched a memory of him. That is why I can say that I remember Churchill—that he lives in my memory—even though I never met him. The only difference is that I know it’s a false memory, while Sacks thought his was true. But when he discovered it was false, it was no less vivid. What’s false about a false memory isn’t that it necessarily misrepresents its object, whether an individual or the event it contains. What’s false is that it isn’t a memory.
But I simply haven’t spent that much time thinking about the marks Nat Bailey has made, and I never will. True, this is not a black and white thing. It could be a matter of degree. If Churchill the person, separate and apart from his name and his marks, is blazingly alive in my mind, then maybe it’s more accurate to say that Nat Bailey the person, separate and apart from his name and his marks, is not wholly nonexistent, but is rather a barely smoldering ember in my mind. And in fact, based on the marks of Bailey’s that I have encountered, I do have a very weak sense of him as a person separate and apart from those marks: a kind of generic glad-handing Rotary Club extrovert. But that’s nothing that distinguishes him from any number of other people about whom I’ve read or seen in the movies or met in person; there’s nothing unique about the entity I have in my head when I call to mind Nat Bailey the person. I certainly wouldn’t describe it as rising to the level of a distinct, singular personality—a particular individual. Beyond that, no one really comes to mind. He could have been anyone.
On October 1, 1963, Groucho Marx penned a letter to T. S. Eliot, signing off “My best to you and your lovely wife, whoever she may be.” On October 16, Eliot responded: “My lovely wife joins me in sending you our best, but she didn’t add ‘whoever he may be’—she
knows.”11 Neither Groucho nor Valerie Eliot had at that point met each other. But even so, for Groucho, Valerie could have been anyone, while for Valerie, Groucho could have been only one person: the person in her mind who had emerged during the time she had spent with the name and the marks.
On into the future, few of us will inspire in others—not even in our descendants—the kind of time-drenched remembering necessary to keep us alive in memory. They’ll have too many other things to do with their time, such as making their own marks for posterity. Those who come after us will want to be remembered too, and their having to remember us in turn will amount to a drag on that enterprise. “What is the advantage of having one’s own name on the lips of future generations,” Marcus Aurelius asked, “when their overriding concern will be the same as ours: to have their name on the lips of their successors. . . . How does that confer any reality on us?” Far from being our collaborators in the project of keeping our memory alive, our children will turn into our competitors. I remember once wandering into a religious center in North Toronto and peering at the plaques on the classroom doors. Many took this form (names have been changed):
THIS ROOM HAS BEEN DEDICATED BY EARL AND SONIA JOHNSON
in loving memory of their mother Leah Johnson
In our era, if not long before, “death denial” has expanded to include “death-of-memory denial.” Most academic sociologists expect to still be remembered, by colleagues in the field, fifty years from now.12