By the time I went out looking for a new teacher I no longer had any idea what I was doing. It was the dead of winter, my mind wasn’t functioning properly; I was a wreck. I didn’t remember what I wanted to study; I didn’t remember why I wanted to study at all. There no longer seemed to be any point. The one who couldn’t teach me anymore had said: You can always divorce your spouse, but your true teacher will be with you for the rest of your life. I was concerned. I flew back and forth. I muddled through various interviews with various teachers, some of whom were very famous, some of whom were very wise, some of whom were neither. Things were said, I was sometimes impressed, sometimes intimidated, sometimes bewildered. But in the end, after everything had gotten mixed up, the one thing that stood out to me, in my confusion and terror, was that one of them, and only one, had said to me, very simply: If you come here, I will take good care of you. In the end, that one line was the deciding factor. He had said the thing I most needed to hear at the time I most needed to hear it, and he probably did not even realize this. But in retrospect I realize that I made the right choice, even though I did not know at the time all the reasons why it was the right choice. Perhaps, actually, because I didn’t know. If I had been less confused, more rational, more confident, more optimistic, if I had tried to weigh all the factors and come to the logical conclusion, I probably would have miscalculated and made a serious mistake.

Affliction can be a blessing. The older I get, the more I see that, more often than not, it is.

* * *

I dreamt my teacher and I were out of the beach, running around in the sand, trying to collect data about the waves. The waves always receded before we got all the information we needed. The task was clearly impossible. We could never fully understand the ocean this way. There was so much time pressure, on every cycle of flow and ebb, and yet we weren’t panicked. What mattered was not that we solve the problem. What mattered was that we were out there, looking, making the necessary observations, together. And it made me so happy to know, that of all the people in the universe, we were the ones out there. I was shocked by this, actually, that we were out there alone, and amazed that he was willing to take on the whole ocean with only me.

For me, writing and speaking seem to be very different pathways to getting words out. When I write, I don’t necessarily hear the words in my head before I mark them on the paper. When I am writing well, I rarely seem to have any idea what I am going to “say” before I say it. But with speaking, I seem to think knowing what I’m going to say is a requirement to break silence at all, while most other people do not. People talk about extemporaneous speaking, thinking out loud, having no filters on their mouths. I don’t relate to this. If I want to brainstorm, a pen is required. I filter everything before it is spoken, and vast numbers of unverbalized thoughts are lost.

. . .

At the vision conference, my sixth or seventh time going, I had a dream about signal detection theory. It was either that wetting a kitten’s fur increased the signal-to-noise ratio, or that drying it did. I downloaded recordings of white noise on my iphone to try to drown out the snoring of the postdoc, my friend, sharing the hotel room with me. One of the mp3′s had a heartbeat embedded into it, but still I couldn’t sleep. I kept trying to hide from all the scientists, lest they expect me to be one. There were rumors of my advisor smashing a coffee cup on the floor. I continued to have nightmares about my talk for weeks after giving it. Nothing ever seems to change, except that some of the high school kids who used to come to the lab are the ones authoring papers and winning the Best Illusion of the Year.

I went to mass this morning for the first time since Easter. It is hard to go these days, I feel like I am viewing everything taking place at the altar from a great, great distance. There was a time I was so close to every word the priest spoke, so present in every gesture, I could see right into the bread as flesh and wine as blood, would tingle and shake with a sensation of actual participation in the sacrifice, every syllable imbued with this overlay of past in present. Now like so many others at so many times I stand there reciting my Latin from memory without even the grammar I so painstakingly learned holding it up. Everything held far away and at the surface. I think of the scandals. I wonder who I might have given the impression that any of the ritual were truly necessary, that any of the dogma and the structure were a substitute for God.

At home I read about Isabella Blow, I watch YouTube footage of the second plane crashing into the Trade Center, the towers collapsing, the TV anchors trying to stifle their panic. I didn’t watch much of the coverage at the time. It just didn’t occur to me, since it was all happening right outside. Having anxiety dreams again, I listen to recordings of Faulkner from the 50s, thinking the sound of a Southern voice might soothe me like my grandparents’ farm. I often think if I went back to Georgia I might finally be able to write about New York… of this whole decade almost I’ve spent here, so little is recorded that I wonder if I have really lived here at all. With the taxi drivers, I still pretend I am new in town so they won’t expect me to know where I’m going.

I had a very vivid dream a month or so ago about being offered a fancy job in a beautiful futuristically-designed office. The company’s exact purpose was unclear, but it seemed to have something to do with new media. I was lead into a secret, drab, 1970′s-looking room in the back where I found out that my job there would be to use an antiquated computer to follow current cultural trends online. I had access to huge amounts of money and resources with which I could have historical documents fabricated on the basis of current events. My task was then to auction off these false documents to the highest bidder on eBay. It was a very lucrative position, but ultimately I wound up refusing it, in tears.

One week ago, I was awake until 5:30 in the morning remembering things I hadn’t thought about in years, such as, the first boy who ever kissed me, when I was in middle school. He was a computer geek who designed his own Doom levels and loved Godzilla and was, as far as I knew, the only other person my age in my small south Georgia town who used the Internet the way I did, to communicate. Somehow, through him and his mother, a beautiful young blonde whose screen-name was Morgaine or something like that, I met one one of the first, it not the first, stranger I ever corresponded with over an extended period via email. He was 30, and I must’ve been about 13. I was already well on the road to my phase of wearing all black all the time, but he was the one taught me all about “real” gothic music, from the 80′s. Because of him, I started listening to Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and, most especially, the Sisters of Mercy. (My poor family was subjected to “The Temple of Love” and “Mother Russia” on repeat for hours.) I interviewed him about his tech job for an English class assignment once, but I don’t remember what else we talked about, except that he frequently making jokes about being sent to Alcatraz for talking to me, and it seems like we might have actually discussed the possibility of meeting. He stopped talking to me after he got married (which, after some Googling, I have determined was in 1998, when I was 16). I also recall an embarrassing incident in which my mother forced me to open my hand to reveal that I had written “fuck me and marry me young” (a Sisters of Mercy reference) on my palm in ballpoint pen.

I don’t know if I was talking about sex with a thirty-year-old man on the Internet when I was 13. I’m not sure I was even that young. Whatever happened, the thing that seems strangest to me is that I forgot about the entire interaction for years, not just the online correspondence with this man, but the relationship with the boy from my school that lead to it. In fact, by the time I kissed the second person I ever kissed, I thought that she was the first. It’s also incredibly difficult to mesh any of these memories, chronologically, with other memories I have of my online life in my early teens, such as my stint as high-priestess of an online coven that met in the IRC DALnet #teenwicca channel, and discovering confessional “girl-poet” websites on Geocities and Tripod (such as Helena‘s immortal nothingbutmeat), and beginning to create such sites of my own. All of these events must have overlapped temporally to some extent, but some of them made it into subsequent writings and stories I told about that time in my life, while others did not. It seems clear that my memory and personal history are shaped by the stories I tell about my life, rather than the other way around.

I had these things on my mind when I chatted with Lera Boroditsky a couple days later, and she pointed me in the direction of Beth Loftus‘ work on the malleability of memory and false memories. This article in Slate on Loftus, which I tweeted about a few days ago, gives a interesting overview of her life and research, and raises ethical questions about memory-tampering (a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of my favorite films). Just today, Joe LeDoux, a neuroscientist and rock star (in several respects) at NYU has been posting lots of links on Twitter to new research from his lab on memory-erasure in rats.

Perhaps the future of the past is here already.