Second Walk

Second argument: on memory.

This typing now, and any writing we might do, and the video-camera and web-post that LA Wood has done: all attempts at remembering what actually happened, what cannot be repeated, the historico-biological reality just lived. In our arguments, of course, we continue to abide by one of our two fundamental concepts, that Biology is a historical science, i.e. a science of things that are dependent on the trajectory of their past and are projected into the future along uncertain paths. A historical science cannot predict with certainty or decide a priori which path the process will follow into the future. All we can do –-and this is indeed scientific-- is try to remember and to do so with mindfulness of the future. For us in biology –-unlike physicists us who live in the mid-scale problem of juggling death for a laugh, bearing children into the abyss of thermodynamic inevitability and non-linear time, for us who decided by virtue of being born and keeping ourselves alive that we would surf over this as if there was solidity in the wave, as if the world was moving along with us over linear time, Earthly space and Carbon-based biologies-- for us all there is is remembering with mindful expectation of the future. Remembrance of the moment as it becomes future, the place we left for that in which we become. Just like our Academic Walks. Just like our Walks, argument-lines as they are, anchored in the humus-memory Under-the-Oaks.

Yesterday with Gray Brechin we remembered many things. Of course we would – the man would almost make you believe that all past could be recovered through his eyes, and every detail to mind about the future could be answered through his mouth, his pen. We remembered, thanks to John García (for whose Hood from Princeton years I am thankful – see adjacent blog entry) that these Academic Walks are really the remembrance of a practice that used to be well developed and widely honoured in times before the print-press: Art of Memory. Not a simple memorization method, but a practice that allows our visual brain to reach arguments in depths of history (memory) that would otherwise be inaccessible, Art of Memory explicitly assigns rhetorical value to specific sequences of places: “walks”. The ancient Greeks, self-obsessed and fond of their own buildings as they were, shrunk these walks into memory palaces, indoor representations of the outdoors. Soon enough this rarefied view of a simple walk was rejoined by the jewish tradition with its deadly fixation in the para-normal, which took the walk literally out of this world and placed it in the mythical spaces of super-human kings and warriors. Even Giordano Bruno, apparently, sought this idea in the circles of cosmic orbits, trying to find that ideal –-a-historical, thus impossible-- understanding of the world of here and now.

Under-the-Oaks it is easy to see Bruno’s mischief. Up on the North slope of Strawberry Canyon the products of the physicists’ fixed obsessions take too real a form: nuclear technology, nano-robotic dreams, the hubris of “synthetic biology”. And all the concrete that will come with it. Under-the-Oaks the arguments that I will never be able to repeat by typing are simple and clear, filled as they were yesterday with the promise of rain, the sounds of the people of the trees, the hum of rubber-tree-tires upon petro-oleum asphalt.

Gray set two lines of argumentation. First, he drew the isobar of connection between the Phoebe Hearst Amphitheatre and the Memorial Stadium, and he endowed this line with a tension between “the Greek” and “the Roman” – the open-sided meeting place for “Town and Gown” against the militaristic training place of the Roman-styled, closed Stadium. The Venus-Mars polarity, the Phoebe – William Randolph Hearst polarity. Two divergent paths available for our community, our university, and all that consequentially follows.

Second: We found also echoes of this polarity along the Moss Steps, as Gray took us along the South side of the stadium: a bifurcation requires a choice between arcadian cement or a left-turn on what he described as a “country lane” of unique beauty and unusual accumulation of architectural and environmentalist names (Gray goad). John Muir ambled in the darkening light, and a forgotten house plan gave Frank Lloyd Wright his Berkeley franchise. Sierra Club, Bohemian Club. Redwood-and-sequoia their Art of Memory, distillation of Sierran misunderstanding.

In the dark, a deep voice remembered Mike Davis and challenged: “Let Panoramic Burn?” As the day breaks, I must remember to try and get him to come with us for a walk.