The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (20 page)

It is this notion of internalizing the memorized thing, of
digesting
it, that so differentiates older notions of memory from newer interests in externalized memory. Previous generations may have had memory aids like writing, but those tools worked only to boost (never replace) a deep commitment to brain storage.

The memorized, internalized work can even achieve the status of a kind of swallowed pill.
In Manguel’s
A History of Reading
,
we learn that the second-century Roman doctor Antyllus felt those who didn’t digest poetry suffered “pains in eliminating, through abundant perspiration, the noxious fluids that those with a keen memory of texts eliminate merely through breathing.”

• • • • •

Marcel Proust, who maybe thought more intelligently about memory than anyone else in history, knew something about the way our strange brains might heal us. He set out to describe the act of reconstructing one’s own past in his greatest work,
In Search of Lost Time,
which was given its title (
À la recherche du temps perdu
) not because the past is a misplaced and retrievable thing, but because it is wasted and gone; searching for lost time (
temps perdu
) is an exercise in fiction itself (it is the anti-Timehop). The work is a kind of hopeless, four-thousand-page salvation mission wherein the “rescued” past self is always a work of art. Reading Proust can inspire us to salvage our own pasts from the obliterating winds of negligence, build some creative self from the available material. When we commit ourselves to considering our own past with even a fraction of the care that Proust brings to the table, we ennoble ourselves.

A century later, Proust’s work is a powerful lesson in the mutability and creativity of memory that Nader and Cowan speak about. Personal memories like the ones Proust is dealing with are curated. When we tell stories about ourselves, we select the scraps of identity that will live on in an enduring self. And these memories are strung together by sometimes bizarre and precarious means. Consider Proust’s most famous description of personal recall, the madeleine scene. His Narrator finds that a single, idiosyncratic sensory experience can be the key that unlocks a lifetime of observations.

The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine
which . . . my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays of pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because, of those memories so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered. . . . But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Proust’s remembrance is not a cool accounting of one thing after another, but a polynomial, multidirectional experience; we could even call it symphonic in that several voices and understandings emerge to make a single four-dimensional impression. When the madeleine touches his lips, a world of associations, coexistent in several times (“from morning to night and in all weathers”), rises up “like a stage set.” It all “sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.” But all this world is itself only a fraction of the objective world Proust’s Narrator must have lived in; a screened vision of the actual past, with each element of the memory tied in some mysterious way to the taste-memory housed in the crumbs of that famous little cake.

Human memory was never meant to call up all things, after all, but rather to explore the richness of exclusion, of absence. It creates a meaningful, contextualized, curated assemblage particular to the brain’s singular experience and habits. Valuable memories, like great music, are as much about the things that drop away—the rests—as they are about what stays and sounds.

• • • • •

My own earliest memory always returns to me through the senses. For Proust’s Narrator, the past sprang forth, pop-up-book style, when he tasted that simple madeleine dipped in tea. For me, there’s a certain weight that, if held in my hands, calls forward a landscape inhabited by my four-year-old self.

What is that weight? Or is it a density, instead? Imagine holding a small box of sand, eight cubic inches, and you’ll be close. It does no good to have you imagine the weight of a person’s cremated remains, though that’s what we’re talking about. The memory is not concerned with facts. Think of an eight-inch box of sand. That’s the weight that brings this memory back. I pick up a melon or a small stack of books and suddenly the memory reveals itself.

I am four years old, standing in a wild yard above the stone shore of Pender Island. That morning, I was happy to take a short ferry ride from the suburb where I grew up, happy to feel big wind tousling my sandy hair as I leaned up against the railing on the deck with my dad. Now the air is mysteriously still and I can hear even dragonflies quite a distance from me in the grass. Enormous cedars lean over me, and the cedar planks of the family cabin make a red brown box on the far side of the yard. It is summer in my memory, and the rubber tire swing is too hot to use (though what season it actually was, I cannot say). The overgrown grass tickles my exposed legs as I move. I am small, but the slugs in the grass are smaller. I’ve been stalking them with a glass saltshaker I stole from the kitchen. I am killing them all, dousing them in crystals and watching their bodies turn. The adults on the deck, perhaps twenty of them, are busy in their obscure adult world. I am separate from them.

Then an aunt calls me over and I hide the saltshaker in the grass, unsure whether I’ve been helping or doing evil. I walk silently over to my aunt, who holds a white cardboard box in her hands. She leans over, without stepping down from the raised deck, and places the box in my hands. She says, “It’s heavy, isn’t it?” And I nod up at her, holding the box above my head, waiting for her to take it back. My aunt lifts the white box from my grip and turns away; I return to my massacre.

I know now what happened next. The adults convened at the opposite end of the deck and scattered my grandfather’s ashes at the base of a young arbutus. But that isn’t part of the memory. In the memory, I only retrieve my hidden saltshaker and stalk farther into the grasses. I hold the salt in front of me, like a talisman, while I look for more victims.

Perhaps I’ll build myself a clever memory palace one day. It seems we all want such palaces—and we’ll probably build them far from the quicksand, the vicissitude of lived memory. We’ll build them instead with the 1s and 0s of our devices—spires and spires of perfect digital storage. But for now I have that rough-hewn cabin and shaking field of grass.

All the boys I have ever loved have been digital . . .

I write his name in nothing, he whispers to the author . . .

—Owen Pallett, “He Poos Clouds”

MY
friend Dan often spends his evenings searching for sex through the screen on his phone. Like many gay guys I know, he’s unencumbered by debilitating prudery or a boyfriend (whereas I suffer from both conditions). He is charming and handsome enough to procure a little action in “the real world” if he wanted to, but the fact is that Dan, like plenty of others, is permanently logged on to one online tool or another designed to help him get laid.

This new frontier may be inhabited by everyone—gay and straight, men and women—but gay guys are the vanguard. Gay men have always looked for sex through a filter. In the past, our hunting ground was limited almost exclusively to designated bars, bathhouses, and vacant parks. Today, that collection of filters includes the windows on our laptops and the chilled display of our phones. Neighborhood pubs—with their cheap beers and costly glowers—are steadily being replaced by chattering arenas in the cloud.

A little while ago, Dan was talking with a guy on a Web site called Manhunt; he’d known this guy (through his online avatar, at least) for two years. Driven to action at last, Dan asked him out for dinner. “Sorry,” came the reply, “only interested in hookups.” Fair enough, thought Dan, and he moved along. A few weeks later, though, he noticed the fellow had changed his profile so it now read, “Looking for a long-term relationship.” Dan rallied and asked him out again. This time the guy said he was interested in getting together only if Dan could provide an additional player; he’d always wanted to try a threesome.

Dan related this to me while frowning into a cup of Earl Grey. He might have encountered such erotic flippancy in any number of offline venues. But as we export more of our sex lives online, it seems there’s been a correspondent crowding of casual sexual availability (and sexual rejection, too). Since Web sites like dudesnude and Manhunt gained steam in the early 2000s, men like Dan have been able to order in their sex (or be ordered in themselves) as easily as pizza. We are permanently ready.

Nobody who searched for sex in 1994 and then again in 2014 could help noticing the change. But when I sat down to brunch recently with a group of gay men, it seemed especially clear. A wide-eyed description of some rugby player’s physique would give way to an image on a Samsung Galaxy, hurriedly passed around the table. Fussing over whether an encounter was a one-night stand or not would devolve into a critical analysis of next-morning text messages. In fact, the entire appraisal of our sexual behavior seemed quite dematerialized—scrubbed clean of pheromone stink, denuded of flushed skin. And in their place: the scentless rationality of a plastic phone.

Another friend, Jack, is so taken by the promise of online hookups that he interacts with apps like Grindr or the “Casual Encounters” section of Craigslist pretty much 24/7. Even at work. We went out to karaoke the other night and, two pitchers in, I got to asking him about the draw. His smile was a strange mixture of unabashed and contrite: “As much as these sites can be racist, ignorant, and sooooooo full of snobs, liars, and jerks, it’s fun to give in to the utter superficiality—just have several sexting conversations on the go at once. The pictures are often lies, and the bullshit of it all can be overwhelming. But I got into it because it still felt better than being alone, you know? Sometimes you have to overdose on something, I guess. And it’s all been much more
successful
than any of my bar outings. . . .” He laughs. “I mean, it leads to more actual sex.”

Yet the abstracting force of the technology at play, its ability to distance us from our desires even as it promises their fulfillment, always seems to assert itself. There was the time Jack agreed to meet up with a “hot, hung, superfit, dominant top” whom he’d met online. The man turned out to be a frail and elderly fellow wearing cowboy boots, jogging pants, and a grad jacket from several decades prior. (Jack declined their engagement at the door.)

Jack tells me a story like that and I laugh at his misadventure. But then, when the night is through and the dark walk home is chilling my thoughts, I wonder what became of that old man in the cowboy boots. Had he pulled on that outfit thinking the accoutrements of youthful vigor would be enough to continue his online pretense? Did he go back to his computer that night and doggedly entice others to his door? And when those young men arrived, did they walk away as Jack had done? Or did they shrug at the difference between slick online promises and damaged warm-blooded reality, kick off their shoes, and make the gray-haired cowboy happy?

• • • • •

Back in 1999, the lustful hero of
Cruel Intentions,
Sebastian Valmont, spoke for the majority when he muttered that Internet romance “is for geeks and pedophiles.” But the Valmonts of the gay world are now among the most ardent supporters of online connections. Prudes and libertines both love, for example, that smartphone application Grindr (launched in 2009). The app alerts men to the proximity (and sexual inclination) of other men, not while they’re in a seedy bar, but while they’re walking their rottweiler or chatting with their mom at a nice café. It’s convenience itself: A person’s phone is constantly replenished with a dozen miniature photos of smiling faces (or other body parts), and a fellow can click and chat with other guys, note that they’re only 110 yards away, and then arrange what was once called “a discreet encounter.” This is hardly a fringe activity: More than six million men have the app on their phones, and it’s now used in nearly two hundred countries.
On a single Sunday
in the fall of 2012, for example, Grindr users sent 37,435,829 messages of love, lust, and denial.

Taken together, such Web sites and apps make a permanent bathhouse of our surroundings. Sexual frames of mind once relegated to special environments are no longer thus bound. And so the bathhouse brain, which is primed for immediate satisfaction, becomes our everyday brain. If I’m sitting in a sun-dappled park reading
Sense & Sensibility
and suddenly take up the idea that I’d like some action
right now,
it’s only my own starched manners that will stop me.

• • • • •

Gay men are only the first wave. Straight people are quickly remodeling their own sex lives. Along with selling used sofas and renting apartments, Craigslist, the massive, global classified Web site, has lively sections devoted to the proffering of sexual trysts. Neatly divided by orientation, the site’s “Casual Encounters” pages overflow with gentlemen declaring themselves “fit, hung, ready to please” and ladies demurring, “Please have good hygiene.”
Meanwhile, Chatroulette links strangers
from Beijing to Bogotá via webcam feeds—inevitably leading to the ubiquitous Roulette Flashers, men who masturbate before the camera in the hopes of titillating/appalling female viewers (a report from TechCrunch found that one in eight users on Chatroulette is broadcasting R-rated content).

These forums may be tawdry and voyeuristic, but even innocuous connections made on Facebook often belie a sexual pursuit (its progenitor, Facemash, was a game in which Harvard students rated their classmates as “hot” or “not”).
²⁰
Explicitly or otherwise, mainstream technologies are now integral to the game.
Youths send homemade porn to one another
via their phones, while apps like Snapchat encourage risqué photo sharing because they promise to automatically delete images (although, naturally, this turned out to be untrue).

This is not a question of simply transferring offline behavior—meeting via newspaper classifieds, for instance, or picking up a stranger in a bar—onto the Internet. Yes, we’ve turned every new broadcast technology into a beacon for the lonely (the first printed personals were created a mere fifty years after the invention of the modern newspaper), but no, the Internet is not just an extension of what came before.
Surveys conducted in 1980
, and again in 1992, demonstrated that less than 1 percent of the population was then meeting through newspaper ads.
Today, at least one in five
relationships begin online.
According to a massive 2010 BBC World Service report
spanning nineteen countries, nearly a third of us now consider the Internet a decent place to find a mate, and
similar Pew Research Center work
focusing on Americans in 2013 saw that number rise to 59 percent.

For many of us, the days begin and end with a consoling look at a phone or a laptop. We find ourselves on constant alert for connection—and sexual connection is prime among these. Our technologies offer something irresistible: a shortcut between desire and consummation. They grant us twenty-four-hour access to an alternately frustrating and exhilarating pool of sexual potential and a far larger scope of search. Online connections are, in sum, fast food and dire nourishment in one.

After all, absences are difficult, even torturous. And the alternative, the digital world we’ve erected to fill those absences, is uniquely adapted to excite our bodies and minds. That much is evident in our basic physiological responses. When we receive a text message, our heart rate increases, blood flow to our skin increases;
83 percent of us
, according to one study, even hold our breath. (Writer Linda Stone dubbed this “e-mail apnea.”) And as Gary Wilson has pointed out
,
the dopamine rush we get from viewing porn online is often greater than that induced by real sex (or even old-fashioned magazine porn), because all that clicking and scrolling exploits the searching-and-seeking drive that served our hunter-gatherer ancestors so well. Porn sites deliver a never-ending stream of Tabasco sauce and, “
as long as a guy can keep clicking
, he can keep going, and so can his dopamine.”

But amid the smorgasbord of Tabasco-laced sexual broadcasting, emboldened as we are with the possibility of getting what we want whenever we want it, some essential absence has been taken away. How did our erotic lives get powdered into instant coffee? (
Just add desire.
)

• • • • •

In 1965, accountant Lewis Altfest, together with his computer whiz buddy Robert Ross, created Project TACT (Technical Automated Compatibility Testing), a commercial dating service that, like the descendants it would spawn, relied on the inputting of personal information (do you dislike foreigners? would you rather be Einstein or Picasso?). A customer would pay $5 and fill out a questionnaire, which was then run through an IBM 1400 Series computer equipped with an algorithm that let Altfest and Ross find matches for lonely hearts.

They were keenly aware that computer-aided dating could be seen as both nerdy and déclassé, so for months they walked the streets of New York’s Upper East Side, scouting for upscale singles. To doormen, they explained they were working on a graduate research project; once shown into the lobby, they made their way to the wall of mailboxes. Whenever one had two different names on it, Altfest and Ross assumed the occupants were single and added those names to their list. “It was a tailored approach,” Altfest told me. “And, if I do say so myself, it was a very sophisticated approach.”

Once they knew who was rich and single, Altfest and Ross declared their TACT program an “East Side experiment,” something that only people living in the right neighborhood could join. “We restricted it to the poshest area in the city, and sent personalized invitations to all the single people there. We said, This is an experiment, and you’d be doing us
a favor if you participated. You obviously don’t need
a date; you’re simply helping us out.” The normal return on a direct mail advertising program like that is 1 percent; Altfest and Ross got close to 25.

The race to translate human desire into 1s and 0s had begun. At the same time, a group of Harvard kids was pushing Operation Match, which used computers to identify compatible couples from a bank of college students who had self-rated their own attractiveness and intelligence. Every communication technology is harnessed by the horny of the world, but those students with their lists of tech-sanctified lovers were experiencing something quite new. Apparent in the infancy of online dating were the first intimations of a population in love with off-loading romantic decisions to a yenta algorithm. What a strong impulse that would turn out to be: the desire to have one’s desires directed.

Emerging as it did during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, TACT played off fresh, even courageous, social mores. Dating, courtship, and sex were all becoming more liberally defined at precisely the moment when computers were broadening options for interpersonal connection. By the early 1990s, AOL introduced chat rooms where users could cyberflirt; soon after, sites like Match.com created mathematical formulas to pair up singles. The romantic revolution would deliver us from the silencing odds of our old social circles into a (highly managed) crowd of potentials.

• • • • •

The advent of GPS-enabled phones has made it possible to take the search outside and into real time. To get a picture of the future marketplace for online hookups, I sat down to lunch with Morris Chapdelaine, a muscled and fast-talking man about as far from tech nerd as one can get. Chapdelaine is the executive editor of a new app for gay men called GuySpy (which had just welcomed its millionth user from its HQ in White Salmon, Washington).

Like Grindr, GuySpy allows men to find one another using GPS, but it fashions itself a social network, too, complete with news stories, blogs, and a community of users. It also pushes established privacy boundaries by pulling up mapping systems and pinpointing the exact street corner that your soon-to-be lover is loitering on. It even includes the option of making anonymous phone calls. Midway through our meal, Chapdelaine had his phone out and was flipping through nearby men. “He’s cute. . . .
He’s
cute. . . .”