Plastic Memories Quotes

She wasn't happy, but then she wasn't unhappy. She wasn't anything. But I don't believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing. This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a doughnut with plastic powder, had to have a memory or a dream.

So many humans. So many colours. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-coloured clouds, beating, like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.

The first time I kissed you, you had just cut off your hair with a plastic knife. You were in restraints and your lips were completely chapped and dry from the tranquilizers. The next day you tried to kill me with a torn-off piece of bedsheet. I've seen you at your worst. You hardly need to dress up for me.

Usually at least once in a person's childhood we lose an object that at the time is invaluable and irreplaceable to us, although it is worthless to others. Many people remember that lost article for the rest of their lives. Whether it was a lucky pocketknife, a transparent plastic bracelet given to you by your father, a toy you had longed for and never expected to receive, but there it was under the tree on Christmas... it makes no difference what it was. If we describe it to others and explain why it was so important, even those who love us smile indulgently because to them it sounds like a trivial thing to lose. Kid stuff. But it is not. Those who forget about this object have lost a valuable, perhaps even crucial memory. Becuase something central to our younger self resided in that thing. When we lost it, for whatever reason, a part of us shifted permanently.

Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.

Once . . . long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.

Why must the plastic form make up the foundation of image consciousness?

The most special times in a person's life are not meant to last forever. They're like bubbles rising from a plastic ring dipped into a soapy solution. The soap bubbles rise, with the sun flashing brilliant colors, then bursts into a showery memory mist.

Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?

The problem was that such simple, ordinary bliss seldom formed memories. It was too smooth and silken to adhere. It was the bad stuff, ragged and uneven, that caught, like all those plastic grocery bags stuck in the trees of Baltimore.

In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride.

Look under the passenger seat in a black plastic bin. There should be a book.” Raphael hopped out, dug under the seat, and pulled out a dog-eared copy of The Almanac of Mystical Creatures. “Got it,” I said into the phone. “Page seventy-six.” Raphael flipped the book open and held it up. On the left page a lithograph showed a three-headed dog with a serpent for a tail. The caption under the picture said CERBERUS. “Is that your dog?” Kate asked. “Could be. How the heck did you know the exact page?” “I have perfect memory!” I snorted. She sighed into the phone. “I spilled coffee on that page and had to leave the book open to dry it out. It always opens to that entry now.

What is a memory, anyway? Is it an indelible record, unimpeachable, frozen in some synaptic arrangement and stored away for some moment it might be needed in the future? Or is it subject to editing and revision, something plastic that our brains can shape into another form we can handle, something less toxic than the original, something less able to poison us?

Neither of us looking for an apology, or to be proven right at the other's expense. No anxiety to make it better than it was, no yearning towards something more. No dramatic conclusion at all. Just an array of loose ends, wrapped in a bundle of memories, all tied together with a sinew of regret - regret that we could both ultimately live with.

Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.

Often, as she leafed through the sticky, plastic-coated pages, spotting herself with a frizzy perm or wearing a loud, printed blouse, she was struck by how long life was, and how much time had passed, and she wished she could go back and apologize to those closest to her, explain that she understood now. Impossible, and yet the urge to return and be a different person never lessened, grew only more acute.

His familiar husky voice sent a wave of wistfulness through me. A thousand memories spun in my head, tangling together- a rocky beach strewn with driftwood trees, a garage made of plastic sheds, warm sodas in a paper bag, a tiny room with one too-small shabby loveseat. The laughter in his deep-set black eyes, the feverish heat of his big hand around mine, the flash of his white teeth against his dark skin, his face stretching into the wide smile that had always been like a key to a secret door where only kindred spirits could enter. It felt sort of like homesickness, this longing for the place and person who had sheltered me through my darkest night.

The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings—as opposed to the invigorating “good stress” of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self.

Think of it as plastic memory, this force within you which trends you and your fellows toward tribal forms. This plastic memory seeks to return to its ancient shape, the tribal society. It is all around you—the feudatory, the diocese, the corporation, the platoon, the sports club, the dance troupes, the rebel cell, the planning council, the prayer group . . . each with its master and servants, its host and parasites. And the swarms of alienating devices (including these very words!) tend eventually to be enlisted in the argument for a return to “those better times.” I despair of teaching you other ways. You have square thoughts which resist circles.

I hope that one day you will be reunited with the one person you cherish.

So many humans. So many colors. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-colored clouds, beating like black hearts. And then. There is death.

The digital book has no front or back covers; there is no place to assert ownership, and there is nothing to own. "The digital delivery module" is a piece of molded plastic made in China, encasing a few memory chips. That is not the book, that's the "reader." Wait, I thought I was the reader. Oh, never mind.

Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from people who haven’t. Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin. Women who’ve suffered childhood sexual abuse have smaller somatosensory cortices—the part of the brain that registers sensation in our bodies. Victims who were screamed at might have an altered response to sound. Traumatized brains can result in reductions in the parts of the brain that process semantics, emotion and memory retrieval, perceiving emotions in others, and attention and speech. Not getting enough sleep at night potentially affects developing brains’ plasticity and attention and increases the risk of emotional problems later in life. And the scariest factoid, for me anyway: Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning. Brains do have workarounds. There are people without amygdalae who don’t feel fear. There are people who have reduced prefrontal cortices who are very logical. And other parts of the brain can compensate, make up the lost parts in other ways. But overall, when I looked at the breadth of evidence, the results felt crushing. The fact that the brain’s cortical thickness is directly related to IQ was particularly threatening to me. Even if I wasn’t cool, or kind, or personable, I enjoyed the narrative that I was at least effective. Intelligent. What these papers seemed to tell me is that however smart I am, I’m not as smart as I could have been had this not happened to me. The questions arose again: Is this why my pitches didn’t go through? Is this why my boss never respected me? Is this why I was pushed to do grunt work in the back room?

The point of this journal was to improve my writing skills, but it was also to preserve my well-curated childhood. She hoped that as an adult, I would flip through this notebook fondly, letting it fill me with sentimental memories. But as I read through it now, it appears her mission miscarried. I have no recollection of the Santa Cruz trip, or this lion dance, or that trip to the beach in Mendocino. The only thing I remember vividly is that clear plastic ruler on my palm.

Then she would be that hostess in Houston and I would be that tanned one from Florida, a small memory of chlorinated pool water, fruit juice and gin, steak raw in the middle, and hearty rhythms in the draperied twilight of the tomb-cool motel cubicle, riding the grounded flesh of the jet-stream Valkyrie. A harmless pleasure. For harmless plastic people, scruff-proof, who can create the delusion of romance.

I treasure ruefully some memories of W.H. Auden that go back to the middle 1960s, when he arrived in New Haven to give a reading of his poems at Ezra Stiles College. We had met several times before, in New York City and at Yale, but were only acquaintances. The earlier Auden retains my interest, but much of the frequently devotional poetry does not find me. Since our mutual friend John Hollander was abroad, Auden phoned to ask if he might stay with my wife and me, remarking of his dislike of college guest suites. The poet arrived in a frayed, buttonless overcoat, which my wife insisted on mending. His luggage was an attache case containing a large bottle of gin, a small one of vermouth, a plastic drinking cup, and a sheaf of poems. After being supplied with ice, he requested that I remind him of the amount of his reading fee. A thousand dollars had been the agreed sum, a respectable honorarium more than forty years ago. He shook his head and said that as a prima donna he could not perform, despite the prior arrangement. Charmed by this, I phoned the college master - a good friend - who cursed heartily but doubled the sum when I assured him that the poet was as obdurate as Lady Bracknell in 'The Importance of Being Earnest'. Informed of this yielding, Auden smiled sweetly and was benign and brilliant at dinner, then at the reading, and as he went to bed after we got home.

The sun glowed over them, throwing a miniature shadow on the road. Warm air was accompanying the heating of the day and the fluttering of leaves made multiple shadows dancing on the footpath. They could imagine fairies in the sky, dancing with the air, throwing their shadows near their plastic home.

My neighbour turned to me again, and asked me what work it was that was taking me to Athens. For the second time I felt the conscious effort of his enquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp. I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.

As much as he loved Old Earth artefacts, it was tremendously frustrating at times to know that it wasn’t possible to prove the original purpose of so many of them. Spotting an object he had puzzled over for the past two years, he stopped at its shelf, picked up the crumpled piece of plastic, and unfolded it until it had the approximate shape of a woman. She could be inflated by blowing air into an attached valve. Although he did have his suspicions as to what she was for (and he blushed even thinking about it—he described her as a ‘portable statue of a surprised female’ to potential customers), he still yearned to know whether he was right or not.

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, when it would be much easier to go to the bathroom and untape the plastic zipped bag containing his cotton pads and loose razors and alcohol wipes and bandages from its hiding place beneath the sink and simply surrender. Those were the very bad days. It

Memory, Evans-Pritchard reasoned, was an indirect expression of power. The Arenos faced structural amnesia about something else and linked it to a different source of power: the Louisiana Chemical Association, the Society of the Plastics Industry, the Vinyl Institute, Shell Oil, PPG Industries, and their leaders in government. Spokesmen for this source of power drew the popular imagination to the exciting economic fugure. The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten.

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn't have known. The only things I noticed were silver bracelets on women's wrists and popsicle sticks in potted rubber plants. There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night. No car, no car stereo, no silver bracelets, no shuffling, no dark blue tweed suits. My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless—a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine. My first circuit must have been wearing thin. My real memories were receding into planar projection, the screen of consciousness losing all identity.

Have you forgotten who we are? Inuttigut. We are Inuit. We live in a place littered with bones, with spirits, with reminders of the past. Nothing dies here and nothing rots: not bones, not plastic, not memories. Especially not memories. We live surrounded by our stories. It's one of our gifts. Unlike most of the rest of the world, we can't escape our stories, Derek.

There was something funny I saw while travelling about which I remember thinking “oh, that’s worth telling the readers about,” only now I can’t remember what it was. It may have involved a waiter. Or possibly a ceramic tile. I’d have to go into a sensory deprivation tank to catch the tail of that memory and I’m not sure I have the time to do that before my dinner’s ready.

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, when it would be much easier to go to the bathroom and untape the plastic zipped bag containing his cotton pads and loose razors and alcohol wipes and bandages from its hiding place beneath the sink and simply surrender. Those were the very bad days.

She had stood there with the phone pressed to her ear as though it were a huge plastic seashell, all the unhappy years of her marriage echoing again in her eardrums, washing up in the coils of her memory.

The paper comes in plastic, a little thinner each week, a few more ads. Pretty soon there'll be no news. We'll be underwhelmed, over-bored & all storied out. The clouds ready to burst with our blue-skinned memories. Everyone with a blog, a website, an online store, dedicated server & two-dimensional quick-response-coded documentary made about their precious life. Our brains at maximum capacity, running optimization programs to recover what's left of our sanity. Still, we hope. We go see the latest blockbuster, buy the latest iPhone, zone out in front of our schizo-screens drinking jugs of moonshine corn syrup with our latent mutant meals. Facebook keeps us chained to our pasts, our posts, screwed in our seats... Scarecrows surrounded by night soil & spirits. Your acid shield may protect you from outside threat, but it'll never protect you from yourself.

Having happy and beautiful memories won't always bring you salvation. The more beautiful a memory is, the more painful it can become. It can even become terrifying. Both for the one who's leaving...and for the one left behind.

So many colors. They keep triggering inside me. They harstinker my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-colored clouds, beating like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.

The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

The girls stared in amazement. Michael was holding a plastic bag bursting with candy. He shrugged. “I snuck into her office last night.” On the platform, Miss Crumley watched with satisfaction as the train heaved into motion. But walking back to the orphanage, she was troubled by the memory of the youngest hooligan, Emma, sticking out her tongue as the train pulled away. Miss Crumley could swear the girl had been eating a piece of licorice. But that was ridiculous. Where would such a child get licorice? When

Through the open drapes behind the nightstand, moonlight pouring through shadowy leaves fell haphazardly on the plastic bag full of shattered memories of his wife. He sat down on the bed, a dark silent gaze spreading over his face. Opening the bag released the flowery scent of licorice and violets—Summer’s signature perfume, Lolita Lempicka. He remembered she always said the aroma reminded her of childhood lullabies, fairies, and magic kingdoms. Matt buried his face in the tattered polo shirt she was wearing that day inhaling the faint trail of his lost love.

Some things they carried in common. Taking turns they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself - Vietnam, the place, the soil - a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules.

She is watching a man lying dead or asleep on a blanket nearby dressed in a crumpled tan suit with blood discolouring his sleeve, his hand clutching a plastic bag filled with bread rolls, alone black shoe on a foot. Another man she saw been carried into the emergency room was wearing just one sport shoe, so many shoes gone astray she thinks, so many shoes dislodged while their owners are carried by the arms and legs or dragged by the armpits into the backs of cars and vans and dragged again into emergency rooms without a gurney, the orphaned shoes kicked aside in the rush or left to die on the street or on footpaths like an unblinking eye awaiting the return of its owner

Aware she’d likely never tasted such a thing before, she took a cautious sip. Nothing came up. “The straw’s defective.” Dev shot her a quick grin. It altered his face, turning him strikingly beautiful. But that wasn’t the odd part. The odd part was that seeing him smile made her heart change its rhythm. She lifted her hand a fraction, compelled to trace the curve of his lips, the crease in his cheek. Would he let her, she thought, this man who moved with the liquid grace of a soldier . . . or a beast of prey? “Did I say milk shake?” he said, withheld laughter in his voice. “I meant ice cream smoothie—with enough fresh fruit blended into it to turn it solid.” Glancing at her when she didn’t move, he raised an eyebrow. She felt a wave of heat across her face, and the sensation was so strange, it broke through her fascination. Looking down, she took off the lid after removing the straw and stared at the swirls of pink and white that dominated the delicious-smelling concoction. Intrigued, she poked at it with the tip of her straw. “I can see pieces of strawberry, and what’s that?” She looked more closely at the pink-coated black seeds. “Passion fruit?” “Try it and see.” Handing her his water bottle, he started the car and got them on their way. “How would I know?” She put his water in the holder next to the unopened bottle. “And I need a spoon for this.” Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out a plastic-wrapped piece of cutlery. “Here.” “You did that on purpose,” she accused. “Did you want to see how hard I’d try to suck the mixture up?” Another smile, this one a bare shadow. “Would I do that?” It startled her to realize he was teasing her. Devraj Santos, she thought, wasn’t supposed to have a sense of humor. That was something she just knew. And, it was wrong. That meant the shadow-man didn’t know everything, that he wasn’t omnipotent. A cascade of bubbles sparkled through her veins, bright and effervescent. “I think you’re capable of almost anything.” Dipping in the spoon, she brought the decadent mixture to her lips. Oh! The crisp sting of ice, the cream rich and sweet, the fruit a tart burst of sensation. It was impossible not to take a second bite. And a third.

Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from those of people who haven’t.[8] Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin. Women who’ve suffered childhood sexual abuse have smaller somatosensory cortices—the part of the brain that registers sensation in our bodies. Victims who were screamed at might have an altered response to sound. Trauma can result in reductions in the parts of the brain that process semantics, emotion and memory retrieval, perceiving emotions in others, and attention and speech. Not getting enough sleep at night potentially affects developing brains’ plasticity and attention and increases the risk of emotional problems later in life. And the scariest factoid, for me anyway: Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning.

He would keep what he would always believe had to be a false memory of her falling like a booted Icarus out of a lighted sky in which there was somehow falling snow and her mouth open in a lovely O that had started to shape a word, and her long legs against the electric light, shooting out of the blue plastic square that rose like a kite lifting on a whirlwind and one of her boots flying what seemed the length of the block

They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-colored clouds, beating like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.

Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store.. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.

We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters. Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how, find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, fire men! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropolis rose! And so on.

One of my earliest memories was of a maze of pale green walls. The corridors never ended, no matter which way I turned. I was running, my feet bare, my paper-thin gown flapping around skinny foal-like legs, and the demons kept on coming. I’d run the maze before, because I always knew which way to turn to find the little clear plastic box. I’d run, and run. Lungs aching, throat burning, my feet slapping against the smooth floor, and the sound of scrabbling claws chased me down. I made it to the box, every time (I’d learned later, there were others who hadn’t) and once inside, I’d yank the clear door closed. The demons didn’t see the box. They saw only me, the wraith-like little half-blood girl. They would launch themselves—claws extended, jaws wide, eyes ablaze—and slam into my box, sending shudders rattling through my bones. They’d snap and snarl, hook their teeth into the box and gnaw at its edges, desperate to get to the feast huddling a few millimeters away. Flooding, the Institute had called it. At first I was afraid, and I learned how to run. Then I was angry, and I learned how to fight with my fists and my element. Then, I got even. I lured those demons into a corner and ambushed them, killing every last one. After countless visits to the maze, after weeks, years, I’d started liking it, and killing became as natural as breathing. It was what I was good at. What I was made for. What I lived for. © Copyright Pippa DaCosta 2016.

So many humans. So many colors. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-colored clouds, beating like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.

Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside. Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried. 'This is embarrassing,' I admitted. 'It doesn't have to be.' 'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said. The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter. In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family. I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.

This is what I think of America -- nothing. This is what I think of American Jews -- nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism -- nothing. Your chances for survival -- none at all. You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you're over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won't give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife--who's tearing her program up into little white paper pills she'd like to swallow like Percodan--isn't merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufficiency of options for educated women in this country; it's more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn't just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it's more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that's been thrust at her--from what college to choose to what career to have--is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example--whom she's been condemned to babysit--will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable, with your frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, laugh at a joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birthright away for a bowl of plastic lentils...

We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I disremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it's unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.

We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters. Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how, find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, fire men! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropolis rose! And so on.

And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

I remember one time, while visiting you all in Hartford— this must be a year or two after you landed from Vietnam—” Paul rests his chin on his palm and stares at the window, where a hummingbird hovers at the plastic feeder. “I walked into the apartment and found you crying under the table. No one was home—or maybe your mom was—but she must have been in the bathroom or something.” He stops, letting the memory fill in. “I bent down and asked you what was wrong, and you know what you said?” He grins. “You said that the other kids lived more than you. What a hoot.” He shakes his head. “What a thing to say! I’ll never forget that.” His gold-capped molar caught the light. “They live more, they live more!’ you shouted. Who the hell gave you that idea? You were only five, for Christ sakes.

Nero discovered that the losses went to his emotional brain, bypassing his higher cortical structures and slowly affecting his hippocampus and weakening his memory. The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings—as opposed to the invigorating “good stress” of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self.

Dogs and roses. All these suburban houses bespangled with roses and bristling with dogs. A dog behind every rose bush. For people and their hellish imaginaries, dogs are as ornamental as roses. In reality, the roses are just as vicious as the dogs or an electrified fence. There are too many of them, they are too red, their carnivorous petals close on a forbidden space. The pleasantness of the residential suburbs, the pleasantness of the sarcophagi of greenery where the television aerials gleam. The pleasantness of aphanisis in the death-laden detached houses, set in a bower of lilacs and hollyhocks. The only sign of the frenzied urge to bite and fight, the only sign of the vitrified and howling passions beneath the film of plastic is the beast of the Apocalypse, barking on the horizon beyond the flower beds.

oversized grave with a granite obelisk for a headstone. Scattered around it were faded wreathes and crushed bouquets of plastic flowers, which made the place seem even sadder. Aurum and Argentum were playing keep-away in the woods with one of the coach’s handballs. Ever since getting repaired by the Amazons, the metal dogs had been frisky and full of energy – unlike their owner. Reyna sat cross-legged at the entrance of the tent, staring at the memorial obelisk. She hadn’t said much since they fled San Juan two days ago. They’d also not encountered any monsters, which made Nico uneasy. They’d had no further word from the Hunters or the Amazons. They didn’t know what had happened to Hylla, or Thalia, or the giant Orion. Nico didn’t like the Hunters of Artemis. Tragedy followed them as surely as their dogs and birds of

Decorated in exotic tones of saffron, gold, ruby, and cinnamon with accent walls representing the natural movement of wind and fire, and a cascading waterfall layered with beautiful landscaped artificial rocks and tiny plastic animals, the restaurant was the embodiment of her late brother's dream to re-create "India" in the heart of San Francisco. The familiar scents- cinnamon, pungent turmeric, and smoky cumin- brought back memories of evenings spent stirring dal, chopping onions, and rolling roti in the bustling kitchen of her parents' first restaurant in Sunnyvale under the watchful army of chefs who followed the recipes developed by her parents. What had seemed fun as a child, and an imposition as a teenager, now filled her with a warm sense of nostalgia, although she would have liked just one moment of her mother's time.

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. But we`ll be gone by then, as will our collective and collected memory. I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs won’t make a sound anymore. We’ve caused a lot of suffering, but we’ve also caused much else. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, when it would be much easier to go to the bathroom and untape the plastic zipped bag containing his cotton pads and loose razors and alcohol wipes and bandages from its hiding place beneath the sink and simply surrender.

Stepfather—January 6, 1980 In addition to imitation mayonnaise, fake fur, sugar substitutes and plastic that wears like iron, the nuclear family has added another synthetic to its life: step-people. There are stepmothers, stepfathers, stepsons and stepdaughters. The reception they get is varied. Some are looked upon as relief pitchers who are brought in late but are optimistic enough to try to win the game. Some are regarded as double agents, who in the end will pay for their crimes. There are few generalizations you can make about step-people, except they’re all locked into an awkward family unit none of them are too crazy about. I know. I’ve been there. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. I became a hyphenated child a few years after my “real” father died. I was the only stepchild in North America to have a stepfather who had the gall to make me go to bed when I was sleepy, do homework before I went to school, and who yelled at me for wearing bedroom slippers in the snow. My real father wouldn’t have said that. My stepfather punished me for sassing my mother, wouldn’t allow me to waste food and wouldn’t let me spend money I didn’t have. My real father wouldn’t have done that. My stepfather remained silent when I slammed doors in his face, patient when I insisted my mother take “my side” and emotionless when I informed him he had no rights. My real father wouldn’t have taken that. My stepfather paid for my needs and my whims, was there through all my pain of growing up...and checked himself out of the VA hospital to give me away at my wedding. My real father...was there all the time, and I didn’t know it. What is a “real” mother, father, son or daughter? “Real” translates to something authentic, genuine, permanent. Something that exists. It has nothing to do with labor pains, history, memories or beginnings. All love begins with one day and builds. “Step” in the dictionary translates to “a short distance.” It’s shorter than you think.

They looked at each other across the little plastic table, half of their faces faintly illuminated by the light behind the bar. They didn’t touch; they didn’t speak. Dominika could feel the electrons jumping the gap between them, could feel them in her heightened heartbeat. Her eyes darted over his face—his mouth, his eyes, the lock of hair on his forehead. He was looking at her, and she imagined the feel of his skin against her. She told herself she would not start anything—she would not—even though she needed him. She needed him to ease the burden that came with her new life as a mole, a betrayer of her country, living one step from the execution chambers. But she would not. Nate looked at her, saw her lips trembling. In Helsinki he would have gathered her up and taken her to bed. Not now. She had reemerged from Moscow, was willing to resume work as their—his—penetration agent. Nate would not jeopardize it, would not disrespect MARBLE’s memory. As he looked at Dominika’s backlit hair, Nate thought of what had to be done.

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do. “Make ’em dry” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.” It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunchtime that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.

Something More Fragile Than This" Quick before our bodies turn themselves in, with a reverence reserved for the dead touch me because I want to remember how beautiful I am. While Spring snows around us, cracking her eggs on our windows, in her meager dress of yellowing-white, because I want to rise into today. So why the urge to render something more fragile than this? Why, always, the soul blowing glass? The soul, once again, filling the lungs with smoke because a memory of regret sweats in the plastic sleeve of a family album. Because there’s a snapshot caught between the pages of some thick book: my heavy 20 year old frame setting off the 60lb weight of a dying mother. Because somewhere, there’s a negative slide of my heart. Because and because and because I’m sure there’s a photo in some drawer that shows me dressed in black. But I want to devote myself to the mystery of this afternoon. I want to honor this falling night, worship the hour vanishing between six and seven. This moment where I’m standing against myself and against you with a taste in my mouth that’s yolk. With Bob Marley taking that one long drag on the refrigerator door.

I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs really won't make a sound anymore. We've caused a lot of suffering, but we've also caused much else. I know the world will survive us—and in some ways, it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon. There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don't. But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth's greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth. It's easy to forget how wondrous humans are, how strange and lovely.

I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs really won't make a sound anymore. We've caused a lot of suffering, but we've also caused much else. I know the world will survive us—and in some ways, it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back toward the moon. There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don't. But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth's greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth. It's easy to forget how wondrous humans are, how strange and lovely.

He had in his head a scrapbook of the tastes that had impacted him the most during his travels: goat cheese and olive oil in California, the tropical fruits and chilies of South America, everything that had touched his lips in Japan. When Angelo and Paolo talk about their travels, they turn to the memories- the parties, the people, the crazy times had, always with the metronome of mozzarella beating in the background. But what followed Vito were the flavors- the dishes, the ingredients, and techniques unknown to most of Italy. "When I came back from Japan, there were six kilos of matcha, two kilos of coconut powder, and twelve bottles of Nikka whiskey in my bag. In Rome they stopped me and opened the bag. They thought they had caught me with cocaine. I told the guy to open up the bag and taste." Vito didn't drink Nikka (he and his brothers rarely drink alcohol); instead, he emptied all twelve bottles into a wooden bucket, where he now soaks blue cheese made from sheep's milk to make what he calls formaggio clandestino. He stirs up a spoon of high-grade matcha powder into Dicecca's fresh goat yogurt and sells it in clear plastic tubs, anxious for anyone- a loyal client, a stranger, a disheveled writer- to taste something new.

Principles That Great Teachers Follow Great teachers know that each brain is unique and uniquely organized. Great teachers know that all brains are not equally good at everything. Great teachers know that the brain is a complex, dynamic system and is changed daily by experiences. Great teachers know that learning is a constructivist process, and that the ability to learn continues through developmental stages as an individual matures. Great teachers know that the search for meaning is innate in human nature. Great teachers know that brains have a high degree of plasticity and develop throughout the lifespan. Great teachers know that MBE science principles apply to all ages. Great teachers know that learning is based in part on the brain’s ability to self-correct. Great teachers know that the search for meaning occurs through pattern recognition. Great teachers know that brains seek novelty. Great teachers know that emotions are critical to detecting patterns, to decision-making, and to learning. Great teachers know that learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat. Great teachers know that human learning involves both focused attention and peripheral perception. Great teachers know that the brain conceptually processes parts and wholes simultaneously. Great teachers know that the brain depends on interactions with other people to make sense of social situations. Great teachers know that feedback is important to learning. Great teachers know that learning relies on memory and attention. Great teachers know that memory systems differ in input and recall. Great teachers know that the brain remembers best when facts and skills are embedded in natural contexts. Great teachers know that learning involves conscious and unconscious processes. Great teachers know that learning engages the entire physiology (the body influences the brain, and the brain controls the body).

And today, for the first time, we are given a real recipe: making chocolate pudding from scratch. We stir cocoa and cornstarch and sugar together, then stir in milk. Chef guides us step by step and we all clean our stations as the pudding chills. As I'm putting away my ingredients, a little red bottle in the pantry calls my attention. I snatch it up and sprinkle some on my pudding. When Chef Ayden calls us up to test our dishes, I'm the first student to set my bowl in front of him. He grabs a clean plastic spoon and pulls my dish closer to him, leaning down to inspect it, turning the dish slowly in a circle. "Mmm. Nice chocolate color, smooth texture; you made sure the cream didn't break, which is great. And I'm curious what this is on top." He takes a tiny spoonful and pops it into his mouth, and the moment his mouth closes around the spoon his eyelids close, too. I wonder if my cooking woo-woo will work on him. "What is that?" he asks, his eyes still closed. I assume he means the spice on top and not whatever memory may have been loosened by my pudding. His eyes open and I realize the question was in fact for me. "I used a little smoked paprika," I say. Heat creeps up my neck. I hadn't even thought about what would happen if I used an ingredient that wasn't in the original recipe. "You trying to show off, Emoni?" Chef Ayden asks me very, very seriously. "No, Chef. I wasn't." "The ancient Aztecs too would pair chocolate with chipotle and cayenne and other spices, although it is not so common now. Why'd you add it?" "I don't know. I saw it in the pantry and felt the flavors would work well together." He takes another spoonful. Chef told us from the beginning that since every student is evaluated, he would very rarely take more than one bite of any single dish. I'm surprised he does so now, but he closes his eyes again as if the darkness behind his lids will help him better taste the flavors. His eyes pop open. "This isn't bad." He drops his spoon. "Emoni, I think creativity is good. And this, this..." He gives a half laugh like he's surprised he doesn't know what to say. He clears his throat and it seems almost like a memory has him choked up.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

Still, she did not allow self-pity to overcome her. She relied on her ability, since childhood, to chase away bad memories. She did not ponder on all the evil done to her in the village; nor did she recall the fear she had felt on the viaduct. Her mind did not return to the past, and an inner strength blanked out her fears and sorrows. The only bad memory she could not erase was that of her aunt making her cry in front of the locked door, as well as the shame she had felt returning to say good-bye as she walked down the muddy road in the village. Her black plastic shoes reminded her of those incidents.

Chapter 3 The next morning, I wake up early, but I hang out in bed longer than usual. Since the surprise party yesterday, I’ve been bombarded with images of my past. And those memories have a bitter taste that yesterday’s cake can’t mask. I somehow manage to extricate myself from my pod, even though it feels like my head’s a bit foggy—my stomach, too, for that matter. I walk quietly toward the Cafeteria. By this time, there shouldn’t be many people left. Hopefully my delay will go unnoticed. I didn’t account for Doc, of course. When I get to the Cafeteria, she’s sitting at one of the tables with a tray of unfinished food in front of her. When she sees me coming, she taps the plastic nervously with her fingers. “Oh, so now you’re hungry?” she asks. Doc has always had a problem with people not following the rules, and she doesn’t understand why people break them. For her, duty is an essential trait. I think her attitude is a bit extreme, but it’s clear that she’s turned out to be a better person than me, so maybe I should try following the rules. “Sorry. Problem with my alarm clock,” I say, improvising.

First comes the Emotion Regulation Network. I consider this primary, because I believe that unless we have the ability to regulate our emotions, we cannot enjoy a happy life. We can’t sustain Bliss Brain for long enough to spark neural plasticity if our consciousness is easily hijacked by negative emotions like anger, resentment, guilt, fear, and shame. The Emotion Regulation Network controls our reactivity to disturbing events. Regulating emotions is the meditator’s top priority. Emotion will distract us from our path every time. Love and fear are fabulous for survival because of their evolutionary role in keeping us safe. Love kept us bonded to others of our species, which gave us strength in numbers. Fear made us wary of potential threats. But to the meditator seeking inner peace, emotion = distraction. In the stories of Buddha and Jesus in Chapter 2, we saw how they were tempted by both the love of gain and the fear of loss. Only when they held their emotions steady, refusing either type of bait, were they able to break through to enlightenment. THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS BY EMOTION Remember a time when you swore you’d act rationally but didn’t? Perhaps you were annoyed by a relationship partner’s habit. Or a team member’s attitude. Or a child’s behavior? You screamed and yelled in response. Or perhaps you didn’t but wanted to. So you decided that next time you would stay calm and have a rational discussion. But as the emotional temperature of the conversation increased, you found yourself screaming and yelling again. Despite your best intentions, emotion overwhelmed you. Without training, when negative emotions arise, our capacity for rational thought is eclipsed. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls this “the hostile takeover of consciousness by emotion.” Consciousness is hijacked by the emotions generated by fearful unwanted experiences or attractive desired ones. We need to regulate our emotions over and over again to gradually establish positive state stability. In positive state stability, when someone around us—whether a colleague, spouse, child, parent, politician, blogger, newscaster, or corporate spokesperson—says or does something that triggers negative emotions, we remain neutral. The same applies to negative thoughts arising from within our own consciousness. Positive state stability allows us to feel happy despite the chatter of our own minds. Getting triggered happens quickly. LeDoux found that it takes less than 1 second from hearing an emotionally triggering word to a reaction in the brain’s limbic system, the part that processes emotion. When we’re overwhelmed by emotion, rational thinking, sound judgment, memory, and objective evaluation disappear. But once we’re stable in that positive state, we’ve inoculated ourselves against negative influences, both from our own consciousness and from the outside world. We maintain that positive state over time, and state becomes trait.

Already on that highway Las Vegas felt like a dream, fleeing from my memory, growing fuzzier and more unreal with every passing mile of creosote basin rimmed by jagged hills. Will what we call civilization go like that too, a brutal, gleaming, plasticized absurdity that we will recall less with nostalgia than with befuddlement and wonder that a whole species could consent to live that way? There are other ways. It's not too late to find them. One way or another, we will have to.

Cholesterol is ubiquitous in the central nervous system (CNS) and vital to normal brain function including signaling, synaptic plasticity, and learning and memory.

A large part of people who manage to stay young, in spite of their chronological age, relates to synaptic plasticity - the ability of the brain to make and form new connections. As we've seen, plasticity is influenced by your genetic makeup, your lifetime of experiences, and the culture in which you live. It is also influenced by your daily routines, especially as you get older. Astrocytes, a type of brain cell, serve as suppliers of that energy. A mounting body of evidence shows that physical activity increases the effectiveness of astrocytes and thereby enhances synaptic plasticity, memory, and overall cognition.

MY MOTHER’S PHLOX To send this to you toward the end of summer, I was forced to rebuild my desktop. Not in the old-fashioned way, With saw and eye laid alongside the board With some rue in my fingers, But I wanted to create phlox. Although, god knows, it can’t be done In three dimensions, as the earth Has so easily done it, but who can compete With the earth? No, I wanted only the words And they have lost themselves in the fields Or along the gravel road. It’s just as well. (Floks) n. pl. various plants of the genus Phlox, Having opposite leaves and flowers, With variously colored salverform corolla. Over the years the phlox have spread Even into the fields beyond the barn, Into the edge of the woods, inventions Of themselves in endless designs… They exhale their faint perfume summer after summer, And summer after summer it was my nightlong Intoxicant. It was my potion, my ragged butterfly, My faulty memory of my mother Who was the same age then, as I am now. As then, I was the same age you are now, When my mother planted these phlox in my garden. I’m sending them to you by UPS, Wrapped in plastic in a proper box. Take them out and stick them in water; Dig a good bed and spread the roots. They need almost no care. They cast their seed; they thrive on neglect. Later, they may change like the faces you love, Ravaged and ravishing from year to year.

Women’s brains in particular come into adulthood gifted with an excellent ability to recall specific aspects of verbal information, such as the precise details of a conversation, as well as episodic memory—the ability to recall details of past personal experiences, chiefly what, where, and when they happened. This fact may explain how so many women seem to possess crystal clear recall of conversations their husbands swear never occurred! All kidding aside, young adult women come equipped with a mature brain, a sharp memory, and fluent communication skills. At the same time, though, the internal processes that make and remake the brain (namely, the death and birth of neurons and their fluctuating activity) will rise and fall with each of our menstrual cycles, and throughout our lives. In fact, even once the brain has reached its mature state, it remains plastic, retaining the capacity to shift and change in response to our life experiences. These brain-body shifts are never more evident than . . . when a woman becomes pregnant.

Give her a penny, I scream. I’m sick of every memory of me being discarded, avoided, or embalmed in a shrine. I want my mom to smile when asked for a penny and to laugh when she walks through the meat section of the grocery store, remembering the time we baked a ham together with the clear plastic wrapping still on, how we basted it for two hours before noticing it looked strange. I want my dad to smile when he eats chicken wings and watches an Angels game. I want Mo to never pass a dandelion without blowing off the fluff and then running through it to catch the seeds in her hair.

Opening the box, they withdrew the thick plastic grave markers. His lips twitched as he scanned the epitaphs: R.I.P. Van Winkle, Dee Cayed, I.M. Gone, and Barry R. Bones. "Dracula, Fangs for the Memories," he read aloud and, chuckled. Grace held up her favorite. "Rigger Mortys. Death Grips and Holds Me Tight, But I Shall Return on Halloween Night." Tongue-in-cheek, he asked her, "What would your headstone say?" "She Threw a Great Party," came to mind. "How about yours?" "Death by Decorating.

Mint Julep Ice Cream Use this to clear out the past and start over by painting all past painful memories in a happier light. Don’t eat too much, or you’ll be forgetting other things too, until you’re a doddery old fool like me, who can’t remember what day of the week it is. Getting old really is a son of a bitch. Ingredients 1 c. sugar ½ c. water ½ c. bourbon 1 tsp. vanilla 2 c. milk 2 c. heavy cream 6 large egg yolks 8–10 large sprigs fresh mint (plus extra for garnish) Directions 1. Bruise the leaves of the mint leaves to release oils and flavors. Combine the sugar, water, and the 8 mint sprigs in a small saucepan over medium heat, and bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Cook for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, and let cool completely. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer, then add the bourbon. 2. Combine the milk and cream in a large nonreactive saucepan, and bring to a gentle boil. In a small mixing bowl, whisk the egg yolks together. Whisk 1 cup of the hot cream mixture into the egg mixture. In a slow, steady stream, add the egg mixture to the hot cream mixture. Continue to cook for 4 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Remove from heat and let cool completely. 3. Whisk the bourbon mixture into the cream mixture. Cover with plastic wrap, pressing the wrap down against the surface of the mixture to keep a skin from forming, and chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours. 4. Remove from the refrigerator, and pour the mixture into an ice-cream machine. Churn according to the manufacturer’s directions. For an extra kick, add a spoonful of bourbon over ice cream before serving.

That’s why learning a new language in old age is so good for improving and maintaining the memory generally. Because it requires intense focus, studying a new language turns on the control system for plasticity and keeps it in good shape for laying down sharp memories of all kinds.

say never start a story with a waking, but when you’ve been hard asleep for thirty years it’s difficult to know where else to begin. Start with a waking, end with a wake, maybe. Hard asleep is, I am informed, the technical term. Hard, because you’re shut down, dried out, frozen for the trip from star to star. They have it down to a fine art—takes eleven minutes, like clockwork. A whole ship full of miscreants who are desiccated down to something that can… well, I was about to say survive indefinitely, but that’s not how it goes, of course. You don’t survive. You die, but in a very specific flash-frozen way that allows for you to be restarted again more or less where you left off at the other end. After all the shunting about that would kill any body—the permanent, non-recoverable kind of kill—who wasn’t withered down. They pump you full of stuff that reinflates you to more or less your previous dimensions—you’ll note there’s a lot of more or less in this process. It is an exact science, just not one that cares about the exact you. Your thought processes don’t quite pick up where they left off. Short-term memory isn’t preserved; more recent mental pathways don’t make the cut. Start with a waking, therefore, because in that instant it’s all you’ve got, until you can establish some connection to older memories. You know who you are, but you don’t know where you are or how you got there. Which sounds terrifying but then let me tell you what you’re waking up into: actual hell. The roaring of colossal structural damage as the ship breaks up all around you. The jostling jolt as the little translucent bubble of plastic you’re travelling in is jarred loose and begins to tumble. A cacophony of vibration coming through the curved surface to you: the death throes of the vessel which has carried you all this way, out into the void, and is now fragmenting. There’s a world below that you know nothing about, not in your head right then. And above you are only the killing fields of space. The fact there’s a below and an above shows that the planet’s already won that particular battle over your soul and you’re falling.

From Graphic scene on a Plastic phone, To an Elastic heart of blood not stone Aching heart, emotion fearless, Psyche broken now I’m tearless Takes a while to sleep it out, May I be healed from all this drout If not by time and not by luck, I hope at least I won’t get stuck With this snapshot night and day, I wish to forget this memory.

She wasn’t anything. But I don’t believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing. This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a doughnut with plastic powder, had to have a memory or a dream.

Other studies show that plastic changes in the brain can even be observed after just a few months. For instance, in 2006, researchers imaged the brains of German medical students three months before their medical exam, and again right after the exam, and then compared the brains of these students to the brains of students who were not studying for the exam at this time. The results: Medical students’ brains showed changes in regions of the parietal cortex as well as in the posterior hippocampus. As you can probably guess, these regions are known to be involved in memory and learning.

Once, standing in an open space, he’d seen a commercial airliner pass overhead, on its way from one country to another, the sun golden upon its wings. It seemed incredible to him that there were people inside, drinking wine and eating from plastic trays, pressing a button for the hostess. Did they have any idea what was going on directly below them, a nation devouring itself? He felt like a drowning man watching a ship sail by.

There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind’s sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature’s plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic.

I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.

Sort pills. Write note to family. Fold blanket. I am alone. Alone in a dark, unfamiliar room filled with piles and piles of stuff, reminiscent of a neglected storage locker. I know researchers are observing me from behind one-way glass—that this is an experiment in empathy, that we are, in fact, on the sprawling campus of a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, that I can rip off the headphones at any moment and return to my present life, my real life—but this offers me no comfort. I can barely see through the goggles. My feet hurt. Every step is agony, the sharp plastic spikes digging into my soles. Sort pills. Write note to family. Fold blanket. I try to make out the shapes around me. I see an ironing board, a stack of sweaters. A ball of twine. My determination to cross items off any to-do list—always a strong suit of mine—feels slippery. Suddenly, I am a child playing hide-and-seek in the dark. Counting. Eyes squeezed shut. Terrified. Wondering if anyone will ever find me. Blanket. Pills. Note. I keep repeating the words like a prayer so I can remember them through the terrible din. The inside of my head is a needle against a scratched record, skipping, skipping. I feel my way around a cluttered table. A pill case! I try to pick it up. I barely feel it in the palm of my hand. After several tries, I get it open. Then I begin to sort the pills as best I can. Most of them spill to the floor, and I am suddenly, irrationally furious. I move around the table, supporting myself on my hands to take the pressure off my feet. I push an iron out of the way, a magazine, a wooden hanger. The notebook. I find the notebook. My gloved fingers won’t close around a pencil, so I hold it the way a child would, in my fist. By now it all feels nearly futile. I’m on the verge of tears. What is the last task? Through the static, I remember: the blanket. I have to fold it. By now I’m dizzy, depleted. What difference can it possibly make? Who cares? I do a shitty job of folding the blanket and then—then I just sit down in a chair and wait for M. to rescue me. —

Before we left the motel, Jeremy had spent alot of time making phone calls. Not that I understood what he doing. For whatever reason, I had holes in my memory such that I'd know perfectly well what a car or money was for, but objects like telephones and toilets were unfathomable mysteries. So, at the time, it seemed to me that Jeremy was spending a lot of time with a piece of plastic pressed against his ear, talking to himself. Which was fine by me. We all have our eccentricities. Jeremy liked talking to plastic; I liked hunting and eating the rats that ventured into the motel. Or, at least I did like hunting and eating the rats, until Jeremy caught me, and Jeremy caught me and promptly kibosh ed that . Some of us are less tolerant of eccentricities than others.

Look, maybe it’s none of those things or a combination of them. All I know for sure is if you don’t talk to him you’ll never know. Call him.” “I can’t—he hasn’t called me.” “So?” “So, I don’t want to be the one to call first—it’s too desperate,” I protested. “Will you listen to yourself? You’re a strong, independent woman—a supernatural creature with almost unlimited physical strength and immense magical capabilities and you’re acting like you’re back in high school,” she scoffed. “Excuse me,” I snapped. “I know it must seem stupid to you but this is complicated. I don’t want to chase after him if he doesn’t want me.” “Of course he wants you. He came after you even though he knew he was walking into a trap. Even though he was pretty sure he was going to die—he still came. And you…” Addison pointed at me with her white plastic spoon. “You came back from the freaking dead for him.” I frowned. “I don’t actually remember a whole lot of that.” “Well, Gwendolyn does. She said you were all set to go into the light—and by the way, you ought to tell your bigoted parents that because apparently vampires can go to Heaven. Anyway, you were almost past the pearly gates and she got you to come back by saying Victor’s name.” “She did?” I asked. I had vague, blurry images of a vast black pit filled with writhing things and the horror of falling… and then waking up in my own body. But that was as far as my memory went. Addison nodded. “You weren’t even going to come back for me, roomie—but you came for him. You came back for Victor.” She pushed her spoon back into the upside down banana split. “I can’t eat any more of this. I’m going to be sick.” “I didn’t know I was that far gone,” I said quietly. “I mean, I had some vague memories but I thought they were just dreams… nightmares.” “They were real,” Addison said shortly. “I didn’t want to talk to you about it because I didn’t want to think about how close… how close I came to losing you.” She sniffed dabbed at her eyes with another paper napkin. “Addison…” She cleared her throat, obviously trying to get control of her emotions. “I don’t know for sure but I got the impression that Gwendolyn risked a lot to bring you back—apparently, it’s kind of a big no-no to snatch someone from death’s door like that. But she wouldn’t have been able to do it if you weren’t willing to come. And the only reason you were willing was—” “Victor,” I finished for her, in a whisper. “Right.” She nodded decisively.

other, better, memories: making fried eggs with her dad, turning them over with a large black plastic spatula. “Not so fast, Molly Molasses,” he’d say. “Easy. Otherwise the eggs’ll go splat.

What if I took the picture books that my grandmother made and snapped open the rings in every binder, let the plastic pages spill out onto the floor, and then attacked them with my scissors? Those books, pasted together by my grandmother, year after year, replaced the cognitive exercise of memory for me. Sitting on a section of wall-to-wall carpeting, drinking the bubbling red birch beer from a tinted brown glass, I reestablished my relationships with the members of my family. This is where I put it all together and perpetuated the lies. Not malicious lies, but lies with so many years to develop that we forgot the truth because nobody rehearsed it. When Mark was sentence to sixty days in a twelve-step rehab program in 1991, he wrote an inventory of his experiences with drugs and alcohol that filled a whole notebook, and then he gave it to us to read, It was in those pages that I learned he had once tapped the powder out of horse tranquilizer capsules, melted it down, and shot it into his veins for a high that lasted fourteen days. My God, I thought, Oh my God. This is Mark's story? Okay, now put the cooked-down shot-up horse tranquilizer against the pictures in the album. What do you get? Collage. Dry made wet and introduced into the body. Cut cut cut. It's not so radical.

Christstollen. I can shake away thoughts of favorite gifts and trips to Oma's house and building snowmen with Santa hats every Christmas Eve, as long as enough snow covered the ground. But my mother's stollen won't fall off as easily. She made it for my father; he ate the first piece with cream cheese at breakfast while I had bacon and chocolate chip pancakes and my mother drank her special amaretto tea. The recipe is there, tucked in her recipe box, the index card translucent in places from butter stains. I hold it in my hand, considering, reading the ingredients and pawing through the cupboards and pantry. We have raisins and a bag of dried cranberries from last year's Christmas baking. There's a wrinkled orange in the fruit bin, a couple plastic packets of lemon juice that came with one of my father's fish and chips take-out orders. No marzipan, almonds, candied fruit, or mace. I'll be up all night. It's too much effort. But the card won't seem to leave my hand. So I start, soaking the fruit and preparing the sponge.