Last month I picked up a few books at Spoonbill and Sugartown, a fine bookseller in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a neighborhood where I jokingly “vacation” because I’m rarely there but it’s sunny, calm, and beautiful when I show up, and among the paperbacks I selected was the volume “A Dictionary of Art and Artists” by Peter and Linda Murray. The book was published in 1968 and alphabetically outlines the contributions of some major and many, many more minor European and American artists whose names have been long forgotten since the 12th century onward. I used to see myself as the guardian of bygone infomation, relishing a 1963 publication of Bartlett’s familiar quotations, featuring quotes long-dissipated into the ether by so-and-sos also long dead, or a mathbook of advanced geometry from the 1930s, or thoughts of reading lists and curriculums of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, all of these compendiums revealing the ideal knowledge bases of the time at which the book was published. In general, I am interested in what people know and how they came to know it. This extends to an understanding of who and what comprises the cultural memory at any given time. History only saves but so many names, and usually the achievements of the remembered are tersely described. To be certain, collecting old compendiums can contribute to this understanding: read enough compendiums and you might end up with good context for understanding a particular era, movement, decade, or philosophy. But, personally, this guardianship didn’t seem so urgent anymore given several new ways of thinking.
Encyclopedias, thesauri, and almanacks were the beginning of thinking “neurally”, the mediums encourage cross-reference within its pages and engender curousity. (I know I’m not the only one who read dictionaries when I was young.) But, to remain relevant, the information had to be up to date. In the 1970s and 1980s publishers offered an annual “yearbook” volume of current meaning and events, for culturally, no one was expected to purchase a brand new encyclopedia set each year. A set of encyclopedias represented the most basic body of knowledge a family needed to know throughout the course of its lifetime. Today we have Wikipedia and other online resources, and information is much less standardized and accessed randomly and sometimes in much lesser detail.
Since buying that book, I have experienced mental episodes of “constant refresh”: where old information (X) replaces new (X+a few minutes) of its own accord, like a homepage, wiping clean whatever brilliant idea was before it, and replacing it with something anew, rendering the initial idea completely lost. It’s occured to me that maybe this phenomenon, with its off-setting amnesia, will occur only throughout the creative process or during key points of individual growth and advancement. However, I suggest, in this age, where people are acquiring and processing concepts in such a rapid manner, amid this climate of unending content and constant access to information, the constant refresh is a physiological adaptation for handling new ideas at all. Some spiritual lexicons might define this refresh function as a shift to the “Now” as we reach new levels of understanding. However it may take form I am interested in the human mind and how we will employ our intellect in the future. If we adapt to a global “constant refresh” of ideas and meaning and aesthetics, the old stuff of yesterday’s compendiums will not matter; they will disappear, be gone. The question I asked myself, can the “old stuff” turn up in our thinking anyway, can it be accessed, shall it impress itself elsewhere upon our psyche?
I believe it will. I believe in the importance of context and understanding cultural memory, and through this, the old stuff will be drawn upon, if not by name, unconsciously through a subliminal body of reference. Compendiums inspire. I believe societies should share a comprehensive practical knowledge base of the past in order to intellectually contextualize the present and future. This week a friend’s high school students estimated the Emancipation Proclamation was written in the 1950s, and gauged that at least half of the United States population was black: without a solid knowledge base we are lost. People also share a long visual memory of symbols, photographs, tableaus, and icons, be it nooses or blackface, that inspire our actions, choices, and expression. Unearthing and uprooting the subtext to our thinking and behavior only clears the path for new ideas. A constant refresh can only replace information we needn’t know as it’s no longer pertinent to our evolution, but not the information we still need to work through.
