City Life, from evie 22′s Flickr photostream

I keep threatening to write a Manifesto for Monotaskers, but I can never find the time to give it my undivided attention. You think I’m kidding. I’m not.

For a very long time – since I first heard the word used, by a busy friend in front of her computer, as it happens, in the early 1990s – I have been deeply suspicious of multitasking. Suspicious of the speed at which modern urban life is hurtling. Suspicious of what would happen to us if we, ever so gradually — barely noticing the loss it would be so gradual — ceased to truly, madly, deeply engage in what we were doing.

Oh, I know what some of you are going to say, since parts of me think that way, too. We rush through the insignificant stuff, we say, so that we can dwell on the significant stuff. To hasten our arrival at the significant stuff, we habituate ourselves to a life of frequent if not constant haste, and to the use of various labor- or time-saving devices. And yet these very aids often draw us into a kind of Sisyphean relationship with them, in which the time potentially saved by the device is quickly squandered on learning how to use it, or yet another labor- or time-saving device. For all our devices, not enough of us feel as though we have time to dwell on the significant stuff. Folks still feel as busy or busier than ever. And all of this presumes that there was something terribly wrong with paying attention to the labor itself in the first place, something wrong with paying attention for its own sake.

In the fall of 1999, I read with interest Barabara Ehrenreich’s review of James Gleick’s Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. The review was so intelligent I felt I didn’t really need to get the book. Plus I didn’t feel I had the time to read it. Don’t worry, Ehrenreich acknowledges that in the opening sentences of her piece:

You don’t have time to read the book so you read the review. If you’re a publishing honcho, you probably don’t even have time to read the review; you pay some underling to skim it for quotable adjectives and phrases to insert in the ad copy.

One of the gists of the book (according to the reviews I’ve read, and the excerpts I’ve skimmed!) is that that technological advances are shrinking the time it takes to facilitate ever so much – communication, movement through space from hither to yon, you name it – and yet the human body hasn’t changed all that much over the millennia. Its durability has not increased at the pace everything else has; the time it takes an impulse to travel through all the neurons and dendrites to and from the brain is not in the process of speeding up, even over the course of a few more millennia, at anywhere near the rate your personal computer has sped up over the course of a decade. But here’s why I like Ehrenreich on Gleick and speed, more than I’m tempted to directly read Gleick on speed:

So is it a good thing — this multiple-interfacing, hyper-wired, globalized, caffeine-driven, profit-maximizing, millions-of-bits-per-second whatever that we’re caught up in? Over all, Gleick thinks yes, though this means gliding right past questions like what’s become of our attention spans or whether we’re really better off with 500 channels of incoming information if they’re all about Monica.

In the September 2006 issue of First Monday, David M. Levy published an intriguing essay extending these concerns. In “More, Faster, Better: Governance in an Age of Overload, Busyness, and Speed,” Levy articulates an “environmentalism for the information age,” one which cultivates “sanctuaries in time and space.”

Without adequate time to think and reflect, time to listen, and time to cultivate our humanity, and without spaces that are protected from the constant intrusion of information and noise, I do not see how we can respond to the innumerable social and political challenges of the new millennium with the quality of attention they deserve. In order to rectify this state of affairs, I will suggest that we take steps to design spaces and times for reflection and contemplation. Much as the modern–day environmental movement has worked to cultivate and preserve certain natural habitats, such as wetlands and old growth forests, for the health of the planet, so too should we now begin to cultivate and preserve certain human habitats for the sake of our own well–being.

Sunday’s Washington Post piece about Joshua Bell’s commute-hour buskery provides illustration both of one of the most corrosive diseases of our age – chronic obsession with speed and efficiency – and its antidote: a potential space and time that could have been used for contemplation or reflection. Of course one of the ironies of the situation is that so many of the hurried and harried commuters were working to filter out the excessive influx of words and images and sounds that conspire to overwhelm. It’s just that one of those sounds might have helped mitigate the welter of others.

In my bit on it the other day, I asked folks whether they would have been more or less inclined to stop and listen for a while if they had a kid with them. I’ll admit I can’t say how long I would have lingered, but I’m pretty sure I would have stopped. My own inclinations notwithstanding – as it happens, I’m quite predisposed to ambling along with scant regard for time and a high regard for violinists, wherever they may be found (can’t help it; mom was one) – the main point is that, like several of you who commented on the piece, I’d slow down and stop for my kids. If job or daycare or whatever it was could at all bear the delay, I’d slow down and stop for my kids.

I would do this (A) Because showing musicians that courtesy is something I’d like to get them in the habit of. (B) Because the bigger of our kids is already clearly quite musical, and the little one smiled all the way through my bad pennywhistle concert the other night on the changing table. So I figure they’d love it. And (C) Because slowing down and stopping for my kids, whenever it’s humanly possible, looks to me to be the ticket to the good life, near as I can tell.

We had a fire, okay, not a fire, but a whirr-click-whine! whirrr-click-whine! sound that repeated itself for, as we now learn, a devastatingly long period of time. That’s because the sound was emanating from our computer’s external hard drive, where we store all the essentials we’d grab if there actually were a fire, after we had already grabbed the living creatures and the box I keep at my meditation altar that contains locks of my mother’s hair and trinkets my nephew gave me. The digital valuables in the hard drive consisted of countless precious documents, hundreds of scanned-in and dozens of purchased albums of music, and, most important, tons and tons and tons of pictures. Into the thousands of ‘em. Mostly the faces of people and creatures we love, some of whom can’t be photographed any more, all of whom are no longer what they were when they were photographed over the past few years.

Did we backup? Not enough, is the short answer.

A lot of the music is recoverable, thanks to the Know-It-All-Brother-In-Law (aka the KIABIL), who lives downstairs, and who takes proper care of our two households’ digitally intertwined collective music library. But for sure, no documents were backed up. Also no photographs since late last year, when in a pre-birth nesting fit, I backed up every digital photo I’d taken in the previous several years. After Christmas Eve, though, and up until what’s on the CF card in my camera now, everything goes dark. Pre-birth, birth, post-birth, infancy ’til now. The last months of my dog.

More massive works of art and memory have been lost much more violently, of course. Ralph Ellison’s long-awaited follow-up to Invisible Man was burned to cinders in a fire at his Massachussetts home in 1967; he was famously devastated, and the work, Juneteenth, was published only posthumously after years of reconstructive surgery (and some imaginative supposition) by his literary executor. Maxine Hong Kingston had worked two years on a novel, The Fourth Book of Peace. One hot, dry October day in 1991 she returned home from her father’s funeral to find her neighborhood in flames. The manuscript and all the notes that led to it were incinerated, along with her home and the homes of thousands of other families on that Oakland hillside. Twenty five people died in the Oakland hills fire, too, the loss of life only compounded by the loss of its signs: objects, products of a life’s work, triggers for memory. (Consider this effort by one group of New Orlineans to reconstruct memory in Katrina’s wake.)

Soon after my girlie Max died – I mean minutes, I mean when we stepped out of the late-night emergency pet clinic, where we finally had to take her – I began the familiar process of making the absent present. Or trying to. Looked at the weeds growing at the base of the light pole that she had sniffed not more than two hours before. Imagined the sway of her body as she walked from scent to scent along the sidewalk there. Felt the act of remembering begin to supplant the experience of being in the presence of. At home, everyday objects inevitably began to take on a talismanic significance: her collar, the inside of which is coated with the accumulated schmutz of years of her body oils. Her leash, still hanging by the door and certain to stay there for I don’t know how long; her bed, by my bedside still. The photographs I look to again and again. Now, too, the small cedar box of her ashes, which I picked up from the vet’s just a few days ago.

As soon as a year after my mother’s death, I began to dread the sensation that my memories were fading from direct memories of her into memories of my memories. It was the worst kind of simulacrum, in which the only things I would retain of my mother would be the memories that made the cut, the habituated recollections. The smell of her, the sound of her, her gestures, even, would now return to me only when triggered randomly by another smell, or a sound, or a gesture. At the time, I lamented this slippage of memory nearly as much as I lamented the loss of her. Another bittersweet paradox: time may help heal the wounds of loss, but often it does so by obscuring the very things one misses so dearly. Or at the least, by draping a gauzy haze over them.

Says the narrator, in the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (in its entirety in the public domain, here):

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Maybe we’ll name the next external hard drive “Chance.”

As for Maxine Hong Kingston: she couldn’t return to the book she had written before the fire. Didn’t want to. She said, in an interview with folks at Powell’s Books in late 2003:

My way of writing is that I always have to be exploring. I’m always going into new territory. To just look back and try to remember what the old words were, it just would not be right. I had a chance to remember the old book. I have a former student who became a hypnotherapist; he wanted to hypnotize me, and then I would recall the computer screen and just read off the words. I thought that was the scariest thing because I would be caught in an old version and I’d only be using recall memory not remembering events, but remembering something word for word.

What she wrote next was a hybrid fiction/non-fiction work which she titled The Fifth Book of Peace. Where The Fourth Book of Peace ended with the fire, The Fifth Book of Peace takes that event as its narrative jumping-off point.

Compared to the loss of an entire home, much less people in it, or buildings and the people in them, or the better part of a city and a geographical region, the unrecoverable files on our defunct hard disk begin to assume their correct proportion. We don’t have pictures of the son being born; instead we have the son. We don’t have the digital record of ideas and work that we’ve churned up over the years using this computer; instead we have ourselves.

Not that we asked for it, but aesceticism does have its rewards.

Kingston said, in a May 2004 conversation in WaterBridge Review:

After the fire, I didn’t want things. At about age 50, I began to scheme to give things away — and I do this more urgently as I get older. I have to connive to get people to take my stuff. Everybody has too much stuff. I love that cartoon where the Dalai Lama opens an empty gift box and says, “Nothing! Just what I’ve always wanted.”