Sufficient to the Day

I take a lot of pictures.  I am old enough to have spent thousands of dollars on film and photo developing over three decades, from my late single digits up until about the age of 35.  While I was an early adopter of the iPhone in June 2007, my film photos trailed off almost four years before that, when I purchased my first digital camera of any quality.  Without the expense of film and developing, the number of photos I have taken has vastly increased, but I have printed very few.

I have become obsessed with backing up my digital photos, however, and copies exist on our iMac, a backup drive attached to the iMac, my iPhone, my iPad, Apple’s iCloud service, and Google Photos.  Many, of course, are also on Facebook (though, for a variety of reasons, I don’t consider that a reliable backup).  My current count of digital photos is 53,874, and that’s after a recent effort to clear out thousands of duplicates, near duplicates, and misfires.

I go through periods when I force myself to quit snapping photos of significant events or of places that we visit so that I can live entirely in the moment, but those phases never last.  While I always try to strike a balance, there’s a reason I am an obsessive photo-taker (though hardly a photographer, since that implies a level of skill that, alas, I’ve never developed).  My photos are my visual memory.  My aphantasia, my complete inability to visualize anything outside of dreams (which I have discussed in recent columns), has left me, the older I get, with a fear of losing forever the faces and places most dear to me.

Throughout much of the 20th century, it was not unusual for a young man to carry a photo of the girl he loved in his wallet.  (Today, he can, and usually does, keep many such photos on his iPhone.)  For me, it was a necessity, and not simply a sign of devotion.  In the summers of our college years, and in the two years between our graduation from Michigan State and our marriage, Amy’s high-school graduation picture kept her present to me in a way that (I did not realize at the time) most other young men did not need.

But since the fact that I could not (and still cannot) visualize Amy’s face is not a problem inherent to her but to me, the same obviously applies to all other women I have known.  There’s something comforting about letting old girlfriends and passing crushes literally fade away, and being able to give my full attention to the woman who consented (God knows why) to be my wife and the mother of our children.  Midlife crises, I suspect, are rather rare among those afflicted with aphantasia.  Living in the present, though, is quite easy, since the past is dark, and so is the future.

When my son Jacob first brought aphantasia to my attention a little over a year ago, my initial bewilderment at the reality that virtually everyone else can (with more or less clarity) conjure up actual images was followed by a bit of despair.  Why had God allowed me to be afflicted with this?  Today, I look at it a bit differently: I live a charmed life.

What could be better than to wake up every morning in the same house, to walk the same streets, to see the same sights, to meet the same people, and yet, in a very real sense, to experience them all once again for the first time?  I smile a lot, and always have, and now I know why.  I’m Bill Murray in the latter part of Groundhog Day, with the difference that time hasn’t stopped for me.

It’s all too easy to live life caught between the regrets of the past and fantasies of the future.  I can’t visualize either, but I fall prey to regrets and fantasies, too.  That’s not the way we were meant to live, however, and the serpent is the only one who wins when we let ourselves be pulled out of the moment with promises of a future that can never be, or despair over a past that can only truly be healed by the saving work of Christ Himself.

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.  Are ye not much better than they? . . . But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.  Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.

“All that was in the past,” Joseph Stalin once told Winston Churchill, “and the past belongs to God.”  Which just goes to prove that you can take the dictator out of the seminary, but you can’t erase the law of God from even the most depraved of human hearts.

First published in the May 2019 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Returning to Earth

What lies at the root of the abstractionism that I discussed last month, which afflicts the modern world like a mania, especially here in the United States?  Walker Percy dubbed the phenomenon angelism, by which he did not mean that those who exhibit it have evolved to a state of moral purity but that we have individually and collectively cut ourselves loose mentally from the ties that bind us to the world and the people around us.  And yet (for reasons that should be obvious) we have not been able, through such abstraction, to overcome the limitations that are inherent in human life and the material world.  Stymied by our inability to overcome those limitations, we have come increasingly to despise the world and our place in it.  And so our response is not to become more human but less so, as Percy’s Dr. Tom More put it so clearly in Love in the Ruins almost 50 years ago:

For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man.  Even now I can diagnose and shall one day cure: cure the new plague, the modern Black Death, the current hermaphroditism of the spirit, namely: More’s syndrome, or: chronic angelism-bestialism that rives soul from body and sets it orbiting the great world as the spirit of abstraction whence it takes the form of beasts, swans and bulls, werewolves, blood-suckers, Mr. Hydes, or just poor lonesome ghost locked in its own machinery.

Walker Percy did not live to see the rise of social media (he died in 1990), but the various forms that social media have taken and the conduct they have engendered among so many of their users would not have surprised him.  For all of the potential that social media have to draw people closer together, to rekindle ties with old friends and relatives, to keep us rooted in one another and therefore in the communities in which we are mutually a part, in practice they have all too often enabled the opposite: Social media allow us to engage in flights of fancy, to escape from the reality of our lives by imagining ourselves (consciously or even unconsciously) to be someone different, or even just to cast aside the manners and mores that are essential to civilized life in an actual community.

There have been dozens of investigative articles over the past several years on the phenomenon of “trolling”—people exhibiting behavior toward others with whom they interact online that would, in face-to-face encounters, skirt the line of diagnosable sociopathy, or even cross over it.  A common theme runs through all of them: When trolls meet the reporters, they behave much differently in person.  They are frequently shy, almost invariably polite, and express hurt when the reporters ask them about their actions online in tones that imply condemnation or disapproval.  The reporters themselves experience cognitive dissonance—they expect to dislike, even hate, the trolls but find themselves liking and even sympathizing with them.

The behavior exhibited by trolls looks increasingly like one extreme of a broader phenomenon that afflicts an ever-wider swath of users of social media, and I don’t mean just white nationalists and “social-justice warriors” on Twitter.  More and more of us find it both easy and a relief to create identities on social media that do not reflect the reality of our everyday lives—even if we use our own names.  (And I use us here not as a rhetorical device but as a recognition that I have strayed in this direction myself over the years before recognizing that I had loosed the bonds of earth and needed to return to reality.)

Were Walker Percy still alive, I suspect he would see in this parallels to the psychological condition of dissociation.  With our increasing use of social media (and other electronic media, such as email and texts) as a substitute for the hard reality of dealing with flesh-and-blood human beings, we create alternative unrealities that consume more and more of our attention and consciousness until, one day, we look in the mirror and no longer recognize the man we see there.  We become strangers to ourselves, but the ghosts we have created through our abstraction can never truly replace the creatures that God has made us to be.  Bound by time and ties to people and place, we have only two options: keep raging against reality and losing our true self in the process, or start recovering that true self by accepting the limitations inherent in it, and returning to earth.    

First published in the April 2019 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.