The Salt-Box

This is the year-in-review playlist for the boy, who turned 6 this week.  (See this post at GeekDad for background.)

1. “Constructive Summer,” The Hold Steady
2. “3 Dimes Down,” Drive-By Truckers
3. “Livin’ in the Future,” Bruce Springsteen
4. “The Spike,” Junkman’s Choir
5. “Meet Me By the River’s Edge,” The Gaslight Anthem
6. “Radio Nowhere,” Bruce Springsteen
7. “A Well-Respected Man,” The Kinks
8. “Wide Blue Yonder,” Junkman’s Choir
9. “Ask Her for Some Adderall,” The Hold Steady
10. “Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is in Another Castle,” The Mountain Goats w/ Kaki King
11. “Tire Swing,” Kimya Dawson
12. “Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife,” Drive-By Truckers
13. “Back to School Again,” Ken Sheldon
14. “All I Want Is You,” Barry Louis Polisar
15. “7 8 9,” Barenaked Ladies
16. “Happy Home (Keep On Writing),” Kimya Dawson
17. “Pop Fly,” Justin Roberts
18. “Outfit,” Drive-By Truckers
19. “Sleigh Ride,” R2-D2 & C-3PO

Like THS say, “the sing-a-long songs’ll be our scriptures.”

Thinking about the infinite distractions of contemporary affluent life, Laura Miller glosses Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, thus:

Your very self, “stored in your memory,” is the product of what you pay attention to, since you can’t remember what you never noticed to begin with.  [Via Andrew Sullivan.]

Much depends here on what “remember” and “notice” mean, I guess, but this doesn’t sound right.  There’s a certain sense in which it’s clearly true: some kinds of intellectual content, for example, you probably need to become aware of before you can remember them.  (This is why, in class or in a paper, it helps to make something a problem.)

But the experience of sustained intimacy, whether based on families, love relationships, or friendships, suggests a host of exceptions: The experience of not being aware of something until it’s gone is proverbial.  There’s also a different kind of memory: The lived memory of habit and attitude, built up reflexively, and sometimes non-consciously (avoiding unconscious here to forestall a distracting argument about Freud, who’s probably relevant here).  When you first live with another person, and they ask “how come you always X?”–the reason is a kind of memory.  Sometimes it’s explicit–”In my house, we *always* puree the cat for dinner, never breakfast.”  But lots of times it just reflects the built-up years of making largely unreflective inferences about people, based on hints and guesses.

We can also borrow Wordsworth: “the best portion of a good man’s life” are his “little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love.”

In the main, I agree with Miller (and Gallagher, as presented by her): attention matters.  After all, Wordsworth recoils from the busy city streets into communion with nature.  But I’m not as sanguine about collapsing selfhood into “things we’ve consciously noticed.”