The way of the tau:

Or, courting the vagaries of the hippocampus

Darren Tofts

“It’s ok not to remember everything” (Hilde & Ylva Østby)

I had never heard of it. There was something mysterious about the term as well as very droll, being a studious gathering of the genus hippopotamidae, the collective noun for which is deliciously called a bloat. The hippocampus is a very small part of our body that we will in all probability never actually see, unless there is a reason to seek it out. Deeply embedded in the brain, the hippocampus is associated with and responsible for the healthy functioning of our memory. From the Latin it means “horse sea monster” and ancient Greek surgeons described it as being in the shape of a seahorse. Half horse, half fish, it is a weird hybrid. And as with any freak of nature there is every reason to presume that amnesia is always a possibility, a perversion of its equilibrium.

Like yin and yang it reconciles opposing forces within the body. Physiological problems, especially to do with memory, can go out of kilter and diminish the healthy functioning of vital somatic and physiological systems. Hilde and Ylva Østby in Adventures in Memory (2018) portray this in a vivid image, that of putting a seahorse “in a glass of formaldehyde”. Such processes include the accretion of amyloid plaques and tau proteins in the hippocampus. And tau is not to be confused with tao. Kwai Chang Caine in the 1970s TV show Kung Fu repeatedly mentioned that he “followed the way of the Tao”. The Tao in Chinese philosophy is the doctrine of vigilantly pursuing a path towards enlightenment, of understanding the true nature of the world. So for some time now I have also been following a path, the way of the tau. If only it was some perverse straying of the journey to wisdom and the pursuit of tranquility in daily life. It is something far less sublime. In fact it is a major pain in the arse, well, so to speak.

Having been diagnosed as a reluctant carrier of the tau, the speculations and hunches of my betters started to kick in, scratching their heads about what was going on in mine. I certainly had no idea. However while doing research for this text I came across information that really struck a chord. It really was one of Joyce’s epiphanies. Hilde and Ylva Østby suggest that head injuries are among the most serious threats not only to the brain but also memory. This was quite a revelation. No one had ever mentioned the connection over the years, well not that I can remember. But as it happens when I was nine I had a cerebral haemorrhage, having tripped over a dopey dog and hit the deck hard on a concrete path. It was touch and go for a time and a blood clot had to be removed from the right side of my head. The prospect that such a banal event may have contributed to a diminution of my memory was absolutely hysterical.

It’s worth noting too that growing up I was known as the forgetful member of the family and plenty of observations of this quirk were made, some certainly harsher than others. But the connection between aberrations in the body and memory loss became more intriguing when I read in Adventures in Memory that the neurons associated with memory are grown in the olfactory bulb in the nostrils. As long as I can remember I have had difficulty breathing through my nose. I had a septoplasty procedure years ago to clear them, but to no real effect. But what was even more surprising while writing this text was a link I found between memory loss and epilepsy. Now while I have never been diagnosed with that illness I have as long as I can remember had restless legs, which is distantly related to it. It is a hereditary condition and my mum had it as well as her dad. And at least one TV character I know of did, a girlfriend of Kramer’s in Seinfeld. His appellation for the condition is the “Jimmy legs” and accordingly he insists they sleep in separate beds after having sex.

One of the most revealing details highlighted by Hilde and Ylva Østby is that in cab drivers the posterior of the hippocampus is larger than the norm due to their “intense spatial training”. Thinking back on my own experience of marvelling at the deftness of cabbies wrangling the choked streets of Rome and Istanbul, this is of course obvious. But until recently I had never associated their mnemonic dexterity with the word hippocampus. Had I have known, would I have been so pretentious to tell them how much I admired theirs: “Signori, me ammiro il tuo ippocampo”. I don’t think so. But the opposite of such precision and control is the act of succumbing to chance, to random, unexpected moments of discovery. The Situationists, like Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire before them, wanted to get lost in the crowd, to go off grid not in search of anything, but rather simply give themselves up to happenstance, serendipity and what the streets may or not reveal. Their perambulatory drifts through cities were one of the first decisive blows of modernity, embracing chance and re-using and re-making the familiar, such as city laneways, rubbish heaped in a doorway, slaughterhouses and urinals. In this they highlighted the making of memories as indeterminate and disarming. When William S. Burroughs urged us to “exterminate all rational thought” in Naked Lunch, he imagined another kind of memory work that was alive to a type of delirium and chaos. It could be that the way of the tau may be seen as another instance of Burroughs’ desire to embrace the anomaly and the accident. It is a script not going to plan, like a head injury.

*

For years I had been fascinated with memory and my first book in 1998, with artist Murray McKeich, was Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (the launch of which I did actually remember to attend). It was concerned with such things as the emergence of the Internet and the Web as vast storage facilities of information, global memories and complex interconnections between them. Accordingly it was at the time among the first literary texts to critically engage with electronic networks that could remember more efficiently than us, much like the invention of writing had done. It also considered these new ecologies as the postmodern equivalent of ancient memory palaces and was very much written in the shadow of Frances Yates’ exhaustive study The Art of Memory (1966).

As I sit in scribbling in the garden, the birds are in full throttle, chattering to each other and clearly enjoying the sun. Listening to them represents for me a great opportunity for courting the Mondegreen, the misheard lyric of a song as something else, like Jimi Hendrix’s “’scuse me while I kiss this guy” or Queen’s “I sometimes wish I’d never been bored at all”. The most articulate one from the birds I have heard so far is “right you are, good”. Mishearing is in its own way a perverse form of memory loss, a way of compensating for what you think you are hearing, of twisting it into a shape that makes sense. It is a kind of semantic knot, similar to the protein “tangles” that form in the hippocampus and distort the clarity of memory. This “is it or isn’t it” quandary is strangely the dilemma of the replicants in Philip. K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The Blade Runner Deckard at one point asks their maker William Tyrell “how can it not know what it is?” In this instance he is speaking of Rachael Rosen, a replicant programmed to believe she is human. Tyrell’s response is chilling: “I think it’s better that way”. When they suspect that they may not be human and their memories are probably fake, as Rachel does, they are stripped of the brittle veneer of identity and belief. This is the moment of existential horror that Søren Kierkegaard called dread. And for any writer certain words carry unavoidable memories that have clung hard to them over years, much like tau plaques. One such word for me is Kierkegaard. But not because it is the name of the Danish philosopher. In Monty Python’s 1970 sketch about the Piranha Brothers, Kierkegaard is a shady, menacing figure seated in a “conversation pit” with a group of undesirables, among them someone called Charles Paisley the “Baby Crusher”. Kierkegaard keeps to himself in silence, biting the heads off whippets.

Which obliquely brings me back to seahorses. Maybe it’s something to do with their lithe body, small head and long tail, kind of like a whippet. And there is something wistful about a seahorse as a creature so small that is named after another much bigger. Belonging to the genus actinoptergii, the ray-finned fish has a very old mythological forebear in Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. And it is the male that carries the fertilised eggs to birth. They radiate the aura of otherness, like mermaids, flying horses, the centaur and the sirin of Russian mythology, a bird with the head of a woman. As I was sourcing some of the previous chimera in Google a paragraph in one entry was broken by an ad: “5 herbs shield for dementia”. I know I am being monitored and surveilled when searching stuff, that my taste, choice and preferences are gathered and pushed by bots, the unseen stalkers of data we never see. They really shit me and I just try to ignore them. I had seen it before and thought it a bit obvious, twee, an afternoon’s labour of love for some slick designer wearing a black turtle neck sweater and Hush Puppies. But this time it made me pause and really look at it.

It is suggestive of some kind of cerebral explosion, a figurative image of memory loss. Highly compelling, it dramatises the agon of trying to retain that thought, word or idea that is disappearing at light speed just as you are about to write or utter it. Despite my initial indifference, I saw something else in it that was vaguely familiar. Then it hit me. This image was an avatar of the male seahorse, the hippocampus itself, carrying and protecting its mate’s eggs. And their memories of what is to come.

*

A final thought from the Tao. In an episode of Kung Fu, Quai Chang Caine is feeling troubled (which was quite common). He has just witnessed violence in the market-place and wonders why men fight. He tells Master Po that he wants “all men to know peace”. Po responds with his proverbial wisdom:

It is written in the Tao Te Ching, ‘Under heaven, all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil. Therefore, having and not having arise together. Difficult and easy complement each other. High and low rest upon each other. Front and back follow one another’.

This could be read as a figurative conclusion to this text, capturing enlightening thoughts from an ancient religion about how to live with that which is unpleasant, frightening and unknowable. And also an adage for mindfulness, like “amnesia is difficult but it doesn’t have to be”, or “live well with memory loss”. But such a reading really takes us along a path of digressions into sophistry, self-healing and resolution. Of course I’m being provocative and cynical. But what it really misses in its happy-happy, joy-joy view of the world is that diversions from paths in nature can also be shit. The only way forward is to grin and wear it, embrace it and find the humour in its absurdity. And while doing so, if you listen very hard you may hear the voice of Ian Dury, the man who contracted polio as a kid and lived with a limp all his life. With a knowing glint in his eye he gravelly drawls, “look at them laughing”.

What a load of bollocks.

Bio Note:

Darren Tofts still thinks he is a writer who lives in Reservoir.