Save It in Your Mind

Audio-visual equipment is cool. We can immortalize almost everything. But there's a hidden cost. I think cameras and camcorders, intended to enrich our memories, impoverish them with excessive use. I think we're relying on audio-visual gadgets too much, and are letting the subtler flavors of our experiences pass us by.

I spend lots of my time in South Miami Beach, a community that attracts tourists from all over the world. Images of pastel hotels, turquoise seas, and skimpy bathing suits must grace enough film and tape to reach from the earth to the sun. But no one has yet filmed or taped the smell of the tidewater on a rainy day.

One summer morning, I swim a mile in the glassy, cyan Atlantic. As I emerged, I met the expressionless gaze of a camcorder. I was the subject of its focus. I did not mind; I was looking and feeling all right. I could imagine the narrator mouthing in some foreign tongue to relatives at some time-space-distant gathering: "... and here is how the native lifeforms obtain exercise." Did the cameraperson tape the chill of the water on my skin, the tang of salt on my tongue, or the rush of endorphins that went all through me? I think not. How about the fish that had swum alongside me, pacing me, perhaps a pilot fish thinking I was a shark, looking at me with that fishy look that only fish have? The future tape-watchers would have to content themselves with the sight of my aging little body. Oh, maybe they'll think it's cute, the little swimmer and his little butt. Big deal.

A memory comes to mind now, something that could never have been adequately preserved on film or videotape. I'm glad I didn't try. It will never get old. I still dream about it. It was a multidimensional experience that defied, and always will defy, reproduction in any electronic form.

When Hurricane Andrew bore down on South Florida, I evacuated my oceanfront condominium and went to stay with friends in Homestead. (I thought the storm would veer northwest. It didn't.) In my haste, I forgot my camera, and what is worse, my barometer.

During the passage of the storm's eyewall, that donut-shaped whorl of tornadic winds, the air probed underneath the house and tried to turn it over. I could feel it as I sat on the hardwood floor, arms around my knees. It sounded and felt like riding in a train whose engineer had gone mad. No electronic audio-visual hardware could have captured that. And while the sounds of the objects smacking against the outer walls of the house might be recorded, the fear of being hit by some huge piece of debris, which could smash the house to bits in an instant, could not. While the green lightning flashes that lit up the single tiny window that remained uncovered could perhaps have been photographed, the feeling that we were in the midst of an otherworldly tempest, of Biblical proportions physical and spiritual, could not.

In the morning, when we all clambered out of the house, the world smelled like dead, wet wood. We couldn't take a picture or a recording of that! But it will be in my memory for the rest of my life. If I'd been fiddling with a camera or camcorder, I might have missed the smell a hurricane leaves behind.

A few slash pines still stood, badly damaged. In Andrew's backside squalls, these 100-foot-tall trees swayed like staffs of wheat in a summer breeze. Trees ten stories high, as big around as you, denuded as if burned, bowed down before a gale I would have thought violent the previous day. But compared to the hurricane at full force, this fuzzy squall was nothing. We stood in the blown-out doorway watching, listening, breathing. The ghost of the woods breathed with us. No tape could capture its sighs. No electronic equipment could replicate the sense of having leaped through a time gate into an age that motivated some ancient prophet to write, "... and His winds will strip the forests bare ..."

I had no camera. There was no camcorder around. I was forced to soak the event up with my gray matter alone, knowing I might never witness anything like that again. Andrew was a catastrophe, as photographs testify. I don't wish to trivialize people's losses. But intense hurricanes have wondrous grandeur. To learn and remember this, electronic devices are of no value whatsoever.

We all rememember sunsets. I have my special days' ends tucked away in ten dimensions, in that maze of organic microchips between my ears. I can be in those places and times again whenever I want, for free. They're stored in my mind.

One July (many years ago, I confess), I lolled with my mate in the water at Fort Myers Beach, the orange sun sliding into the sea behind us and a full moon asserting its reign over the palms before us, while fish nibbled at our feet in the tepid brine. Another time, I hiked with friends to a hilltop near Tucson, Arizona, and saw the shadows of hills on other hills, whose shadows painted hills beyond them, whose shadows painted hills beyond them. We stayed on after the sun went down, and beheld the umbra of Earth's shadow rising in the east over the brown land. There will never be a machine that can duplicate moments like that. Never.

I will tell stories of my travels and experiences to my nephews, to my children if I ever have any, and certainly to friends along the journey of life. I have very few photos, and no tapes at all. A photo might be worth a thousand words, and a videotape worth a hundred thousand; but they are shallow. Words have power in the absence of pictures, as you know if you have ever enjoyed a great novel, or read a bedtime story to a sleepy child.

I don't mean to condemn all videos. They can enhance our memories. "Here are Ted and Sally with the fish they caught." "Here we are trying to windsurf without wind." The key is moderation, an art we Americans aren't terribly good at. When I see someone taping a pool with nobody in the water, I think it's ridiculous. But of course, if people really enjoy that sort of thing, okay.

In our zeal for the tangible, are we letting our powers of mental recall atrophy? Will future generations lack it altogether? I hope not! The loss would far outweigh the gain.

Next time you go on a trip to some exotic place, take your video apparatus. But take your senses too. Cameras and camcorders have uses -- and limitations. Don't miss the miracle that happens when you embrace an experience with your whole self. It's a cosmic story, a yarn that is spun only once. Watch. Listen. Smell, taste, feel it! Let your mind and body drink it in. It doesn't cost anything, you don't need to carry any hardware, and the memory will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 by Francisco Carrera.