Mild Ben Lerner spoilers ahead, don’t read if you don’t want!
I’ve recently gotten back on my bicycle after a few months away, months where I was neglectful of my pleasures because I was busy and thought it was best to prioritize other things. It was a foolish mistake. My bicycle is very beautiful. It’s lithe and monochrome, a pliant, delicate sculpture that is light enough for me to carry through my door on my shoulder and down the steps. It’s been with me for several years. It has laid next to me on the grass, gone down to the beach with me, taken long train rides on far-away locales.
I was feeling particularly grateful for it this month after an hourlong ride to the Cross Island Parkway in Queens, where there is a bike path that trails along the side of the highway. On the left-hand are fast-moving cars; on the right is a reedy, tall-grain marsh and the Little Neck Bay. At brief, cut-out points, the Whitestone Bridge, embezzled and tall and imposing. Little gnats fly around like stars, and people walk, run, canoodle. On the day I was there, an old woman was facing the water doing Tai Chi, stand-still traffic bleating behind her. It is a place that represents everything that I find moving about Queens, how we seek pleasure in every corner of the borough despite it all.
I had ridden over from an aunt’s place in Flushing, an hour-long ride, an hour of the brush of concrete against my tires and the clicking of my chain as I released my brakes, and I felt, in some way, like I had said something that had been unspoken and lodged somewhere in my heart. What had I said? I couldn’t tell you. But I have since started to develop a small theory of this, and it involves subvocalization.
A bicycle, for me, is a literary device. I am sure it is something else for others, especially my friends who carry theirs around everywhere like appendages that they can hop onto at any moment. I use my bicycle like a special notebook that records the sounds that emerge as my tires jump over stones and skid over soil. I can hear the bicycle in my body; my hands grip the handlebars, there is a sensation that emerges from the base of my feet as I pedal, I am finding myself leaning forward or back when there is a hill.
All of this, I imagine, is a little like subvocalization, which refers to the sounds that emerge from the near-silent process that goes on as we internally recite words to ourselves as we read or write. I enjoy what N. Katherine Hayles says in How We Became Posthuman: that the body’s reaction to suppressed sound deeply influences how we read, and this reaction can compete, and even replace, the inner monologue that many of us have running. I think this is why I never feel alone when I ride my bike. Strange as it might sound, the experience of riding is a voice of sorts, the movement of the bicycle subvocalized inside my body.
Except one sad thing—there is no way of recording what I am experiencing.
I finished Ben Lerner’s Transcription last week, his newest novella comprised of three sections. The first follows a man who is off to interview his mentor and breaks his phone; he lies to his mentor, tells him he still has it, and doesn’t record the interview. This is a man who is preoccupied with the very concept of recording. When he lies to his mentor, it is as if he’s not able to tell the truth about what he—or, maybe, his mentor—really believes, which is that his brain has its own recording technology and he thinks it’s pretty good. The brain is different from a phone recorder and captures different things—the conversation that is written in the first section is meandering, at times nonsensical, hard-to-tell who is saying what—but memory is a recording device tuned to its own unique frequencies.
And aren’t, for example, flowers also recording the world in their own ways, with their incredible and delicate ears for vibration? Those “recording instruments of exquisite sensitivity; their glass anthers captured someone pouring a glass of water, the turning of a page”?
The second follows the protagonist speaking at an event about this fabulous recorded conversation with his mentor, who has since passed. Afterwards, he reveals to his friend that he’s lied about recording.
The third involves the protagonist speaking with his mentor’s son. They talk about technology, as well as the mentor’s granddaughter, whose relationship with eating and technology—the floodgates have been opened, unboxing videos abound—he has started to worry about.
At some point, the son shares a story about a time where his father does not remember an event that they shared. “I do not recall that. The virus has robbed me,” the father said at the time. The son is still frustrated at this event—his father is editing the memory, completely breaking the rules of the record. It doesn’t matter if there is any documentation of the moment—his father’s body has made it so it doesn’t exist.
N. Katherine Hayles has another distinction that’s been useful for me: “incorporated” versus “inscripted.” The former refers to behavior that has become part of a body; the latter refers to behavior that has been turned into information so it can be moved from place to place. As in, the difference between eating a single meal from a cook who knows a recipe by-mind, fluently, and the recipe that has traveled across the internet.
The latter is information. It is removed from a body and can be shared across mediums, can be text, can be video. The first is incorporation. Incorporation is possible in a single body, and each dish will be specific to a single moment in time. Incorporation is, as Hayles describes, a deep part of the body, resistant to change, and partially screened from conscious view. Incorporated material changes from instance to instance; my bicycle ride is long gone, never to return again. Incorporated material changes, like with Lerner’s protagonist’s mentor, whose recording abilities change as his body ages. What is incorporated is anti-information.
Which brings me to the same conclusion I had earlier this month, which I haven’t quite moved past. Moments that disappear are what make us human, different from machines. I think trying to record those moments really is literature’s role in the thing.