American Scientist

Several items lie strewn across the concrete, drying out. A bouquet of silk peonies. A small candelabrum. Three framed photos, a couple of them too soaked to make out. A doll wearing a ruffled dress striped in ivory and green. Her head is as bald and her left eye as blank as Nefertiti’s.

As we talk about this picture, which he took on North Villere Street in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward in the winter of 2007, a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, photographer John Rosenthal pauses. “I used to think I should be photographing explosions,” he says. Over time he understood he wasn’t that kind of photographer: “I realized it’s all in the embers.”

Those embers were what drew me into Rosenthal’s photographs of the Ninth Ward. There is a profound sense of quietness to them, of stillness in the wake of great force. Beyond their eerie calm, these images, which read initially like a collection of landscapes and still lifes, offer up details that emerge gradually over multiple viewings. A photo taken on Winthrop Street shows a gate askew, a battered scarecrow perched alongside, its neck draped with Mardi Gras beads. At first, viewing the image online, I gazed most intently at the scarecrow, festive and at odds with the gate jutting up awkwardly beside it. As I viewed the photo in a nearby gallery hosting an exhibition of these works, a lopsided toolshed became more noticeable, particularly the way its angle mirrors that of the gate. Gazing a few moments longer, at last I could see that, although its hinges are simply propped into place, a chain and padlock still hold the gate fast.

Similarly, the most noticeable element of an interior photo of the St. Rose Missionary Baptist Church is initially the American flag partly unfurled across a pew. Then other elements gradually emerge from a murky background: a microphone on the floor; a metal contraption beside a pew (Rosenthal explains that this is a pedal freed from its drum); and, along the pew’s wooden seat, what appears to be varnish cracked from a cycle of saturation and drying. Later, viewing the photograph in the gallery I noticed that the pew seat is upholstered. Taking a closer look, I realize that the cracking and flaking is too thick for varnish. It dawns on me that it is a deep layer of cracked silt left behind by the flood waters. St. Rose was located just a few blocks away from the more northern of the two levee breaks that occurred along the ward’s northwest boundary. I learn from Rosenthal that the church had been submerged almost completely and had retained floodwater for a month.

Since attending the gallery exhibition, I’ve returned to these photographs repeatedly in Rosenthal’s book After: The Silence of the Lower Ninth Ward. If the embers were what first drew me in, I’ve kept my gaze on them partly because of the ways in which these photographs help me think about remembrance. And how, the more I view these images and consider how they distill and preserve a time of profound hardship, the more they have to say to me about the neurological processes of memory.

Landfall

As we mark 10 years’ passage since Hurricane Katrina, I’m one among millions who have been thinking a great deal about that day a decade ago. I’ve been grateful for recent dispatches on how some of the hardest-hit areas of New Orleans have been doing, and wishing coverage could be more constant. In remembering how Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath unfolded, though, my memories of the event and its coverage are a bit unusual. For one thing, I didn’t know about Katrina until many days after landfall.

The morning of Tuesday, August 29, 2005, I woke up in a chair beside my husband in the intensive care unit of our regional hospital. On August 25 he had suffered an ischemic stroke in his lower left cerebellum. He was 39 years old, a healthy nonsmoker with normal blood pressure and unremarkable cholesterol levels. The possibility that one of us might have a stroke was pretty much the last thing we worried about. Later that day he was transferred to a research hospital, a larger facility with newer equipment. During the evening I met the first of what would, in time, seem like an endless cycle of neurology residents. They were sharp, knowledgeable, and largely interchangeable. Resident 1 explained that we’d meet my husband’s attending physician in the morning. After taking a history and conducting some brief bedside tests, she said goodnight.

My husband slept almost immediately, exhausted from one of his tests—sitting up and moving to the edge of the bed without toppling over from the relentless vertigo that spun the room violently. As he rested, I settled into a chair beside him. When I closed my eyes I couldn’t stop thinking about the scene of the neurologic crime: the blocked blood flow in his cerebellum, the necrosis that must have bloomed around where the clot had lodged. I speculated about how much damage was done and wondered how permanent that damage might be. Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, levees had given way and water rose, higher and still higher. Eventually I fell into a fitful, ignorant sleep.

Aftermath

Because of the timing of the stroke, so close to the disasters of Katrina, these events have remained paired in my memory. As I consider the recovery of one, I hope for recovery for many—although recovery, others have rightly observed, may not be the right word for areas battling back, post-Katrina.

Ten years on, my husband and I are fortunate. He is in great health. A couple years after the stroke he took up running again and over time resumed running marathons, something he hadn’t done since he was 30. Things seem normal and have for some years, although nothing will ever be quite the same.

As we approached this milestone "strokaversary," as we’ve called it, my husband and I have talked occasionally about what we remember of this time ten years ago. With some exceptions, he seems to remember the time in generalities rather than specifics. His brain had quite a bit of healing to accomplish, so encoding memories wouldn’t have been at the top of the neurological to-do list. So to an extent, my memories have had to serve us both.

Being the bearer of shared memories is a strange thing, and it grows only stranger over time as the nature and presentation of those recollections change. To understand the nature of what I remember from 10 years ago I’ve been reading about memory, how it functions and malfunctions. Its currents and eddies.

It’s tempting to think of our memories as fixed, to feel fully confident of their accuracy and stability. Yet accurate and stable they are not. Emotionally charged memories present a particular paradox: They are characteristically both more and less accurate than comparatively neutral memories. Time plays a role as well. Not only do our memories weaken through both decay and interference from newer memories, but they may also accrue inaccuracies with each retrieval.

I no longer recall much of the minutia of caregiving from those days in 2005. The trays of bland hospital food that would appear and disappear lost any true vividness long ago—although, seeing them through a mist of fatigue, perhaps I never regarded those trays vividly to begin with. I remember the layout of the hospital room my husband stayed in the longest, but I have no idea whether there was any artwork on the wall. I know that his tray table in that room was perpetually well stocked with anything he might need, but it doesn’t feel as if I truly recall the particulars. Instead, I have to construct a kind of model in my mind of what must have been placed there. Lip balm. Water, with a straw, an accessory he normally hates. A cloth I’d drape over his eyes to calm the sensory integration dysfunction he was experiencing. Beyond those three items, I have no idea.

By contrast, what remains most vivid from those days are flashbulb memories, emotionally charged recollections that psychologist Charles Fernyhough, in his book on the science of memory, Pieces of Light, describes as “snippets of our past that are bathed in light by the flash of historical events.” He goes on to explain that “above all, flashbulb memories occur for events that matter to us in some way.” These events may be shared cultural ones, such as John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the attacks of 9/11, or, yes, Hurricane Katrina. Or, Fernyhough points out, they may be personal ones that center on intensely emotional moments from our family history—births, accidents, deaths. “Flashbulb events are by definition surprising and distinctive,” he adds, “both factors that we know to increase the memorability of information. Flashbulb memories are often also highly rehearsed and talked about with others, which increases the likelihood that they will be retained.”

For me, these moments have indeed kept their shape and texture over time, and they still feel quite immediate. For example, the moment in the ER when a nurse told me that my husband would be taken to the MRI suite, then went on to say that the doctor suspected a stroke. He rattled off a litany of conditions that could cause a such a thing to happen to the brain of an otherwise healthy 39-year-old. I remember the word “tumor,” the phrase “hole in his heart.” The clause, “We’ll have to test for all that.” I remember the terrible lighting in the ER and the way it made his hair look slightly green.

And a moment in the ICU, deep in the night, when I awakened in a panic, realizing I’d accidentally fallen asleep. Right away, I looked at my husband’s chest to make sure he was breathing. I watched the hospital gown rise and fall as he slept, gazed at its pattern. Little pyramids with zigzag sides dotted along at regular intervals. They looked like tiny Mayan temples, I thought.

At another point, this time in the neurology ward, I was fussing with things in the hospital room as my husband slept, making sure my father had everything close at hand in case something came up. I was about to head downstairs for a quick bite to eat in the cafeteria. We chatted a bit, keeping our voices low. My father mentioned New Orleans in passing. It didn’t sound good. “What’s going on in New Orleans?” I asked. He gave me a puzzled look, and then must have realized I hadn’t heard. His voice grew grave, weary. “New Orleans,” he said, “is gone.”

As clear and intense as these memories are, it’s easy for me to believe they are wildly accurate. Research, alas, does not support this notion. Fernyhough commiserates, noting that we tend to believe deeply in the accuracy of our flashbulb memories because they hold profound emotional force. Nonetheless, this perception of accuracy is deceptive. He conveys the following assessment from Elizabeth Phelps, one of a team of researchers who has studied the degree to which individuals’ memories of the 9/11 attacks changed over time: “Usually, when a memory has highly vivid details and you’re confident in those details, that means you’re likely to be right. Confidence often goes hand in hand with accuracy. But when something is highly emotional, they often get separated.”

Still, as I relate my own flashbulb memories, they feel true. Subjective, sure—as all memories must be—but utterly real. Ultimately, though, my memories that feel like moments of truth are more probably moments of truthiness.

What remains

Perhaps I’ve clung to Rosenthal’s photos out of a craving for a different kind of truth. The photographic lens, like memory, is certainly subjective. But until a photograph physically deteriorates, it carries with it a consistent image over time—a capability that lies beyond our own neurological limits.

The term “flashbulb memory” is in itself a bit misleading, as psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik, the men who coined it, evidently acknowledged. Their intention, Fernyhough says, was “to describe our ability to recall not just the event of hearing the news but also our personal context at the time, where we were, what we were doing, who we were with. It’s an unfortunate coining, in one sense, as the authors admit, as it seems to support the mistaken analogy of memory to a camera. Rather, Brown and Kulik meant the phrase to capture the indiscriminate inclusion of contextual details. The flashbulb of memory illuminates everything in the vicinity, and it does so surprisingly and briefly.”

So perhaps these photographs accomplish something I can only long for in my own memories of those long, frightening days. Rosenthal’s photos allow us to count the trophies lying on a schoolroom floor, note the exact color of a painted stoop, read the lettering on a bulletin board. My memories seem more like Rosenthal’s photo of a house on Royal Street—an image he finds anomalous but felt drawn to include in the book anyway. For me, it provides useful counterpoint. In it, a white house is seen through thick fog. Gingerbread woodwork is visible, as is a vast flowering bush. The paint on the porch columns is peeling; a problem with the siding on a neighboring house is barely discernable through the fog. Beyond that, I notice mostly colors. This is a scene of beauty and damage, yet one that yields few specifics.

There are moments when I crave such specifics fiercely, however painful they may be to remember. At times it’s puzzling that I cannot simply wring these details from my memory. But there may be self-preserving reasons for this. Michael C. Corballis, a psychology professor, inquires along these lines in his bookThe Wandering Mind: “Why is memory so bad? It was clearly not designed by nature to be a faithful record of the past. Rather, it supplies us with information—some true, some false, and always incomplete—that we use to construct stories. ‘Memory is a poet, not a historian,’ the American poet Marie Howe once said. We may well be what we remember, at least in part, but our memories, like clothes, can be selected and modified to create what we want to be, rather than what we actually are.”

At a recent potluck dinner I happened to meet a woman who’d lived in New Orleans for some years. She evacuated in advance of Katrina’s landfall, returned when she could to retrieve what was retrievable, and has lived elsewhere since. We talked about that ineffable feeling of home, something she’d felt more strongly there than anywhere else she’s lived. She misses New Orleans, sometimes terribly, yet she’s happy where she is. “It’s not that it doesn’t feel like home here,” she said. “It just feels like I’m living a different life.” When she returned to New Orleans to claim her things, she found herself taking photographs. Like Rosenthal, she hadn’t intended to. Her photos brought up mixed feelings, but she was glad to have them. Then they disappeared. Of all her photos, they were the only ones missing. She thinks it might have been for the best: “Maybe it’s better for me not to have that kind of reminder.” But sometimes she’s still heartbroken they’re gone.