The River Lethe

It went like this. Try to follow along. I know it's confusing.

I got an e-mail from my friend Michael asking me if I had seen a performance by a guy named Rufus Wainright, who does Judy Garland tributes. Michael had seen the video of Judy's Carnegie Hall performance filmed by Wainright at the Paladium. Michael had rented it from Netflix and liked it so much he ended up buying it (Michael and I are both big Garland fans).

I had been transcribing my interview with Rinde Eckert when the e-mail came. I had reached the point where he was explaining the whole Orpheus and Eurydice myth and how, in Hades, Eurydice was offered the opportunity to bathe in the River Lethe...

...she’s offered the River Lethe, which is a river you bathe yourself in and you forget everything. ...the River Lethe is basically to ensure that you aren’t crippled by nostalgia. Because there’s nothing new, what you can be is constant longing, aching for the past and aching for what was, and so to counter that "hell," basically they offer Lethe, which is a way of wiping the slate clean.

After I read Michael's e-mail, I thought I'd go to YouTube and see if there was something from the concert he recommended so I could get a hint of what Wainright was all about.

I had a bunch of windows open on my computer including two different Firefox windows, so clicked on one of them.

Well, I tend to overload my system with too much multi-tasking for the amount of RAM that I have and I did everything so fast that the system stalled. And it stalled on the Firefox page which had a different interview with Rinde Eckert, also about his Orpheus X, and he was answering a lot of the same questions I had asked.

While waiting for Firefox to actually get going again so I could go to YouTube and check the videos, I started reading the Eckert interview. I also was clicking around on other tabs trying to jump start the computer (when will I ever, ever learn that the way to "jump start" a computer is NOT to ask it to do something else, but to back away and let it do its own thing!) I inadvertently clicked on the Word tab and Word takes forEVer to load and you can't stop the load once started.

Well, eventually I got Word shut down and Firefox started up again and I was already to check out Rufus Wainright on YouTube.... but I absolutely could not remember what it was that I wanted to look up. I couldn't remember if it was about the interview or about something in e-mail, or another of the odd thoughts that flits constantly through my mind while I work.

I sat here staring at the screen and realized that within the space of what was less than five minutes I had completely forgotten what was so important that checking out that very thing needed to interrupt my transcription and overload the system so rapidly that it temporarily stopped working.

I got this image in my head that my short term memory is becoming so wonky that I'm starting to think I've been showering in the waters of the River Lethe--not enough for a full dunk to offer total loss of memory, but enough to make the synapses of the brain sizzle on and off on a whim.

I tried to remember all that I had done in the previous 10 minutes ... had I checked Scrabble to see if Joan had made her move? ...did the e-mail from Char evoke any thoughts of things I needed to look up? ...was there something I heard in the latest Morning Stories that made me want to check Google for further information? ...did I get a brilliant idea for an Utterz? ...was there something I needed to upload to Flickr?

It was just a total blank. No clue anywhere as to what it was that I wanted to check out. So I went back to work, setting the brain waves to churn in the background while I continued transcribing Rinde's interview.

And then, with a loud POP, the waters of the River Lethe parted and I remembered that I wanted to look on YouTube for video of Rufus Wainright (which I did).

Is it any wonder that I rarely get things accomplished, when my brain is firing on so many cylinders at once and age has given the added challenge of trying to remember what cylinder A was all about when you've already skipped ahead to cylinder D?

Bathing in the River Lethe instead of a quick shower does have some interesting good points about it, but I'm not willing to give up all the good memories just to lose the bad.