sig.nif.i.cant

In the iPhone settings there’s a well-buried tracking feature that comes automatically enabled; Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services > Significant Locations. MY PLACES Home: 1 location, Feb 21, 2020 - Feb 16, 2021 HISTORY Portland Oregon: 27 locations, July 24, 2020 - Feb 16, 2021 Beaverton Oregon: 1 location, Feb 2, 2021 Troutdale Oregon: 1 location, Jan 29, 2021 Corbett Oregon: 1 location, Jan 29, 2021 Dufur Oregon: 1 location, Jan 4, 2021 Each location entry can be clicked, expanding the view and narrowing the specificity, to include a map with the exact location, and the dates and times that you occupied that space. More jarring than the (honestly unsurprising) fact that my phone has been silently tracking and logging the exact times that I come and go from my home - is that word, [[significant->pg2b]].

I’m not one to adhere to dictionary definitions, but I assume the folks at Apple were working off some kind of “standard” definition when they chose this language, so I look it up. Merriam-Webster tells me: significant adjective sig·nif·i·cant | \ sig-ˈni-fi-kənt \ 1 : having meaning especially : SUGGESTIVE (a significant glance) 2 a : having or likely to have influence or effect : IMPORTANT (a significant piece of legislation) also : of a noticeably or measurably large amount (producing significant profit) b : probably caused by something [[other than mere chance->pg3a]] (statistically significant correlation between vitamin deficiency and disease)

I honestly [[doubt->pg3b]] that my presence in Beaverton on February 2nd was in any way “meaningful” or “influential” - or even “caused by something other than mere chance” - if I’m being honest. (I don’t spend significant time in Beaverton, and the location of the pin is unrecognizable to me. Maybe I was picking up a friend from work whose car had broken down? Or was I at Uwajimaya perusing the prepared foods? I guess these count as “other than mere chance” - but as a person who moves through space with at least a general sense of intent, that would essentially deem anywhere I’ve been “significant”).

I dig around in my Settings for more context. Apple tells me: Allow your iPhone to learn places significant to you in order to provide useful location-related information in Maps, Calendar, Photos, and more. Your iPhone and iCloud connected devices will keep track of places you have recently been, as well as how often and when you visited them, in order to learn places that are significant to you. This data is end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read by Apple. It is used to provide you with personalized services, such as predictive traffic routing, and to build better Memories in Photos. “… to build better Memories”. In 2015 my therapist told me to take a lot of pictures with my phone. My memory is bad. Entire years have [[quietly eroded->coast]] like the cliffs on the Oregon coast into the Pacific Ocean. I forget names. Entire existences. [[Or I stumble back into them suddenly by mistake->pg4]]. I sift through the memories I have maintained, but am unable to organize them chronologically. Having the pictures helps.

If I’m unsure of Apple’s qualifications for significance I’m doubly unsure of [[my own memory’s algorithm->pg5a]]...

[[I remember sometimes->pg5b]].

I hold onto the weight but not the when. I can pull back into my body the pressure of waking up with our foreheads pressed together. Of dog paws pressing into my back. Some memories live in the pit of my stomach. Like Warren turning his truck slowly across the empty field, shining its lights looking for deer, not being able to process what he was saying to me under the sound of the radio. Like the way my body collapsed to the floor after I closed the door when he dropped me back home. I know in my chest the exact height of the shelf in the little hometown video rental place in New Hampshire where I first saw the VHS case for Poltergeist. I couldn’t draw you a floorplan of the shop, but if you dropped me back in, through the roof and through time, I could lead you straight to the box. I remember the basement of my first home, but not the first floor. (I do remember the kitchen floor - or more specifically, the [[kitchen tile->tile]] - but I think maybe only because I have a photo of it). If I think of sitting in the stairwell with Jess, peeling clementines in a single spiral, making an entire meal of a pyramid of them - saliva floods my mouth. That memory lives there. But I can’t picture if it was before or after she shaved her head. When we were 18 she wrote me a poem. It’s just three lines. It’s been [[taped to the wall of every place I’ve lived->jess1]] (Simsbury x1, Boston x3, Providence x1, Brooklyn x1, Portland x4) - but I can only picture her round handwriting and how it’s laid out on the paper, I can’t recite the words. I remember spaces ([[in my body->pg6a]], if that makes sense).

On new year’s day in 2017 Aristophanes - the raven rescue at the Portland Audubon Society - made eye contact with me, then plucked the innards out of a dead mouse. Later that year it occurred to me that [[I should’ve taken it as a sign->cup1]]. The moment is engraved in my bones now. I can feel it pluck at my own viscera. But 2015-2018 are jumbled, and I only know it was 2017 because I’ve had to look back through my Instagram for Aristophanes’ [[photo->ari]] so many times to check what year it had been the day that I posted it. Five years ago I found a dead cow out by my favorite cemetery in the Oregon desert. She had been dumped there. I remember backing away, saying it smelled, but I don’t remember the smell itself. Two years ago [[like muscle memory->pg6b]] I went back, [[to check on her->cow2]], [[bones scattered across the field->cow1]]. [[Cleaned by the sun and small animals->cow3]]. I collected them.

[[I remember some things->pg7a]].

I believe that we are not machines ([[a body->naomi2]]) operated by a computer ([[our brain->naomi3]]) - but that being and knowing and remembering exist in our bodies and are interpreted and catalogued by our brains and bodies [[together->pg7b]] - sometimes sloppily, sometimes without our consent or understanding. In grad school I start to learn language to talk about this; embodiment, affect.

I know that neurodivergence and depression and a genetic predisposition to poor recall affect my internal cataloguing system. Muddy my access to it. But what then is Apple’s excuse - having assembled an actual set of calculations to determine and log significance - for [[the disjointed collection of my memories->pg8]] it has assembled?

Jantzen Beach Center: 7 visits between July 24, 2020 and Feb 16, 2021 This is where the closest Target is, one of the few places I’ve been able to buy groceries in the pandemic without feeling panicked. Not “significant” in my mind, but maybe only, again, by the definition that it does not appear in this list by “mere chance”. If a Target had to be “significant” to me, more likely it would be the one in Concord, NH - 35 minutes outside of Beam Camp, where I worked for the summer between living in RI and NY. Much of the camp didn’t have electricity, and none of it had AC, so the small handful of day-off adventures we took out of our wooded home and into the fluorescence and chilled air of civilization felt holy. N Decatur St: 4 visits 12:17-3:40 PM Feb 7, 2021, 11:15-11:46 AM Feb 7, 2021, 2:28-7:22 PM Feb 6, 2021, 10:29-10:53 AM Feb 2, 2021 Momo’s old house. Momo is a sweet Fillipinx, chronically ill, trans, virgo (it’d be important to them that I include their sign), young artist who I became friends with through Marrow. I spent time there that week because their former housemates had trashed the house and moved out following an intense confrontation. It was the most interaction I’d had with other humans in a while. Maybe a dozen queers showed up to help. Briauna and I painted Momo’s ex’s bedroom together. We got to sit on the floor and see each other eye-to-eye for the first time since a socially distanced pandemic cemetery stroll we took last summer. We sat on opposite corners of the room, opened the windows, carefully pulled down our N95s to drank mango juice. Laughed together. Closed the door to tell secrets. We even hugged. Is the location significant, though? Is it significant now, that someone else lives there? SE Belmont St: 1 visit 3:26-3:35 PM Feb 1, 2021 This one confused me at first. One visit? Why was I in southeast? I click it open and the little map shows a pin by the Avalon Theatre & Wunderland. There’s a light there, was I stopped for a red? I recheck the times - no, not for nine minutes. Then I remember that I had pulled over near there, on the way home recently, to text and send a selfie to my boyfriend. I check my camera roll to confirm, scroll to the date listed - and as suspected, there’s me, grinning, tongue out, in my driver’s seat: [[“February 1 3:30 PM”->selfie]]. Was it because I took the photo that my phone’s AI decided to include this brief stop in the list? I tell my boyfriend about the iPhone log, about this writing experiment, about trying to figure out why my phone had logged me being stopped briefly in SE… they say, “I LOVE THIS GAY ASS STORY”. Suddenly the nine minutes feel significant. Sauvie Island: 2 visits 3:07-3:22 PM, 3:39-3:55 PM Jan 17, 2021 I walked the Wapato Access Greenway State Park loop that day. I didn’t leave and come back mid-hike, so obviously my phone’s GPS tracking isn’t perfect - or else - is it implying that from 3:22 - 3:39 wasn’t significant? Do parts of the trail [[slip in and out of significance->pg9]]? What happened in or outside that seventeen minute window to make the location meaningful or not-meaningful / “other than mere chance” or coincidence?

I go back and forth on whether or not [[humans are machines->pg10a]] - and I guess that’s why my phone and I don’t agree on what’s significant to me. Locating significance is a Turing test neither of us can pass.

Sometimes I think about how (somewhere between many and) most amputees initially experience sensation as if their arm or leg were [[still there->pg10b]]. Phantom limbs, they’re called (though it can also occur in the absence of other body parts like breasts, genitals, even teeth). I don’t share this to romanticize something I haven’t experienced - but because it feels relevant to embodied memory and the location of significance / the significance of location. What causes phantom limbs isn’t fully understood, but it’s been theorized that the sensation happens either because 1: the neurons in the part of your brain that used to respond to signals from that missing limb begin to respond to signals from from nearby neurons, 2: your brain’s “picture” of your body (which is used for things like body position) remains intact and creates sensation when an intention is brought to the location of a former body part but is met with no sensory feedback, or 3: damaged neurons grow new extensions with nowhere to go, which can create erratic signals and sensations.

What does this mean for the neuroscience of [[embodiment->house5]]? If a [[memory->house6]] runs the length of the tendon in my right arm - what happens if it’s severed? Will the memory [[seep->pg11]] into memories that are held nearby? Will it echo through my neurons until it’s nothing but a low hum? Will attempts to repair it [[rebuild->house1]] [[a different->house2]] [[memory->house3]] [[entirely->house4]]?

I have [[recurring nightmares->leech1]] about leeches. Sometime when I was small, my grandma told me about swimming in a river with her sister Dolly, and Dolly coming out covered in leeches. When I dream about this - is my body replaying the sensation of sitting on the floor of my grandparents’ family room, back against the couch, [[sinking into the carpet->leeches]] as I sank into the absolute dread of what my grandma was recounting - or is it working to make solid a [[reverberation->leech2]] of her memory, passed down to me - of Dolly floating in the river, not noticing the parasitic worms until she climbed out into the sun? Which location is the [[significant->pg12a]] one, the riverbank or the family room?

Significant (adj) from the Latin significare (v) : to mean, import, signify, indicate, [[portend->pg12b]].

I revisit Aristophanes often. He ignores me. Struts around his enclosure doing raven things. [[Either he doesn’t remember->pg13]] the warning he passed down to me, [[or I was reading into nothing->cup2]].

You know the feeling when you’re going up the stairs but not looking, and you think there’s one more step, only to cut through air? Or worse - going down and thinking you have one step left, but instead stomp your foot into floor that came 7 inches too soon? This is how navigating my memory feels. I may be able to recall space (and I could probably intuit blindfolded how many steps there are leading into the basement of my childhood home) - but in navigating those recollections [[detached->pg14a]] from physical space - I crash through air, or into the floor.

I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 25. I took drivers ed when I was 16, but I couldn’t bear to be in the car with my mother long enough to get in the required licensing hours (we didn’t get along then - besides, she’d grasp at the handles and yell at me to start slowing down if we came within half a block of a stop sign). By 18 I lived in cities, so I never really needed a car. Part of why I moved to Portland was because I wanted to be able to leave Portland (to the coast, to the desert, to Mt Hood, to the gorge) so I had to conquer my anxiety and get my license. I hired a driving instructor who literally just drove the SE Powell Blvd DMV test route with me a half dozen times until I was familiar enough with it to pass the test. In [[March 2016->pg14b]] (another date where I’m only sure of the year because I’ve checked the photos I posted to Instagram so many countless times) I took my first long drive. I was 26 then. I’d had a significantly bad day emotionally, and I spent the night looking up abandoned churches within a 3 hour radius. The next morning I woke up, made a route in Google Maps, took a photo of it (on my computer screen, with my phone) and posted it to my Snapchat story, packed my Polaroid and medium format cameras, and left. Being unfamiliar with driving outside of the city, I didn’t comprehend or anticipate that my route (which I made into a giant loop) would take me over Mt Hood and almost immediately out of cell service range - so that I’d become wholly dependent on the small blurry Snapchat photo of my map for navigation.

If I had to reply quickly to the sudden inquiry of the most significant day of my life, it’d probably be this one. I’m not sure though if that’s a product of my emotional state, how well I documented the day (a partial product of my certainty that I was going to die alone in the desert, and thinking it would be funny for someone to find a video log of my day), or the accumulation of small moments that felt unplaceably poignant along the way. (Small Moment #1: Mt Hood National Forest) I realize that I’m potentially in over my head with this drive. I blast Langhorne Slim and (dangerously, I don’t do this any more) take a video from behind the steering wheel. I can’t believe how big the trees are. (Small Moment #2: boarded up church in Warm Springs) I take a Polaroid of the church from the road, then use my phone to record the Polaroid developing. It’s small and probably seems [[insignificant->church]], but it’s one of my favorite pieces of documentation of my life that I have. (Small Moment #3: somewhere along OR 216 E) I almost stop in the middle of the road (not that it would have mattered, I hadn’t seen anyone in hours) because I see turkey vulture on the guardrail. I’d been white-knuckling the steering wheel - driving a winding canyon for the first time in my life, and only half-sure I was even on the right road. Her wings are spread because this is how vultures sun themselves - [[but it seems like an omen->pg15a]]. A bad joke about the last thing I’d ever see. (Small Moment #4: abandoned church in Grass Valley) It’s really just the shell of a building, but the church across the street that owns it is okay with people walking around inside. The wood is beautiful. I take a lot of film photos. I have service again. It’s good because I know I’ll live, but I also check my social media in the parking lot across the street, and feel sick to my stomach over a boy. (Small Moment #5: the Multnomah Falls parking lot that’s between the east and westbound sections of I-84) I drive home along the gorge, and even though the lower part of my loop had been warm and sunny, it’s incredibly foggy once I reach the Columbia River. I don’t otherwise care about Multnomah Falls, but I pull into the parking lot and cry, mist on my face.

In a standard Turing test, an interrogator is given two sets of responses. One from a human and one from [[a computer->pg15b]]. They are tasked with determining which is which. [[To pass a Turing test->turing]], an AI actually needs to have human error coded into it (for example, typing mistakes).

I look back at my presumed “Significant Places” and start to worry that despite our incredibly different results, Apple’s algorithm is actually eerily similar to my own (it prioritizes insignificant things, maintains a declaration of continued significance in spaces that now only [[echo->pg16]] with it, forces its own significance onto moments after the fact, or dips in and out entirely, leaving untraceable gaps...)

In 1949 British philosopher Gilbert Ryles terms the phrase “the ghost in the machine” to talk about Decarte’s philosophy of mind-body dualism (the idea that there is distinction and separation between the mind and body, mind and matter, subject and object). [[I don’t believe in ghosts->pg17a]], but I wonder if I don’t believe this idea that our bodies are haunted by something non-body.

I have stacks of Polaroids. Hundreds of moments that slowly developed and concretized themselves. I bought the [[camera->pg17b]] when I was seventeen, to photograph my friends. I would write song lyrics in the space below the photo. [[Later->grave1]] [[I->grave2]] [[would->grave3]] [[just->grave4]] [[take->grave5]] [[photos->grave6]] [[of->grave7]] [[cemeteries->grave8]].

My grandpa was a photographer. Or, he was an engineer (something which is immediately obvious if you look at his handwritten pocket photography notebook, which was passed down to me, and has incredibly mathematical notes about aperture, using a light meter, etc) - but his 35mm camera was basically [[an extension of his body->pg18a]]. I don’t remember if he bought me my first film camera - a simple point and shoot (I don’t even particularly remember not having it).

Most of my photos are at my mom’s house, in Maryland, in storage. Shoe boxes of prints from the “one hour photo” station at the CVS in my hometown. Polaroids tightly packed back into their cardboard film boxes. Piles of poorly rinsed darkroom photos that still smell like stop-bath, sticking to one another at the bottom of plastic bins. When I back up the photos from my phone, it’s just to my desktop computer. Sometimes I back that up to an external hard drive, but not often enough. [[It’s one fallible digital device to another->pg18b]]. I imagine water being transferred from one cup to another to another and wonder if pixels get left behind like droplets would. Halfway through the first semester of grad school my computer shuts down and won’t turn back on. It’s 10 years old so I should’ve known. I pay $200 for them to recover all the files that I hadn’t backed up. I know physical objects can be lost too, but any image that I can’t hold in my hands starts to feel like a memory that I can’t fully trust.

My iPhone can’t analyze and log the significant places that I photographed before I had it - when I still used film for everything, and didn’t document the minutiae of my life just for the sake of remembering what I had done “last Tuesday” when my therapist or my partner asks or I’m trying to put recent events back into [[chronological order->pg19a]] in my mind. A classmate asks me what the function of remembering is to me (vs allowing things to become lost, or not take hold) and I’m unsure. I think of the people from my past who I removed from Facebook all at once - because without the internet I’d never still need to know what they’re up to or have any connection to them at all. The same probably holds true for whatever it is that I did last Tuesday. I’m not sure why I keep placing significance in the remembering and ordering. It’s funny because I’ve documented most (possibly all) of my true significant places on film, and many of them have never been captured by my phone - either with the camera or its GPS tracking. This is a product of several things: 1. not having a decent camera phone until I was in my mid-twenties, 2. the focus of my life shifting from exploration to “work” (so I’ve genuinely encountered less significant spaces since having a smartphone), and maybe too, 3. my therapist's advice to document it all, and the way this has probably shifted my algorithm - I’m not sure places can feel significant any more unless I’ve slowed down and tried to capture them in the more tangible way of film.

When I was 17, a small group of my friends and I went to explore some abandoned buildings in my neighborhood. I was making a photo-based tarot deck and wanted to use them as models. It was me, Jess, Naomi, Charlie, Gabe, and Silas. (Sometimes I don’t remember Silas being there - but sure enough [[he’s in my photos->silas1]], and I know [[we photographed the same dead bird on top of an old bus hood->silas2]], because we were always in the darkroom together - so I’m listing their names mostly for my own assurance). I grew up in a New England suburb with a lot of tobacco farming. I spent a lot of time as a teenager in abandoned buildings on Culbro’s properties, because with stricter labor laws in the early 2000’s and a primarily migrant workforce, they’d shut down most of their residential buildings (both houses and [[my favorite, a large dormitory->dormitory]]) - and with my camera, no one really cared about my trespassing, even on the occasion when I had the cops called on me. Across from the larger property we were investigating, Charlie noticed a crudely painted sign for [[“Native Honey”->hg1]] outside a house partially hidden by ivy. He and Gabe knocked on the door, and [[Wesley Case->hg2]] - the 84 year old beekeeper who Naomi and I would exclusively refer to as our [[“honey grandfather”->hg3]] - opened it. If I am more thoughtful about how I might respond to the imaginary question of my most significant day, I would probably actually say this one. [[Naomi->naomihouse]] and I have both made work about it - collaboratively and independently, as whole works and in the ways that it seeps into other things we create. Naomi has her masters in nonfiction writing and I reread her essays while I work on this one. In the acknowledgements of Phantoms (her chapbook for which an early version was originally written to accompany a lost wax collection of jewelry I made years ago about ghosts), she says: “The final poem is inspired by the European custom of ‘telling the bees’ -- words used to inform the hive of their master’s death. If the bees were not ‘put into mourning,’ they might leave their hive, stop producing their honey, or pass away. The origins of this tradition are unknown, but many ancient cultures believed that [[bees were able to bridge the natural world with the afterlife->pg19b]].”

[[I wonder->pg20]] if anyone whispered to our honey grandfather’s bees [[when he died->hg4]].

If a leech were to suck my blood, what would happen to the memories [[in those cells->pg21a]]?

When a leech attaches to a host, [[after its initial puncture->pg21b]], it releases an anticoagulating peptide called hirudin, so the blood will keep flowing smoothly.

With a finger on my incisor, I daydream that my own saliva has this property, [[allowing unclotted access to my memories->pg22]] - as readily as the recurring leeches consume my dreams.

My grandma always had piles - constellations - of sticky notes. Like mine isn’t, her recall wasn’t great - but somehow she still knew everything. Some of the sticky notes were reminders of things to get done, but more often the ones I encountered had little bits of significant information that she wanted to pass along. A short blurb on an artist. The value of a hat pin she passed down to me. The name of the small town where she found a good ice cream shop. [[I think about how my polaroids are almost the same size as her sticky notes. I wonder if I should start sticking them around my house as if they were.->pg23a]]

Imagine the power goes out in your house. It’s nighttime and the sky is cloudy. You need to use the bathroom. Do you crash your knee into the side table in the hall, knock over the framed picture of your grandpa, curse at yourself for buying real candles that you can’t leave lit overnight instead of those little battery operated ones that fake-flicker? [[Or->pg23b]] does your body instinctively know the height of your doorknob, like mine knows the location of the Poltergeist VHS on the shelf? If you’re not fully awake yet, will you sleepily navigate around the ([[no->doll1]] [[longer->doll2]] [[present->doll3]]) bookshelf from your childhood bedroom 25 years ago?

I saw an image on Tumblr once that explained that this is why ghosts walk through walls. It was two side by side floorplans, one labeled “Floorplan of house 1878” and the other “Floorplan of offices 1978”. The idea was that they were supposed to represent the same building - but the walls and doorways (and even a stairwell) are in different places - to show the conversion over time of the residential home into office space. Through both floorplans there’s the same red dotted line, with arrows labelling it “[[route of ghost->route]]”. In the 1878 floorplan the ghost goes through doors, navigates around walls, continues up the stairs. In the 1978 floorplan, taking the exact same route, it just barely misses shifted doorframes, goes through solid walls, disappears up stairs that don’t exist. [[I don’t believe in ghosts->pg24a]] but I remember this graphic and I get lost in a Quora thread with 25 theories about how ghosts can walk through walls.

In Beloved Toni Morrison writes: “I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” [[I don’t believe in ghosts->pg24b]] but I believe in what Sethe puts forth as rememory. I read Beloved the same year Jess wrote me [[that poem->jess2]]. I can’t remember her three lines that are taped literally above my bedside table - but I know most of this passage. In Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations Morrison writes: “In the final pages (of Beloved) memory is insistent yet becomes the mutation of fact into fiction then folklore and then into nothing.”

When a classmate asks me about the cow bones and whether I think its memories are in them, I feel intensely guilty that they’re [[in a box in my garage->pg25]] and not sunning themselves in the open field by the cemetery.

Dufur Oregon: 1 location Jan 4, 2021 Dufur is where my favorite cemetery is. It’s a family cemetery - up a dirt road, carved into the hillside, overlooking farms. There’s a barn that seems to be missing more and more of its structure each time I go, and an Igloo cooler that I’ve opened twice over the years (just to be sure it didn’t have anything scary inside). Some of the headstones date back to the 1800’s. My favorite is cracked horizontally down the center, held together with rusted wire. I collect owl pellets and threadbare faux flowers. It’s where I found the dead cow. Once I sat in the patchy dried grass and listened to a thunderstorm roll in. Waited while the sky darkened and started to spit. It’s funny because how I initially found myself there, in 2016, actually wasn’t caused by anything other than mere chance. I’d been trying to go to a different cemetery.

[[Sig·nif·i·cant->pg2a]] Daelyn Lambi May 2021

are you human or computer? type your response below: (force-input-box:"X=",1,"i don't know")