The painstaking historian

Behavior is not hard-wired, not a genetic program that runs independent of our will. It is a process, an ongoing dialogue between our environment and that part of our brain we understand as our self. Behavior can alter our brain chemistry. We are not born bad or damaged; we are born vulnerable.

This is my takeaway from a book I read a quarter-century ago, whose author and title I had forgotten. I only found it because I Googled a quote I remembered from it: “The brain is a painstaking historian.”

Googling this led me to an essay by poet Floyd Skloot, who had used it in a chapter of his 2003 memoir “In the Shadow of Memory.” Chapter Six of the book, largely about his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, is titled “The Painstaking Historian.”

I know Skloot as the author of an essay that appeared in The Gettysburg Review in 1993 titled “Trivia Tea: Baseball as Balm.” I was a subscriber to the Gettysburg Review at the time and remember being haunted by the essay, in which Skloot — who was debilitated by a mysterious illness (possibly Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) in 1988, detailed how baseball and its lore soothed and comforted him.

I kept that copy of the Gettysburg Review for many years, thinking I might write about that essay but never did. Eventually I threw it out, assuming it would be easy enough to find online if I ever wanted to go back to it.

(Wrong. I wasted an hour this morning trying to find it. I found allusions to it, but not the essay itself, though it was collected in the Joseph Epstein-Robert Atwan-edited “Best American Essays 1993,” an out-of-print book which is apparently not available digitally.)

When I tried the Gettysburg Review website, I learned that the final edition of the esteemed literary journal is available for pre-order. It was effectively shut down in December because the current administration at Gettysburg College believe “changing demographic and enrollment realities across higher education” require “a more intentional focus on the programs and activities that directly and significantly enhance student demand and the overall student experience.”

In other words, the GR wasn’t a money-maker. (It’s not just Arkansas academics who have embraced anti-intellectualism.)

But anyway, reading Skloot’s memoir, I found where he attributed the quote I remembered to Debra Niehof, and that she’d used it in her 1999 book “The Biology of Violence: How Understanding the Brain, Behavior, and Environment Can Break the Vicious Circle of Aggression.” (The author’s name is actually “Niehoff.” Skloot’s copy editors should have caught that.)

One of my major takeaways from “The Biology of Violence” was that common knee-jerk reactions were generally emotionally driven and just plain wrong—the threat of punishment, for instance, was not an effective deterrent to violence and our historical antipathy to entertaining biological explanations for violence was short-sighted. The idea that a person — or a class of people—is inherently violent isn’t a useful concept. Violence is a behavior that can be mediated by practical measures, but often our desire to performatively punish or signal our own virtue takes precedence over doing things that might actually make the world gentler and safer.

Skloot seizes on Niehoff’s metaphor of the brain as historian.

“We not only keep score,” he writes, “we establish a permanent record and even put it out on the wires, forever broadcasting in one way or another the story of our traumatic past. Niehof[f] likens the brain to ‘an ardent correspondent’ making careful documentation of experience ‘in the language of neurochemistry.’”

He goes on to point out that “memory is a chemical process” and that our most “vivid and dramatic memories such as those formed under traumatic stress tend to shape us most indelibly.” Childhood trauma can seep deeper than mere memory and become part of the brain’s architecture, with the result that even events that cause only minor stress might feel like a reenactment of the primal wound. Traumatized children can respond to stress in disproportionate ways.

This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who lives in the real world; there is so much evidence that we are branded by trauma. “Hurt people hurt people” is a bumper-sticker truism. As Philip Larkin wrote, there is a lot of damage inflicted by “mum and dad,” even if they mean only to help. (“Get out early … and don’t have any kids yourself,” the poet advised.)

Still, most of us with the wherewithal to read newspapers never had it so bad as we like to pretend. Floyd Skloot had an unreliable mother and a violent older brother who likely killed himself. He is an old man now, suffering from Parkinson’s, but I imagine his life has been a good one. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, known and respected in some circles, with an accomplished daughter and a lifetime of no small achievement for his painstaking historian to curate. I’ve read his poems and some of his essays and am sorry I never got around to writing anything about that wonderful essay of his I read in The Gettysburg Review more than 30 years ago.

For I take comfort in baseball as well—opening day is just over a week away—and miss poring over box scores and even, as I used to do, taking pencil to paper to figure batting averages. I used to sit with a 20-pound copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia balanced on my knees, my hands cupped over my ears as I descended in my bathysphere into a sea of kabbalistic numbers.

I could still do that, and understand the kids addicted to their screens or whatever provides them pops of dopamine. The world changes, but human nature only seems to. We remember every slight and insult, every harsh moment. It is our curse to never forget.