Episode #16: Analogious joy, the invention of memory and the mysterious crested arse-foot bird

In this episode I discover that a bird I see regularly is actually a very weird creature, make my head explode by going down a rabbit hole asking myself what memory actually is, and come up with a stupid idea to offer analogue versions of all of this.

TL;DL
01:26 Old Father Jackdaw update
02:31 Analogious joy
08:10 The mysterious crested arse foot bird
13:37 The invention of memory
19:37 Events and workshops
21:11 A confusing ending

 Links to things I mentioned
Buy an analogue copy of this podcast on C90 cassette
Grebo guru by Pop Will Eat Itself
Video of a grebe walking
Buy prints and cards of my grebe painting
Lighting Little Fires event in Cornwall
Brighton Illustration Festival
2 day Dancing with the Inner Critic Workshop
Mask Workshop
My shop

 The written substack version of this episode can be read on my Substack.

If you're wondering why this is an accidental podcast then listen to the first 5 minutes of episode one.
 
Comments, questions, requests and stuff to stevexoh@gmail.com
 
 

(Total listening time 21’ 40") 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode 16 of Creative Adventures, an accidental podcast. And I want to start by welcoming the influx of new listeners that have come along since the last episode. And I think it was because the podcast had its first birthday a week or so ago, and I produced like a little best of badly animated montage of little clips from the previous 15 episodes. And it seems to have not only connected with people but broken free of the social media algorithms. So thank you so much for coming along and for sending me nice messages about the podcast. And of course, thank you to all of the existing listeners that over the last year have turned this into I don't know, I don't know how to describe it, turned it into just one of my favourite things. What started out as an accessible version of my Substack has become one of my favourite things. And it feels like it's been a very long and slightly turbulent month since I last spoke to you all, and I'm recording in the dark again because summer's coming to an end, and thankfully we've had a tiny little bit of rain as well. But one of the significant things, or maybe it's not really significant, but it felt significant to me was that old Father Jackdaw sadly passed away. And I mentioned old Father Jackdaw in the last episode, and this was a Jackdaw that was visiting my windowsill bird feeders at the flat, and he was a bit bedraggled, and all the other Jackdawors just kept on attacking him and pecking him, and in the end it got so bad that I took him to an animal rescue centre, and they gave me an update a couple of weeks later just to say that he was so badly injured that he had to be put to sleep. So that felt like a sad end to the old Father Jackdaw story and sort of like marking the end of summer, but I'm sure I'll create some sort of lasting memorial to him. And I was so tempted to start the episode by reflecting on endings and going more deeply into endings, like human endings, relationship endings, nature endings, like endings of the universe, I don't know. But something far more stupid has been consuming my attention. And that's because I've had the idea to offer this podcast and also the Substack in an analogue format. So this digital format would carry on. So you'd still be able to listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or other podcast players. But I want to offer an analogue version that you could listen to on a cassette tape. And for a small subscription, I will send you each episode on this cassette tape that has I've got one here that's like a little prototype, and I just love the physical feeling of it. It reminds me of Daniel Johnston's early music that he used to put out on tapes, and it's got each episode has its own unique innerlay. But anyway, I'm advertising it now. And then for the Substack, I will send out a printed out one with doodles on it in one of those lovely old-fashioned airmail envelopes. But the reason why I want to speak about this is not just to promote it. I mean, if you're interested, then by all means then then sign up for it. But I've been toying with the idea for some time, and what's made me hesitate until this point to do it is I can't really articulate what the point of this experiment would be. Because digital media is so much easier to create and consume and distribute. I mean it's immediate and it's free. So why would someone want to pay for something that takes time to arrive and then requires some sort of manual effort to consume it? But I guess it's that that actually attracts me to it, not knowing what will happen and whether anyone will want it or what it will be like to make it or do it. And I did an analogue experiment seven or eight years ago where people could buy a hand-drawn postcard subscription service, and for a tiny amount I really underpriced it. I would send them a unique hand-drawn postcard every month, and it really took off, and I hated it. It took up so much of my time, and of course, I wanted to take lots of care with every postcard that I sent out, but I think the postcards were like five pounds each or something, and then I realised how much work it was going to be, and I hated it. So maybe this will end up being like that. But what I am clear on is this isn't a shallow nostalgia thing. Like, remember the good old days of sending letters and listening to cassettes? I've romanticized that before, only to realise, like on thinking it'd be fun to use a typewriter, how much more effort it actually is. Despite the beauty of it, or buying a cassette player or writing a letter, all of those analogue things remind me that there was a very good reason why we embraced a more digital world. Because the gift of that digital revolution has been to remove some of the tedious friction and the manual labour from those processes. But I'm also curious as to what has also been lost and what were the weird benefits of that tedious friction? Because engaging with analogue media requires a much more active form of participation and engagement with that unavoidable friction. The letter needs to be transported around the world or around the country, then it needs to be opened, and then it needs to be read, or the cassette needs to be taken to a special machine and then play pressed, and you can't really skip chapters and things like that, and then the whole thing needs to be rewound afterwards. And all of these tasks require physical movement and the use of motor skills and a certain amount of patience that we just don't need when we're consuming digital media. And that reminds me of what the psychologist Robert and Elizabeth Bjork called desirable difficulties, which is the counterintuitive idea that making something easier isn't always better, and sometimes the difficulty itself is doing useful cognitive work, particularly when it comes to learning or understanding. In his book The World Beyond Your Head, the author Matthew Crawford explores human attention, and he suggests that it isn't simply a thing that we possess, but something that's organized by our environment and the objects within it. And he calls these environments and the objects within it ecologies of attention, and suggests that they provide like a kind of choreography or orchestration for our attention that influences what we notice and how we engage with the world around us. But the thing I find really interesting in his work, he suggests that the objects within that field of attention push back in their own intractable ways. And for me, this is where there's a really interesting difference between digital and analog consumption. A physical letter pushes back in a totally different way to words on a screen, or a physical audio tape pushes back in a different way to audio streamed from a device. And it's almost as though these old analog objects are more steadfast in refusing to adapt to our human needs, demanding instead that we adapt to them, like some sort of really stubborn toddler or really stubborn pensioner that we have to bend ourselves out of shape to interact with. And so for me that feels like an idea worthy of experimentation. Can I share this podcast in a format that pushes back, that demands more of you, just to see what happens? So I think I've got some idea of why I want to try this out, but having explored it all, it feels simultaneously less stupid and more stupid at the same time to be doing it. So if you'd like to pay to engage with my work in a way that is far less flexible and efficient and demands considerably more of you in order to consume it, I've put a link in the podcast notes, and you can go and you can sign up for one episode or a number of episodes, and a lovely C90 cassette will drop through your letterbox each month. And who knows, this might be the greatest thing ever, or I may have already forgotten about it by next month, and my mind will be consumed by something else. But the other thing that's been on my mind this last month has been Greebes, the water birds. When living by the Thames, I see a lot of Greebes, but every time I see one, the 1990s Pop Walita self song Gribo Guru comes into my mind, which if you don't know it, is a song about 1990s subculture and not about common river birds. But every time I see a grebe, this automatic brain connection kicks in and the words of Gribo Guru are in my head, and it drives me mad. So I wondered if painting a big grebe with the words Gribo Guru would exercise this from my psyche and that the act of putting it on paper would stop it from happening. And I'm not sure if this has worked yet, I only did it a few weeks ago, but the act of doing the painting led me down a fascinating grebe rabbit hole. Because I wasn't sure whether to paint a whole grebe or just a grebe's head. So I did some research to find a reference image for a whole grebe's body, and it was then that I discovered the first of many weird things about these birds. So like many other waterbirds, grebes are brilliant swimmers and divers. That's how they fish, that's how they survive. But what sets them apart from other water birds is that their legs are positioned ridiculously far back on their bodies. In fact, the Latin name for the great crested grebe is podyceps cristatus, cristatus meaning I think crested, but podiceps derives from the Latin for the words rump and foot. So that means that even in scientific terms, these birds are basically known as the crested ass foot bird. Their legs are so far back in their body that they effectively come out of their ass. And this fascinated me that there's a there's a bird that I see regularly that's Latin name is effectively the crested ass foot bird. And I suddenly realised I've never seen a grebe out of water. So of course I didn't know this. They're always in the water. So I looked for a video of a grebe walking and I was amazed to see how freaky they look. And I'll put a link to the video in the podcast notes. It's just this strange, upright being that's constantly almost falling over, a bit like he's riding a unicycle. And I also discovered from this video that they don't have webbed feet but individual big lobed toes, a bit like a moorhen. So that means that the Greeb's whole leg ensemble is incredibly strange compared to other birds, and and I can't help but imagine that their embarrassment at all of this is why they hardly venture onto land. And I was so delighted to find that I live in close proximity to such a strange creature that I did some more research, and I found out that Grebes eat their own feathers, like not accidentally, but deliberately and frequently and in large quantities. They just pour their feathers out and eat them to sit in their stomach to help with their digestion. And they also feed the feathers to their babies, and these babies ride around on the adult's back like some sort of river taxi. And I think I've seen that before and thought I was mistaken to see this big, colourful grebe with this little stripy other bird on its back. And what's even weirder about the babies is in some species of Grebe, the babies come with an inbuilt mood indicator or warning light on their heads. They have it like an area of their head that has no feathers on that when they need something it turns red. So it's like a feed me light or a I need attention light. And then there's the adult grebe's famous wiggly weed offering courtship dance, where before they mate they present each other with these big straggles of weed and do this strange wiggly dance that looks a bit like Squidwood from Spongebob. So all of these things suddenly, through doing this painting, have given me a new creature to obsessively talk about with anyone that wants to listen to these bizarre facts. And I realised that I'm not sure I'd heard a grebe make a noise, and I wondered if they were mute, like a mute swan is. And the benefit of the podcast is I can play you what a grebe sounds like because they've even got a strange voice. It's like you imagine meeting someone really weird, and then the more they move and the more they talk, you think this is a very, very strange person, and then they get up to sing karaoke and you hear their voice, and you go, Oh my word, this is even weirder. So this is what a griebe sounds like, and I like to imagine you being stuck by a riverside at night, cold, scared, and then you hear this thing shuffling awkwardly outside your tent, making this noise. But thankfully they made a wonderful recovery and are quite prolific around the lakes and rivers across Britain and Europe. And I want to share all of this with you just because it's been on my mind, but maybe you can take inspiration from the greed. The next time you see one gracefully moving across the water, looking like some sort of calm, dignified, super professional bird, I hope you take some personal inspiration from knowing that behind this facade they are in fact very eccentric avian weirdos hiding in broad daylight. So the first birthday of the podcast has meant that I've inevitably found myself reflecting on what was happening in my life a year ago when I decided to start it. Like what was I thinking, what was I feeling, what was occupying my mind at the time, or what was I excited or anxious about in my life and what was going on in the world around me. And I spent some time reflecting on that, but the more that I did, the question that really began to fascinate me was where on earth was I retrieving all of these memories from? And I read a book called The Invention of Memory by Israel Rodenfeld many years back, and ironically I'd forgotten all about it until this moment. And in his book, Rosenfeld suggests that memories aren't fixed representations of the past that are stored somewhere in the brain, waiting to be retrieved, but they are experiences that are actively constructed in the present moment from the neural traces that those past experiences left behind. And in his book, Rosenfeld suggests that memories are not fixed representations of past events that are stored somewhere in the brain, waiting to be retrieved, but are actively constructed in the present from the neural traces that those experiences left behind. So remembering is less like replaying a recording and more like creating something new each time we have that memory. And of course, each time we do that, it's shaped by our current context and our emotions and everything that's happened to us since the last time we remembered that thing. So if this is true, it means that remembering is not actually a reliable window into the past, but a new experience that's created in the present that is unavoidably influenced by who we are now. And I like this idea and it makes sense that the act of remembering is a very here and now experience. But as human beings we seem to find it incredibly difficult to conceive of it in that way. And we prefer to think of memory as like a load of stuff stored somewhere that we can retrieve. But what I find extra fascinating about this and what I remember from that book is how human beings' perception of memory has been shaped by the world around us, and particularly the technology that we've created at any point in time. So here and now in 2026, in a world of digital cloud storage, it's easy to think of memory as a vast database that we can interrogate or access. But go back 30 years when this technology didn't exist, and the metaphor of the VHS video recorder informed how we conceived of memory, like a tape that was laid down that we can find that tape and put it back in and re-watch what happened. And as we trace back through history we get a sense of how the invention of photography and the printing press and the manuscript helped us make sense of this mysterious human experience of time travel. And even in ancient Greece, Plato suggested that memory was like a wax block in the soul in which impressions were left for our experiences. But given what we now understand about the reconstructive nature of memory, all of these metaphors seem fundamentally flawed. For me, memory, it seems, is more like looking at the sea. We recognise it as the same sea each time we look at it, despite the fact that what we are actually experiencing is being created anew in that particular moment. So I'm left wondering how accurate is my memory, and I don't just mean getting old and forgetting things. But how accurate are those memories that I have if they're constructed live and in the moment? And it brings to mind various occasions where my daughter's told me of memories she has of things that we did together when she was young. But I remember them very differently, and it's it's tempting to say that's not what happened. But I'm now more wary of writing off our different recollections given that we're not accessing a concrete archive, but recreating those experiences in the moment. And I recall similar things with my parents. I remember my dad insisting that he remembered me having a crush on the pretenders singer Chrissy Hind when I was young. And I've no recollection of that whatsoever. I mean I remember finding people I saw on the television attractive, maybe, but I cannot find any trace of having those kinds of feelings directed towards Chrissy Hind. I don't even remember seeing her on the television. So given how memory is essentially a present moment experience, I'm left wondering what on earth is the difference between memory and imagination. The neuroscientists Donna Addis and Daniel Schachter proposed that remembering and imagining use substantially overlapping cognitive circuitry, and that live and in the moment we are able to reconstruct elements of past experiences as memories or recombine those same elements into events that never happened as imagination. And they describe this shared underlying process as constructive episodic simulation. So both memory and imagination are constructive episodic simulation. I don't know why that's so hard to say. And normally when I explore these things, I I like finding a way to go down a rabbit hole, crack open my brain, and then find a nice way to tie it all up to finish the piece. But I'm stumped with this one, is it spawns so many sub rabbit holes and it makes me question in a deeply curious way how inaccurate my experience of anything other than the present moment might be. And paradoxically, maybe that is the conclusion. To accept the flaws and inaccuracies in our temporal human experience. Be that how we remember the past or imagine the future. Frederick Nietzsche believed that forgetting wasn't a failure of memory, but an active and necessary human process that created room for something new. And he said that life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness, implying that without forgetting we couldn't properly inhabit the present at all. And I like that, but I also wonder if poor old Frederick's imagination has been overinfluenced by the yet to be invented metaphor of cloud storage capacity. So that's it for this episode. I It's a strange combination of things. Uh thinking I'd talk about endings, but then talking about a cassette version of this podcast. Facts about Greebs and then blowing my mind up and doubting everything. But I hope you found it of interest. A few things before I go, things that you might want to come along to, things that you might want to join me on. I've been chatting for years with this group called the Stranger Collective, who have been inviting me to come to one of their gatherings in Cornwall. I mean, literally for ten years, and I've never been able to make it. But I can actually make one, and it's an event that they're running that sounds brilliant, that's called Lighting Little Fires. And it takes place on the 17th of September at Constantine in Cornwall. And it's basically a group of people gathered round fires telling stories. And you go to the different stories, then move on to another one and have a chat, and it just sounds very chilled out and pleasant. And I'm gonna be one of the storytellers on the 17th of September. So come along to that, it sounds like a lovely thing to do. And on the 31st of October and the 1st of November, I'll be at the Brighton Illustration Festival, which is another thing that I've been wanting to be part of for years but never been able to. But this year I am, and I'll have a market stall at the festival, and I'll also be doing my bingo machine talk on Sunday the first. So come along to that. There's also an Inner Critic workshop, two-day inner critic exploration of shame, creativity, and the superego. That is at the end of November, and then there's a mask workshop sometime, I think it's end of October. But I'll put links to all of those in the podcast notes. The next podcast will be out on Friday, the 2nd of October, episode 17. I hope you'll come back and join me then. And thank you so much for spreading the word about the podcast. If you have a moment to leave a review, a rating, share it, do whatever you want, then it is very much appreciated. I've done that thing again that I can't remember how I end it. I've confused myself. What do I normally say? Until next time, goodbye. Something like that. Maybe I'll just do an impression of a grebe. Until next time. Bye.