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| Some Writing That Will Last Longer Than Yours |
"The part of him that tells himself he is king of his own universe imagines that one day some future descendant will rummage through that archive and be delighted to learn all of the ins and outs of great-great-great-great-great grandpappy's life. He's left a legacy."
- Miz Gekko, Commenting On R-350 BURN PILE: Running A Bore Brush Through My Past -
This, oddly enough, is not the first time I've run across this particular
delusion (i.e., that writing it down makes it "Capital H" History).
A lot of people who are out here or who are sending those 5-page Christmas Update letters to everyone want to think that their nuggets of wisdom and the descriptive snippets of unremarkable (or maybe even actually significant) lives are gonna live on forever in some Futurama Ken Burns documentary1.
I suspect it's another version of the common belief in or wishing for an
afterlife. I'd like to think I'm clearer-eyed than that, but at my age I've long
since accepted that my motivations are pretty murky at the best of times. So who
knows.
Whether there's an afterlife or not (another discussion for another day),
they're probably not gonna be using this vehicle to get there. And I'm not,
either.
The so-called "Diarist" Mary Chestnut2
is a Significant Historical Survivor partially because of her unbelievably
privileged place in the maw of huge historical events, but also, I think, because
personal life stories and observations from that time are actually pretty rare.
These were the extensive, intelligent musings of a wealthy Southern planation
sort who wasn't subject to spending 10-12 half-literate hours per day six days a
week rooting out a living or getting killed in Civil Wars and whatnot.
Therefore, every handwritten word in her diary was a comparatively major
contribution to the miniscule trickle of personal data from the time that
survived at all.
Genealogists know this trickle - thus the nearly orgasmic joy at finding a
faded-to-illegibility family Bible from 1800 that has a scrawled record of
births and deaths, or a tooth with enough recoverable DNA to confirm a headstone
in a family tree. Going even further back, further into the rare-makes-valuable
data curve, it's why broken and near-indeciferable clay tablets recording grain
transactions and the most boring legal proceedings imaginable are famous and
intensively-studied museum pieces.
That's just not the case these days. These exact words that I'm writing at this
exact time, probably including the fonts and the edited versions that will make
me nuts till I finally run out of patience with trying to fix them and punch
"Publish", will be in some archive somewhere until the end of data as we know
it, and probably past then, too.
The psycho-sociological reasons why this is so are deep and complex, and not the
points here.
The main point is that even the most transparently useless of the little blips
that are our lives are vastly better preserved than even the big-deal-important
historical figures amongst our ancestors; but are simultaneously buried to
insignificance in the flood of everyone else's noise.
In 250 years any Ken Burns with sufficient indexing and search tools will be
able to shovel through the Yottabytes of data we'll have accumulated by then and
find my history: Every document I ever had anything to do with, every digital or
digitized picture, every incidental intersection with any data collector, and
almost literally every word I've written since at least 1995 using a keyboard,
and most of what I've written with a pen and pencil. These golden drops of
literary magic and raw data will live on in multiple copies in hundreds of types
of more-or-less accessible storage forever, so far as we can tell.
But here's the next point: Why would he -- or anyone -- bother? Mary Chestnut is
one of (comparatively) VERY few sources for on-the-ground historical
observations in her day. On the other hand, our entire lives and their records,
no matter how clever or expansive, are an invisible pinprick of a data-cluster
buried at the bottom of a constantly expanding galaxy of others.
Historically speaking3, privacy is dead. But it doesn't matter, you see, because even assuming anyone
cares, who's got time or interest to look? Your words are probably going to be about as significant and remembered as a common-as-dirt trilobite fossil irretrievably buried two miles down on an existing, but never-to-be-seen slab of slate. As versions of immortality go, that one seems rather -- nah.
So, then I guess I'm just gonna have to write because I like writing. Again, murky motivations rear their heads. But some things are well enough left alone without a deep dive into "why?" Sometimes the best answer is "because", and then shrug and get on with it.
FOOTNOTES:
1. [Ken Burns, "Civil War" https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-civil-war/,
HIGHLY recommended if you haven't seen it]↩
2. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Boykin_Chesnut]↩
3. ["Privacy Is Dead": As with the Playfair cipher, military codes, and the Enigma machine, this will be historically true in the future (there's a phrase for ya'), but is
useful and necessary and worth having in the present. Thus my
privacy/encryption/anonymity fetish, even in the face of an eventual future
where none of it will count. I assume it will all eventually be as effective as a
medieval door lock. But even in the most PC, fascist, anti-hero, Peepuls Democratik Repulik
future in which both I and everything I've ever done or believed has been dead
50 years, who cares? Not I, for sure...]↩
Just a handful of thoughts. I have a pamphlet, I guess you would call it, written by one Parkey Sharkey late of Whiskey Row, which was that collection of seedy bars in 1950s Palo Alto (CA) just beyond the edge of Stanford University's radius within which bars weren't allowed. He was a drunk, one of the "characters" of Whiskey Row, and also a cab driver. So, he'd sit and drink with his buddies until they all got so drunk they needed a taxi to get home, so Parkey was their man, never mind he was as drunk as they were and it's actually not surprising the irony escaped them. He had lots of stories and no doubt one day one his drinking buddies said, hey, Sharkey, you got all these stories--you should write a book! So he did, or a pamphlet, as I said, and it's exquisitely boring and poorly written but it's a sort of documentation of the old days of Palo Alto as seen from the other side of the creek, outside that whiskey-free radius of Leland's. So maybe a hundred of these pamphlets cost somebody about 30 1953 dollars to print up, I don't know. But I know if it was a bunch of blog posts, we wouldn't be talking about it right now.
ReplyDeleteThe other thought was damn the Millennial Gen-X whatever HTML programmer who set up the earliest HTML text editor and decided to label that button "PUBLISH," instead of "submit," or "send," or something equally in keeping with the proper perspective on the matter.
I got more thoughts, but the wind blew that door shut between where the thinking is and the words are.
Heh -- yup, things get pretty breezy around here, too...
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