Microsoft has a research project in this field Mylifebits which has developed a card-sized digital camera (the Sensecam) that you wear around your neck. Using a variety of sensors to detect movements or changes in the environment, it automatically takes photographs, typically a few thousand per day, which can then be downloaded from the device. Apparently one researcher has been using it since 2006, and has almost 5 million photographs stored. This is an aspect of what is called 'lifelogging'. The Microsoft project used Gordon Bell (a famous computer scientist) as its subject, so that his whole past and present life -- all documents, videos, talks, Christmas cards, photos, letters etc -- has been digitized, as well as using the Sensecam, and they are now working on recording all of his telephone calls. I read the account of another man in the USA who was so annoyed about being stopped and questioned while trying to catch a plane post-9/11, that he responded by having a constant online record of his location, plus photographs of what he was doing (including a lot of airline meals), records of all of his expenses etc, just to save the security services the effort of questioning him about his movements.
After a few moments' thought, it becomes clear that the problem with the digitized life is finding something - how can you locate that significant conversation unless you already remember when it happened? Hence the idea of a software project to link and categorize all this data. It would self-defeating if the process of recording and categorizing your life took up too much of your time. I have enough trouble keeping up a fairly brief diary. It reminds of a Borges short piece about the ultimate 1:1 map:
On Exactitude in Science: In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. (from the Penguin translation by Andrew Hurley)This raises the interesting question: what do we want from our memories, digital or actual? To my mind one thing we want is distillation in the form of stories. Borges has a short story 'Funes the Memorious' about a boy who develops an incredible memory, to the point where he is unable to generalise, so that he is overwhelmed with the countless details. As an exercise he reconstructs the memories of an entire day, which of course takes him another whole day.
Inevitably this distillation is retrospective. In the winter of 1990, I changed churches in Canberra and started attending Dickson Baptist church. I remember one service being slightly disrupted by a woman with a terrible persistent cough, who had to leave the church for a while. If you were at Jen's funeral (or read my eulogy in this blog) you'll know that person was Jen. At the time it meant little, and it was another two years before Jen and I became involved with each other. So our lives now are full of such seeds of possibility that may one day be the start of a story -- it was in July 2011 that I first met...
These reflections come from my experiences so far in organising my memories of Jen. I've made a good start on digitizing older photographs, but the task of getting our photographs in decent order (even just our 15 joint years) is a long effort. To recreate the order and meaning of those photographs, I've started to cross-reference diaries and emails to remember what we were doing. It's quite surprising how much I still have saved. After a few days' technological fiddling last year, I unpacked my archive of email from 1989-1993. For a couple of years there I had a long-distance relationship (not with Jen) in which email played quite a part, being faster than letters and cheaper than phone calls, so there are almost daily emails about my life. To travel back those twenty years is emotionally exhausting as well as time-consuming.
In parallel with this I've barely started a narrative of the time I had with Jen, based around the photographs and reconstructed details. It's mainly for the boys, I think, although also for me. They won't care about the minutiae of the distant past, but I hope they will engage with the story: Why did we get involved? What kind of faith did she have? Why did Jen choose to put so much of her time into motherhood rather than work? Why did we move around so much in the first six years of marriage?
The other side of memory, especially for me, is recalling who Jen was as a person over time. I imagine those who are divorced, especially if their partner was unfaithful, must experience a corruption of the past - that all was not as it seemed, that the seeds of destruction and deceit were already developing when they thought everything was OK. I have to an extent the opposite problem -- because Jen was taken from me by disease, our relationship was still strong and intact right to the end, and so it's easy to see our past in a nostalgic glow. I have to remind myself of the compromises, the mistakes, the arguments and the weaknesses, the times when we took each other for granted or were too swept in our own needs to care properly.
Yet as I remember, I also notice what I am forgetting. How tall was Jen, against my body? I have to look at a photograph to be sure. I have enough video recordings (and tapes from 1990 that she sent to her best friend, in Sydney) to remind me of her voice, though I can't exactly bring it to mind at will. But the sound of Jen saying my name? The feeling of a hug and a kiss from Jen when I arrived home at the end of the day? The sensation of her hair in my face, or her eyelashes against my cheek? Digital will never be enough. Memory is the texture of loss.
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Who did you meet in July?
ReplyDeleteAs a thankfully divorced person i can confirm that it's clarification, not corruption which is involved. The other party would agree with this.
so true that digital will never be enough, when love like everything else happens in the body, in that hybridisation of the gut and the stars that is that íncarnate extraordinary feeling of human being . As Patti Smith wrote of her fascination with Arthur Rimbaud and of the inability of even an expert writer to conjure him, "Biography cannot be looked upon as the Rosetta stone of a subject. Only Rimbaud could encode the atmosphere of his being.... And only fools would attach themselves to any singular notion of the poet; for all things are irrevocably entwined within the infernal stump of his existence."
(I love that - "the infernal stump". One more thing must be quoted from Patti Smith on Rimbaud: "Those who are not poets, who are not filthy, who have not happily camped on horsehair mattresses, who are not innocently heartless, can never understand the nomadic truth of a poet.")
i think the 2002 film of 'solaris' covered something of this theme.
i've heard that people who lose of a deeply beloved spouse often seem to forget for some months and years the feel, the sight, the smell and taste, the sound. But they don't really forget, they only unconsciously try too hard to remember and the longing covers up the memories. Memories are delicate, precise, subtle and resilient. they are still there and will be felt, heard, known again, probably when not expected.
Bless you.