Archiving

I just spent twenty minutes turning my collected notes from the middle school English classroom observation into a really terrible scrapbook. It’s a mess of scraps and staples and tape. The handwritten bits are nearly indecipherable and the printed pages are ordered 1-3-2-4. I could’ve done a cleaner job of it, and if I were doing this for a grade I’m sure I would. But compiling all these notes into one journal is just something I did for fun, and I decided against taking an extra five minutes to make it look halfway decent because I want it to look like something the middle schoolers I’m observing will scoff at. Ancient and important texts rarely come in neatly stacked 12-point-font pages with one-inch-margins and page numbers, after all. They’ve got texture, stains, damage, missing parts. And, even though I know that it’s arrogant, that it distracts me from getting my words themselves to be the best that they can be, I always want my writing to have that wonderful feeling of decay.

My classes have accidentally hit on a bit of an archival motif, all at the same time, that has gotten me thinking about this more than usual lately. In Humanities we’re reading most of Sappho’s work, which isn’t hard because only 650 of the 10,000 lines she wrote survived. Much of our discussion is guesswork, imagining what might have filled the missing lines, which gives her writing a half-cloaked majesty that Homer never had. 

Meanwhile, in my fiction seminar, we’re reading Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive. A little ways past the halfway point, I’m not sure what I think about the book yet. It’s about a woman and her family who drive to Arizona to document the lives of migrant children held in detention centers, focusing on an important issue, but in a removed and philosophical way that seems as distanced from the horror as any newspaper article. Still, in that emphasis on archiving there’s a bit that appeals to me. The story is regularly interrupted to catalogue the various boxes of the archivist family. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s a thrill in the simple action of turning a page to open a box, the same sort of thrill as unwrapping a present. I guess that’s what I want my writing to be to some reader: mysterious, somehow, like lost documents or buried treasure, something to be uncovered and explored. That’s why so many of my drafts are marked-up print-outs and lined pages in my terrible handwriting taped together, even though it means I have to go through the long and dubiously helpful process of typing it all up: because opening a box of messy pages is a lot more fun than opening a computer file.

A couple weeks ago I posted about a student film that I’d officially abandoned. Once I was finished, I printed that post out, put it in with the marked-up script drafts, notes, and revision flowcharts. Then I put it in a shoebox, taped the whole thing up, and decided to bury it under mounds of other forgotten crap in the basement when I go home for fall break, hoping it will someday be excavated, that it will have meaning to someone later that it doesn’t to anyone now.

There’s a problem with writing for future historians, though. A lot of problems, but one specific to our time: there’s just so much information. The preciousness of a few tattered pages depends on most other pages being lost or decomposed by the time anyone bothers to look. But, barring some apocalyptic world-wide hard drive wipe, future generations are liable to know way too much about us. It feels like everyone is writing more and more, and there are more and more people to begin with, so what are the odds that anything I make will stick around and be remembered?

I’m starting to sound like some fringe academic sect my dad told me about once, people who thought public education had gone too far and a perfect world would go back to having literacy be a rare commodity. I dismissed them back then a little more easily than I can dismiss them now, because that sort of arrogance is more compelling now that I know how hard it is to have your writing read. But I need to realize that more things being saved also gives everyone better odds of being remembered. So I’ll fantasize about being archived like I always do, hoping it’ll someday come true. And I’ll keep up my ridiculous education scrapbook, because it’s fun and mostly harmless.