I started writing first drafts by hand about two years ago, to deal with various attention management issues, including having a toddler in the house, a pandemic outside the house, and ancestral voices prophesying war in my dreams. Whatever else one might say about the modern internet-enabled consumer computer, it is an extremely efficient psychological-issues-projection system. Anything you want or fear is a breath away—literally, if you use voice interface. With apologies to Joyce: if Judas goes online tonight, it is toward Judas that his clicks will tend. So, I thought, to retain focus, simplify. A piece of paper, and a pen. You’ve done it before.
Plus, this way you can justify buying a nice pen. Or three.
After a decade or so of extremely disaster-conscious drafting, every keystroke instantly autosaved and transmitted to that unsettlingly vague ‘someone else’s computer’ we call The Cloud, my physical draft felt vulnerable, almost naked. What if I spilled something on the notebook? What if I _left_ it somewhere? It’s out there in the world, where thieves and fire are. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth” is the instinct. But of course the internet has its own share of thieves and fire these days—and its own rot.
Jonathan Zittrain recently wrote a great piece for The Atlantic about internet decay, about how the internet isn’t as forever as we assume. One simple example of this decay is ‘link rot’—the tendency of hyperlinks to go mushy faster than avocados left in a bag. If you link to a particular blog entry of mine over on maxgladstone.com, and I change the back end of the site, even if that blog entry still exists, your link won’t work. According to his piece, which I’ll link here in hope they won’t change the URL before tomorrow, something like 70 percent of links on the internet have rotted.
Physical electronics are as susceptible to entropy as links are—if not more so. Cleaning up after a recent move, the task I dreaded most was sorting out our old devices. Phones and digital picture frames and the like may be packaged and marketed to present illusions of silicon permanence—“your photos forever!”—but circuitry decays, and batteries bubble, sometimes even explode. The magic smoke goes out.
By contrast: a few months back I started playing the fiddle again. I had never stopped in an absolute, cold turkey, “Spider-Man: No More??” sort of way, but for the first time in many years I’m playing, if not every day, then almost every day. I opened the case in June expecting to find something horrible—who knows what, Zerg maybe. But of course the fiddle was still there. A couple strings were broken, and easily replaced; the rubber ‘feet’ on the old Kun shoulder rest, which I used to think was extremely cool and sith-like because the name reminded me of Exar Kun, had decayed, and I replaced them with bits of surgical tubing.
It’s an old fiddle, a workmanlike copy of a copy of an Amati, and it’s twenty five years older now than it was when it came to me. A relative found it in his closet, right about the time I was due to transition from the three-quarters to the full size instrument, and repairing the old fiddle seemed cheaper than buying a new one; we took it to a violin shop in Nashville, maybe even The Violin Shop, definite article, for a fix-up, and ever since it’s been happy to sing for me, a clear, clean treble instrument. After carting it around China through extreme heat and humidity without much climate control, I brought it in to Rutman’s in Boston for a bridge replacement and a tune-up; the man who minded the shop said, when I returned to pick the fiddle up, “I like your bow. The fiddle, eh, it is what it is.” What it is, whatever else it is, is mine. For now. Until I pass it on to someone else.
I read this once about violins, though I don’t know if it’s true: as the instrument sits idle, its varnish and glue crystalize like honey on a shelf. To reverse the process, you just have to play—the subtle vibrations restore the pliancy of wood and materials. The cure for the damage of abandonment is gentle care and use. I’ve heard the transformation in the last few months, the recovery. The sound ripens. Some of that’s a gradual refinement in my touch and technique, as I grow from remembering tunes to finding joy in them—but it’s not all me. The fiddle wakes up.
I may lose computers or hard drives, or the contents of this or that cloud service. I have some childhood novels somewhere saved in ClarisWorks format on an Iomega Zip drive, if you want to read a list of nouns that don’t mean anything any more. I also have printouts, to be sure, but if you asked me, age twelve, which I expected to last longer, the Kinkos printout or the computer file, I would have made the wrong bet. Meanwhile, the Enigma notebook half-full of my next novel will last, as long as I keep it away from my toddler and glasses of water.
I don’t have a grand theory here, beyond: it’s fascinating what lasts, and what breaks. What is strong, compared to what we think strength looks like. A bit seems like a thought, which seems eternal, but none of those jumps quite land. The internet is rotting, and here’s my manuscript, written in script that would have been legible a hundred years ago (some of which I’ve written, for that matter, with a seventy-year-old pen). Here’s a top-of-the-line phone, requiring perhaps a pyramid or three’s worth of collective human effort to create and manufacture, and five years after production it’s hazardous to have in the house. Here’s a fiddle, not a world class heritage piece but the kind of instrument a family might abandon in a closet, and with a little attention and care, damn but it does play.
Love this :) It's interesting to think about the many different kinds of decay, the corruption of data and the crystallizing varnish on a violin. For me, decay is the flip side of change, and what decays gracefully can yield to the new all the more easily. I don't think our digital systems decay particularly gracefully, and I wonder if we'll come up with ones that do, where the bits harden instead of dissolving into information soup. A fun think for a weekend!
This is why I like the cloud. Everything breaks and decays, in the end, paper or electronic. To propagate a signal forward through time, to preserve its information, we have no option but to *copy* it, spread it as widely as possible, make fresh copies when old ones fall apart. When the guys in the Amazon data centers walk the aisles every morning and pull all the dead hard drives and replace them with new ones that get fresh copies, they're following a tradition that goes back to monks in the dark ages carefully copying out crumbling Roman classics for posterity, and from there back to DNA itself, the ultimate master of the art.