“I don’t understand the impulse other people have to document their own lives so much,” I said to a friend. “It’s ridiculous. These online photo sites and all this incessant scrap-booking. Why take all that time out of actually living?”
“When you’re older, it matters,” he said. “I don’t know, but... it just becomes more important.”
Hm. Yeah. It seemed too broad of a generalization. But I’ve been thinking about it since.
Documenting one's life. How does one document one’s own life? Does one, and how, and why?
How can one have the clarity, will, and insight to curate the permanent exhibit of one’s own story? And who are the museum goers?
How much is picture … how much is sound … how much is written?
When do you let others speak about you – and is the act of choosing your character witnesses dishonest?
And isn’t it what I am doing right now?
As I write this, I am sitting outside on a deck overlooking the inlet between peninsular Florida and Clearwater Island. It is night, 78 degrees, my feet are bare, and behind me is a string of lights in the shape of multicolored beach balls. If I wanted to document this particular night, it would be difficult. It sounds simple: I went to dinner with my extended family at a seafood restaurant in St. Pete’s two days before my cousin Jennifer (a wedding planner running her own wedding) is to marry the man to whom she is already married.
There is a large underwater iceberg of passive aggression and cultural conflict going on but those are not the things to document, for me. Such things make an ugly haiku. The things I would like to take down are: Lindsay ordering coconut shrimp, Mark telling me about the healing side of the financial services industry, Josh suggesting we go to Crabby Bill’s seafood restaurant on the night when Uncle Bill was, indeed, a little crabby, and no one making a crack about it at dinner; and the crickets, now, at night.
Most of all, I think I would want to tape the sound of the crickets.
My life is so salty and Ferris wheel and grainy and it speeds back into the past so quickly, like the wake from a ship. I am actually beginning to argue with the entire idea that one should document.
There is this polished stone fossil on my desk called an ammonite, an ancient cephalopod that swam around in the ocean that covered the Sahara Desert 350 million years ago. Now its remains sit on a desk in the office of the Media and Democracy Coalition on 19th Street NW. Whenever I get too worried about some burning question such as “Is the IPhone ‘Wanker’ app going to replace the old print business model for pornography?” all I have to do is look at that little curly petrified bastard sitting on my desk. And I breathe in, and breathe out, because sharing office space with something 350 million years old has a way of putting one's woes in perspective.
In Basin and Range, John McPhee writes about the behavior and psychology of geologists. One of the most amazing things in the book is this: most of what we know about the geological history of the planet comes from the corpses of the plants and animals that died and were preserved in the various layers of the earth. Their remains have allowed us, as humans, shuffling around with our little brushes and magnifying glasses, to discover which layer of sandstone is as old as the other - they move around too much to easily count. It takes the shape of a creature to match it in time.
The other completely amazing things McPhee writes about is the attitude that geologists develop toward time. Geologists, as an effect of their profession, become almost shamanic in their attitude towards time: they transcend it, in fact. Having to think, day in and day out, week after week, in scales of hundreds of millions of years completely alters their attitude towards the importance of their own lives...towards human civilization itself, he writes.
“In some ways, talking about (deep time) makes you know that your life is a blip, nothing,” one of the geologists says.
“But in another way... it's like you live forever.”
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