archival survival

The other day I lost six months’ worth of voice memos. They disappeared when my phone broke and couldn’t be properly restored. Notes to self, stories I was composing on the spot and planned to transcribe later, impromptu interviews with the kids, scraps of music, fleeting jam sessions, things I don’t even want to think about now that they are gone.

For a long time I have defended having a smartphone even though I experience its mentally deleterious and socially distracting effects every day. It can be a tool for creativity! I tell myself optimistically. A camera, a tape recorder, a note-taking machine. But then I wind up losing the exact materials I wanted to preserve.

One of those memos I recorded one night while nearly asleep, a moment of clarity and calm in which my sense of purpose and beliefs about life became so clear to me that I reached over to the phone to record them, dictating in a whisper so as not to disturb my sleeping family. In a rare act of categorization, I labeled the file “Whispered Truths.”

I felt comforted knowing the voice memo was there, but I didn’t go back to listen to it. What was on the recording? I will never know. Any truths uncovered in that moment will have to be rediscovered elsewhere or remain forever just below the surface. Past experience tells me I am not missing out on much, that any “truths” contained are likely intrinsic and only felt like revelations in the faux profundity of half-sleep.

On the other hand, my favorite part of “Kubla Khan” is the part Coleridge couldn’t remember, and what I actually succeed in transcribing almost never compares to what I had in my head once but can never recover.

So here’s to the eventual arrival of new ideas, to less digital dependence, to more reliable systems of channeling creativity and harnessing the unreliable mystic. If I am successful with any of these efforts I promise to post about them here, likely using my old-school computer rather than my double-edged smartphone. But right now it’s late and I must go to sleep. Who knows what truths may visit?