Everything will become so compressed it will exist no longer
I am wondering where the great libraries are, those libraries that, were they to catch fire, scholars and bibliophiles would be gravely sad, depressed not so much over the loss of the vast amounts of knowledge and history, but rather the loss of books themselves, the binding and stitching and engraving.
The brittle nature of things makes us love them and wish to preserve them. Only when your grandmother is old do you begin to wish that she would live forever. Only when a keepsake begins to show signs of decay or when a beloved sweater begins to fray do we want to treat it more tenderly or perhaps handle it less than we should like.
I am wondering where, in the future, the great libraries will be, as everything is moving toward a state of obliteration. Due to our desire to preserve information in the most compressed form achievable, we may eventually, however inadvertently, erase the very information we are striving to preserve. In my short life, I have seen the compression of the technological means of memory, but I have also witnessed the loss of those memories. Desktop computers have shrunk into ultra-thin laptops; tube televisions have flattened into panel screens; vinyl records have been replaced by compact discs that were then replaced by digital music files; DVDs took the place of VHSs; floppy disks were replaced by tiny memory chips in the bodies of slim computers. I have seen technology break down; I have seen families grieve the loss of their family photos and videos, which were only saved digitally. I have had personal e-mail accounts wiped totally clean by corporations I had entrusted with the preservation of my correspondence. One can only surmise, given the trends of memory compression, that everything will become so compact it will exist no longer; or, the data and information and files will exist, only they will be inaccessible—in other words, they will exist as myth, ghostly, in the realm of the afterlife.
Our drive to keep and preserve seems to have achieved only the obliteration of self and memory. I know someday our technology will have made possible a world that is no longer 3-D; everything will be flat and thin and unperceivable. To live in such a world, humans too will have to transform into beams of light measuring in micromillimeters. Writers, it seems to me, have been ahead of this technology since the beginning of information storage, as it is they who have always, in efforts to live forever, transferred the whole of their beings onto paper, attempting to take the soul—that very spacious thing—and install it into the finite space of a book.
How writing differs from violent weather
The inhabitants of the earth can do nothing to alter the immediate weather, although they can forecast what the weather might be like. In situations where weather poses an imminent threat to life and shelter, residents, the news stations tell us, should “brace themselves.” For a long time, I have known what systems of weather were heading toward me. There were essays churning in the dark overhead, gathering and threatening: an essay on the anatomy of lotus flowers; one concerning the ecology of ponds; treatises on capitalism, slavery, and language; the story of my mother being sold into slavery for bags of rice; the story of my father in cotton fields; a visual essay on celestial bodies; an essay on kelp seahorses. In writing, I want to blend the factual with feeling—not just the speed of wind, the amount of rainfall, the damage of floods, but the emotions of the woman who has just learned that, due to the weather, for which she did or did not brace herself, she has lost everything. To brace myself from the storm of the essay on lotus flowers, I imagine I will have to surround myself with botany illustrations, use nothing but lotus-scented beauty products, visit botanical water gardens, try to remember the taste of the ripe lotus seeds I ate over five summers ago. Perhaps I should not, as residents facing a hurricane, brace myself, but rather take the boards off my windows and let the storm in. Perhaps “bracing” is merely another way of saying “waiting.” I should do better to face the storm unprepared and deal with the aftermath—writing that is distraught, malformed, imperfect, ugly, unsuited, soiled, ruined, lost, and irrecoverable—when the storm passes, in those moments when I pretend to but do not really revise anything. How writing then differs from violent weather: in storms you have not where once you had; in writing you have where once you had not.
On Writing and Witchcraft
When I was thirteen, I was attracted to witchcraft. I wasn’t so much interested in the outcomes of the various spells, but rather I was fascinated by the seemingly arcane and beautiful tools of the craft. It seemed to me that witchcraft was like a really serious spa session, not that I had ever been to a spa. In movies, you see knives and blood, but in the books I stole from bookstores
