tabula rasa
Last weekend, I took 72 shots (3 rolls x 24 pictures per roll) with a film camera. I've used digital cameras for so many years that it was a disconcerting experience. Because I couldn't get an immediate idea of how the pictures looked, I ended up taking several shots of everything, trying different shutter speeds and exposures, reframing again and again. I felt paralyzed, conscious of the limited and dwindling number of photos on each roll, worrying about wasting film, afraid of making a irremediable mistake.
I'm old enough that I can remember having similar issues when using a typwriter -- inserting sheets of paper at an unattractive slant, trying not to type too far into the righthand and bottom margins, smudging not-quite-dry correction fluid, wondering if the end result had too many carats and handwritten corrections. Sometimes, just as I finished typing, I'd have what seemed at the time like a brilliant insight or at least an idea for a better organizational structure. But I'd leave the paper the way it was, because I couldn't face typing the whole thing all over again.
Now, of course, with word processing, composition, editing and typing merge effortlessly into one seamless process. I can type an outline on the screen, fill in the sections as I think of ideas, then make them disappear when I realize that the ideas weren't all that good to begin with. I can go back and invisibly fix misspellings and grammatical errors. I can shuffle paragraphs at will. And I don't have to worry about any of the technical aspects (is the paper straight? are the margins consistent?).
I'm sure someone must have tried to figure out how and to what extent the newer technologies of writing have altered its content. But, aside from making it easier to plagairize and to detect plagiarism, I'm not sure exactly what, in general, the changes have been. I know that for me, writing, which once was wrenchingly difficult, is now something much less strenuous. It's as though, after years of scrubbing clothes on a washboard while kneeling on a muddy riverbank, I've finally bought myself one of those new-fangled electric washing machines.
If you're trying to make a broader point about life or memory or experience, you probably wouldn't want look to a word processer or even a typewriter. A better analogy is a palimpsest, a manuscript or tablet whose original writing has been rubbed off to make room for something else. A palimpsest is a tabula rasa in the literal meaning of the term. Though tabula rasa is usually translated as blank slate, the wordrasa comes from the Latin verb meaning to scratch or scrape. Presumably, a used tablet with the old letters scraped off was often as close as you could get to one that was truly blank. In the same way, in our minds and hearts, thoughts and feelings are written and overwritten, using and reusing the same piece of parchment. If you look hard enough, you can see the outlines of the letters you tried so hard to erase.
23 comments:
nothing ever disappears without a trace.
ah, this is a topic near and dear to my heart.
i've always believed that writing has suffered because of word processing -- that its sheer tidiness on the page, made possible by Word, or some such, covers a multitude of sins.
I have to agree too -- I wonder how things would be different if the delete key weren't so easily accessable.
I haven't gotten out my film camera in years...I think not seeing the pictures might make me completely nuts (not that I really need much help with that).
Nice post. I agree with what you say about palimpsests. Did you see this piece from this past weekend's NYTimes magazine about composing in Microsoft Word v. a number of more intuitive softwares (word?), intended to let you work as a writer rather than a programmer?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06wwln-medium-t.html
After filling 13 films in 3 weeks on my first trip to the US, I am very grateful for digital cameras. 2 alone were full of waterfalls, I think.
I think the novel Frankenstein suffers from not enough access to word processing - two major characters introduced very awkwardly and about a hundred pages past the most natural point to introduce them. You can readily imagine Mary Shelley inventing these characters on the spot, just so that the monster can kill them.
Beautiful post - I loved it! And I am so right there with you at the last two sentences.
I definitely agree with las.
William James claimed that he could tell the precise sentence on which his brother, Henry, switched from writing out his books to dictating them. It seems we are always looking to how technology changes things.
I have a nice film SLR I haven't used in over five years because of this inability to see the picture thing. I used to take a ton of film pictures, and then marvel at the money and chemicals wasted in printing the whole roll.
And yes, if you look hard enough, you can see the outlines. And when you are looking that hard, you have to wonder how is it that you worked so hard first to erase them and then to see them again.
I have said to dh that if money was no object & I didn't have to work, I'd love to go back to school again, if only for the pleasure of doing research via the Internet & writing essays on the computer vs the handwritten drafts & painstakingly typed final copy that was the norm in my university days. Young people today have no idea...! (And yes, I realize that makes me sound totally ancient, lol.)
Yes I remember the lopsided paper, the anxiety of wasting precious film...
I must be a zillion years old.
When I was in graduate school, I taught a class in music appreciation. It was a required class - every undergraduate had to take it - so every graduate student in the music department taught. It was at the cusp of the move from typewriters to computers. I think half the students were still using typewriters and the rest were using word processing. I remember distinctly that the computer written papers were worse. Sure, they were pretty and clean with nice margins and no white-out, but the typewritten papers were better written, more thoughtfully organized, and altogether more coherent. The computer-generated papers were dashed off, tidied up and never edited. It was quite striking.
I recall seeing a show, maybe a crime show, in which the hard drives of computers were being searched and information that had been deleted was able to be recovered. Perhaps blogging is very much like the tabula rasa
I do recall one of my profs having an email argument with blogger about who owned the content he published.
My husband uses film. He says digital is for documentation only (and that it's easy and boring) while film is for art.
There is a small environmental plus I suppose to using word processors and digital cameras: less paper waste. No need to redo the entire page because you screwed up the margin, and no need to develop the entire roll.
That said, as a historian, I'm a bit concerned about how this generation of text messaging and blogging and emailing will get passed along, saved, recorded. There's a big project in at GMU to save a lot of the digital information from 911 -- the phone messages, emails, and so forth. I just wonder about the rest.
I had to buy disposable film cameras when I went to Barcelona because I forgot my digital I hated it. I guess I'm used to instant gratification these days.
I've found that word processors, with their "undo" function, and digital cameras, with the easy delete, have significantly altered the way I function in the world. I often find myself looking for the undo or rewind in conversations. It's hard remembering that you can't take it back.
Delete, Backspace, spellcheck...most would even venture to say that email and IM, have caused us to depersonalize everything. It seems that we are all so used to writing and rewriting everything to the maximum that it loses it's heart, the original feelings that inspired the piece to begin with, whether that is a letter or a manuscript...anything.
Good topic, great post.
i do not miss my film at all. you do end wasting soooo much film.
i hope you're going to scan them in so that we can see them.
Oh where to begin. Yes. As much as I appreciate and benefit in some way from "modern advances" oh how I long for the time when people had time, accepted that things took time.
I think that is lost.
I miss it. And I sort of miss the ping of a typewriter. The smell of the ribbon. The high from carbon paper.
And I just aged myself 45 years didn't I? LOL
this whole thing made me think of something i hated about infertility. not that it parallels at all with what you actually said, except in my own deadbabywarped mind.
when we *decided* to have a baby, it didn't happen. every month, before every procedure, we would have to question that decision. we were constantly trying to figure out if it was REALLY what we wanted, if we would be good parents. it was just so much effort. i just thought fertile people just said, "OK! let's have a baby!" and before they really even considered the implications, the process was already underway (ie, she was pregnant).
makes you wonder, though, how much crap is out there (photos, writing, or parents) because it was just that simple.
Lisa B brings up a great point, reality is that even on a computer, nothing can ever be erased, or deleted. It's always somewhere on the hard drive or on the internet or well, in our memories.
So maybe nothing is ever truly gone, even in this day and age.
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