On Gossamer Wings
When did who say what to whom?
It began with clay and a stick. Pinch off a ball and squeeze it, then poke it in meaningful ways with the stick and let it dry. Viola! Indelible records.
A few brave and patient souls learned to chisel information into polished stone, but that was so specialized — bordering on artistry — that only the most important stuff got recorded that way.
Some enterprising folks in North Africa found they could take fresh reeds and pound them with the carved rocks until they all stuck together, then they could write on them. Around the same time Cai Lun in China figured out how to use wood pulp, and several North American tribes skinned trees to form sheets for writing. Speaking of skinning, several cultures made vellum from the flesh of yearling calves, or the skins of human babies if the Vatican rumors are to be believed.
In any case, wood pulp paper was a major technological innovation. It was cheap, lightweight and durable, making it widely available as a material for storing information for long periods of time, and making the information easily portable. Sure, those city maps on the ceilings of entryways at the Coloseum in Rome are very interesting, but you can’t fold them up and sell them at gas stations (do I date myself here?).
Information has always been destructible, no matter what the medium. Stones get eroded if they aren’t toppled and smashed, clay tablets were ritually destroyed during Jubilee years, and the torching of the Library at Alexandria did irreperable harm to history, but nothing compares to the digital age for the ability to modify and delete information.
Everyone who still reads knows the scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with Winston Smith in his dreary cubicle carefully pasting new text and edited photos into archived documents to “unperson” disfavored historical figures. Oceanian has always been at war with East Asia. Orwell could not have imagined the power at your very fingertips this very moment.
I mention this, because Mrs. FarSide and I recently dug out an old photo album (remeber those?). We had not only forgotten that we had the photos, but we had even forgotten the event of which they were taken. The memories came flooding back and we sat and talked about those times for an hour. They were far more tangible and real than any of the thousands of image files I have in my library, even though I slavishly sort and archive them, and they are in chronological order according to the file time stamps.
Yeah, I know…don’t say it.
Anyway, it occurred to me (again) that I could manipulate memories and history itself with the tools at my disposal. For work purposes, I routinely “clean up” images and even create things that never existed by manipulating image files and using AI tools. With Adobe Acrobat Pro, I can take any e-book and change the text in a way you would never know (always lock and sign your important files).
With even printed books, it takes complex chemical and photometric assays to determine authenticity, and even then it’s possible to forge them, just very much harder to do so. I can take a high-resolution scan of a printed photo, “polish” it in PhotoShop, and print it out again, and it would be difficult for most of us to tell the difference. Heck, magicians can perform mircles while you stand just inches away, and you’d believe it.
What’s more, human memory is a notoriously fickle thing, even if we grant the fact that each observier has a unique point of view and set of filters. If we could go back and relive events seemingly burned into our minds, we would find that they didn’t occur quite the way we remember. How many times have you sat around with a group of people discussing a mutual experience, and each person adds a “and don’t forget” detail to the story?
So, I guess the point of this exercise is to remind us that there is no objective, detailed record of anything anywhere at any time. We depend on various kinds of records, but they can be modified. Just look what Constantine and Jerome did to the “canonical” Gospels with a few simple translation tricks. I know first hand from editing film and video that a series of recordings can be assembled to tell the same story different ways, or even different stories with the same materials.
We use the expression “written in stone” to say that something is unchangable, yet no one knows what Stonehenge was used for, or why the pyramids were built, or what all those freaking monoliths everywhere were meant to convey. Just ask your neighborhood Scientidiot what reality is made out of. “Mostly empty space,” is the correct answer.
While our civilization is based on the ability to record and transmit information across time and space, the veracity of that information is far from guaranteed. In the end, we can only depend on our own memories and experiences, and even those are questionable.
I submt that the only sure way to transmit information is DNA, and we didn’t create that one. DNA can replicate exact copies of itself, and it is generally fool-proof, given the sheer amount of it around and how long it’s been around. it seems, though, that Universe is not about creating indelible information. It is constantly mixing and matching existing things to make new things. We are just becoming aware of the edit points, but we are unable (as yet) to create the edits ourselves. We can play with our own history all we like, but Universe itself is far beyond our reach.
The Buddha used the metaphor of sea foam to describe reality: it could ride the mightest waves, be blown about by the fiercest of winds, and come to rest on the shore. At some point; however, the bubbles eventually popped and the foam melted back into the aether, vanishing forever into time and space.
Our memories are always composed of the things we think are most important to us, nnd each generation modifies the past to serve its needs in the present, as it careens blindly into the future. That’s not to say preserving information is a futile exercise. It has its value of connecting each of us to something beyond ourselves.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the greatest musical talents ever, has no living relatives — only two of his six children survived to adulthood, and neither had any recorded offspring. Mozart himself was buried in a common grave and there is no way to tell which remains are his, thus none of them really are. There are manuscripts and letters that are purportedly his, but other than someone’s memory and tradition, it can’t be objectively proved. His death and burial were recorded in the church records, and his music lives on, but there is no physical proof that he ever existed outside of legend. Does that make his music any less astounding?
There is no such thing as a sure thing, especially when it comes to time and space. We are all just sea foam in the process of melting back into the aether. We are, however, collections of information that are part of Universe’s creative process.
I find that oddly comforting.
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As my Dad would often say, "If I wake up without pain, I'll know I'm dead." Now in my own old age, I know what he meant. Pain is reality. Pleasure is fleeting. Pain sticks around.
I saw a video a year ago. It was one of those travel videos. The videographer was flying north from Scotland to the Orkney Islands.
As the plane passed over the very northern tip of the Scottish mainland, he pointed out, with his camera, a lonely cabin at the end of a dirt track.
"That is the cabin where George Orwell wrote Animal Farm. It has no water or electricity, but you can rent it as an Air B&B."
The instruction manual for Stonehenge was a verbal tradition that has remained such in contrast to the Talmud which got written down.