blackrimglasses

As we’re heading into the new year, I am going to do something a bit different here. Instead of talking specifically about technology, I want to talk about time, life, and how each fits together. I know that I’m a geek, and as such my interests tend toward the new, interesting and technological, but as a geek as well my moments of introspection and reconciliation are that much more complicated, as memory for me is not a single referential thing. Its tagged, compartmentalized, archived and analyzed.

Time therefore is fluid, compressed by the nature of its recollection. And yet it is still there, drawing out long and compressing up strong.

I find myself thinking a lot about time lately because it seems to be slipping away with ever quickening frequency. The whimsical “where did the week go” I hear weekly is not so much a cause for a witty remark, but an abstract kind of panic. Where did it go? Where do my days go?

Its not that I worry about this. Its that I wonder if, in 60 years or so (hopefully), I’ll look back and not think where did the day or week go, but where did the decade go. I don’t want to be in the mode of forgetting the culmination of each day transitioning into a day anew.

The transition from a day to another is supposed to be a period in which the culminated history of moments to that point can recombine into informing the day to come. I think I’m loosing this.

So as I enter what will be my 29th year. As the calendar closes on what was my 28th, I will write three posts:

• Time Past
• Time Present
• Time Future

Time Past

I have been alive 10,482 days, as of writing this. So add two dates for padding.

Its a large number, but an oddly nice one. Its somehow nice to think that in 8 days when the year is nearly done, I’ll round out at 10,500 days of light hitting retinas, sound vibrating cillia, etc.

To think back though of 10,500 days is to think back of what ties each date into a memory. To think back to which sense ties a date to another date, thereby making a cluster of dates that blur into memory.

What, in those 10,482 days prepared me for sitting in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico, with one shoe on, a wife getting ready to go eat, and me typing this on a Mac Book Pro?

Memory recounts via bursts and flits of light, smell, sound and darkness. Its nothing measurable and nothing concrete. Days appear here and there, some clustered together amidst others. Some alone in solitude, distinct for whatever reason. There are parts of days I remember, parts that I remember only one sense from, and parts augmented by photographs, videos or other third party recountings.

So here we are, 10,500 days on and I’m trying to remember the last 365 and now remembering the ones that came before it. I feel as though I’ve reached the point where my externalized recollection of the past has outgrown the internalized.

Meaning: I have nearly 900 photos on Flickr, about 5000 not on Flickr, an online identity tracing back almost 15 years and a data storage collection approaching 4 terabytes full.

And still I can think back and remember things, and nothing digitally can come close to approaching it.

I remember in 1981, before my sister was born and my dad holding me, pointing to the clouds rising above Old Faithful and telling me thats where clouds were made. I remember the propeller on the airplane as we flew back.

I remember the sun setting above a runway when I was 4.

Up until a certain point, my memories were rooted not in any temporal place, bur rather based on experience. Time only got rooted to memory when I started tying memory to referrents that existed outside my internal space.

For example, my memory of the house I lived in when I was 5 is rooted to the channel that MTV was on (channel 21) and the texture of the carpet that I sat on when I watched it. My memory of the daycare center I was in when I was 4 and 5, is rooted to the old cabinet style TV that I watched Mr. Rogers on, and the recliner I sat in to watch it. I also remember that I used to fake the hiccups so someone would bring me water.

Days solidified along with the cultural referents. I remember my mom crying when the Challenger exploded. I remember the Whittier earthquake. I remember the Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez) more for the panic inspired in my mom and dad than for what he did.

At a certain point though, all my reference points for specific moments start tying themselves to the MM/DD/YYYY format we’re used to. Everything started getting timestamped.

• My first e-mail I received from someone.
• The time I IM’ed on AOL with Michael Stipe (true story), in 1994
• The first BBS I signed into
• The first upload of Murmurs.com

More than anything, the first time my memory was timestamped, was the first moment I ever felt connected to something bigger than myself. I wonder if that is a common thing with geeks and tech early adopters? When I first dialed into a SLIP account, sent an e-mail, downloaded a file and played a MUD through telnet, it felt like I removed myself from myself. It was September, 1992.

Cell phones got added to the mix shortly after, and all phone calls now had that timestamp on them.

• Breaking up
• First conversations
• Last conversations
• Goodbyes
• Hello
• Bad news
• The best news ever

They all have very specific visual cues, the numbers on the screen voices at the end of the line, a time/date and music accompaniment. I remember listening to Music for Airports after getting an e-mail and then a phone-call dissolving a long-term relationship, and wondering what I was going to do. I remember listening to the song “PS You Rock My World” after a phone call with the woman I’m currently married to and feeling like life went from “Pause” to “Play” again.

The thing about these memories though is they are not cataloged and filed away (in most cases) but a collective recollection brought about by a multitude of inputs.

Its about what happened, what happened around it, what the visual cues were, aural cues, smells and tastes.

And I think thats something I’m loosing. 10,500 days into this life, the last year doesn’t seem to have taken anytime. And while there are memories to be sure, it almost seems like the individual strength of memories are diminished by the means by which we augment and compress them into online photo galleries, YouTube clips, blog posts, IM’s and e-mails.

It used to be the memory of a day was sacred and was reflective more out of a desire for that memory than for the reality it encompassed. We had photos to pull them out of ourselves, but they were edited and conserved by the finite nature of the media. Video too was not terribly accurate, but a filtered and lined, interlaced and NTSC version of what happened. The 70’s were yellow and had rounded corners. The early 80’s had tube based video cameras and so light had trails. The 90’s were on Hi-8 and won’t play anymore.

Its almost like the tools to recount time past are too real and leave nothing left to subjective recollection or the compounding of individual histories into History. The perfect Day of X is now also reflected in a specific timestamp with all exposure information showing that my hair was fucked up.

There is a concept in philosophy called Historicity. Its used to explain the inability for history to be viewed in situ. For history only to be subject to the things that bracket it, contextualize it and make it subject to atomic reality. History is never atomic, always in context of not only linear time, but non-linear recollection and recombination of other views and histories on to itself. Historicity.

Baudrillard said in a lecture at UCI in 1999.

“For reality is but a concept, or a principle, and by reality I mean the whole system of values connected with this principle. The Real as such implies an origin, an end, a past and a future, a chain of causes and effects, a continuity and a rationality. No real without these elements, without an objective configuration of discourse. And its disappearing is the dislocation of this whole constellation.”

The crux of course is that the more we try to reify reality within the frameworks of temporal recollection, the more removed we get from what reality really is.

If a subject is photographed from infinite angles by infinite photographers, and those infinite photographs are recombined to make a new representation, which of the infinite photographs, and which of the infinite photographers is truly in possession of the objective reality? Or is the act of recombining them a method of creating such?

Is the creation of objective reality really an answer for loosing ourselves to history?

Maybe our sampling rate for our subjectivity has grown too high into the point where reality is nothing more than pixels on a screen, bits on a disk and frames on the ethernet.

My goal for 2008 is simple then:

I want a day lived to the point of a complete subjective recollection.

Like clouds being made in Wyoming.