A while ago in internet terms, there was a post on Spike, the Meanjin blog about the site forgotten bookmarks, which I promptly visited. I liked it a lot. It’s the kind of blog that I love, feeding as it does, the social eavesdropper, collector, lover of books, librarian and general internet addict in me.
But even as I loved it, I found myself feeling unsettled by the postcard highlighted and transcribed on Spike. The one that was found in The Remains of the Day. I tried to write a comment on Spike at the time, but couldn’t get the words quite right so deleted it (as I so often do, I’m crap at commenting, I really am).
The discomfort I felt, however, kept following me. I would say it haunted me. I even dreamt about it one night. My discomfort had nothing at all to do with the general idea of putting these treasures on the internet. Like I say, I love the site. My discomfort was to do specifically with that letter.
Having, as I do, time on my hands to engage in emotional over-analysis, I have been doing some thinking about why I have been so affected by this particular postcard.
Probably, I’m more sensitive about things and artefacts and mementos than I might previously have been. Having, within the space of twelve months, co-ordinated the cleaning out of my grandfather’s house when he moved into aged accommodation; my family home after my father died; and my own house when we moved over here, has left me…well, let’s just leave it at sensitive for now.
In the last six months, I’ve been writing a bit about how it has been, what it means to deal with so many things, things that quickly translate into memories and artefacts and mementos. I’ve been fiddling it all into essays which will hopefully weave themselves into a book. Through that, I’ve been doing, as I’ve said, a lot of thinking about the rights and wrongs, the shoulds and the shouldn’ts, the oughts and the ought nots. The ethics of it all. Topped off with some postgraduate research into ethics and life writing. So, that’s affected (affecting) my thinking too. While the thinks that I’ve thought about life writing don’t automatically transfer to this situation, some of those thinks do.
Now in the end, I did leave a comment on the Spike blog, to which Jessica replied that I have raised an interesting point about privacy and ethics. I guess my comment over there does seem to be specifically about privacy, but actually, my discomfort goes deeper than simple privacy. It is more to do with the rights we do or don’t have to tell other people’s stories. Certainly, privacy is an aspect of this, but it is only one aspect.
Life writing cannot avoid the telling of other people’s stories to a greater or lesser extent. Each writer will need to decide whose stories, and how much of those stories, they are allowed to tell, and that decision will be affected by all sorts of factors (journals and books and essays filled with such factors if you are interested, let me know, I can point you at some good places to get started).
So it is with this postcard. Do we have a right to this postcard, its contents and the story it tells? My simple, general answer would be that yes, as a society we do have a right to such things and my simplest arguments in favour would be that we are all enriched, we all learn from them, there is more good than harm generally done.
But this particular postcard? Why is this troubling me?
One crucial issue is, I think, the time. It is dated 00. That’s 2000, barely ten years ago. In internet years, ten is a lifetime, but in stories of loves lost and found, ten years might not be much time at all. If I were a player in that story, if I were him or her, or if I were the person now wearing that ring, I wonder what I would think if I came upon that postcard on the internet?
And then I started thinking not so much, ‘What if that were me?’, but, ‘What if I were the custodian of that letter?’
If I had come across this letter in my father’s things, would I share it with the world? Possibly – probably – I would share it with my closest friends, but not with the internet. So if I can think of circumstances under which I might not share it, then wouldn’t they stand for a stranger too? Don’t we owe more benefit of the doubt to a stranger simply because we have even less chance of knowing their ins and outs?
All of these are interesting questions, but they are intellectual, theoretical questions and don’t explain what it is that is specifically bothering me. Why did I dream about that postcard? Why do I care that much about its publication?
It took me a while, but I finally worked it out. The real reason this particular letter is gnawing at me is because when you are left with someone’s things, you could quite easily become the custodian of such a letter.
You could easily become the custodian, but not even know.
So when I look at that postcard, I’m not thinking of all the boxes that I bundled up in my grandfather’s and father’s houses and took to my own. But of all the boxes I bundled up and gave away.
And what happens in chapter two when you go into exactly what was in those boxes you gave away?
And in chapter three where you begin the search to get them back?
Have you read Dawn French’s Dear Fatty? She’s interesting in how she’s openly navigating the life writing/exposing family ideas while writing.
These are ideas I try not to think about too much, but I’m glad I read your thinks on it.
I think in the end this was why I couldn’t write fiction (oh, and the impossibility I found of structuring a novel, short story yes, novel urgh). So many of the short stories I wrote back then were not at all fictional. And I made one or two people cry. At least with blogging, it is openly autobiographical and I find the lines about whose stories I can tell easier to find. Being fifteen years older helps too, I suppose.
As for being the custodian of life ephemera, I don’t find the anonymous cards and photos difficult but I am dreading becoming the custodian of my mother’s vast collection of family history.
And because I am thinking about context I am thinking about how that thing changes with each new context it gets. The granddaughter who might find something new about her relations, the family friends who have a different person in mind when they read it, the stranger who finds it in a book and invents the person from the artefact.
I think part of the appeal of those found objects is similar to our blog, in fact. Personal glimpses, but removed from us so that we can see ourselves reflected in them properly. Emotional connections, but not so close that we need to feel uncomfortable. Usually.
I have a friend, who is also an only child, who like me has watched her mother hoard generations-worth of stuff and wondered what on earth was going to happen when it was all up to her.
We made an only-child pact over dinner one night that when the time comes we would allow one another to set a match to the lot of it.
Because we’re not the custodians of people’s lives, just the shell of stuff they leave behind. We can’t take away what they were by moving things on, or keep hold of people by keeping their stuff.
And really, if I was the owner of that necklace? And I found a postcard showing that my husband/ lover had had an ex-girlfriend who wrote things like “I have every bit of confidence in the beauty of your unique David-ness”? I would be sitting down with that husband/ lover and pissing myself laughing with him about how ridiculous his ex was, and dying to hear some more of her cheesy hippy sincerity so that I could piss myself laughing some more.
But then I’m not a big thinker. I’m more of a bitch.
I can see how it got you thinking TC…and it’s not just the ethics of it – it’s such a short story in itself.