Loss, Writing, and (unhappily for me) the Loss of Some Writings
A week ago I heard about someone losing all kinds of data from a crash and I thought to myself: ”I ought to back up some stuff.” Did I do this? No.And then my hard drive decided it no longer wished to be a hard drive. I now have a new one, but in the case of hard drives new is not better. I miss my old one. There were some things on it. All of them, in fact, except what’s also here and floating around in my email and that sort of thing. I feel stripped, bereft. But things are ephemeral; life is ephemeral. Not that I’m necessarily so comfortable with or thrilled about that. But there we are, nonetheless, in an ephemeral state. All of us. The thing is that writing (especially of the artsy type, or some approximation thereof, which is what I’m really feeling the loss of) is less ephemeral than other things, usually; that’s kind of the point of writing. It functions in the writer’s absence. It has a life beyond the writer’s life (and intention, potentially). It’s supposed to be out there beyond me, even after me, in my absence one way or another. I’m not supposed to be sitting here functioning (or attempting to) in its absence. But of course it did its work in me already; that isn’t undone. And the good stuff–if there is any–or the stuff that has any power–will reassert itself, in my mind–or not, in someone else’s, in another form. If something is worth saying and crafting it will be crafted. By someone, at some point. And it will be lost again. And said again. In a similar way, or in another.
Tags: art, computers, expression, loss, writers, Writing
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March 27, 2008 at 6:22 pm
I admire your insouciance in the face of lost writing. Last year I not only had a crash, but after buying a new computer and paying someone to recover the data, my computer was stolen. Mostly all of my work was recoverable somewhere or other, except for one recently written long and complex–for me–poem. No way to get it back, and I grieve for it at least once a week. Have I learned now to back up religiously? Nope.
April 1, 2008 at 9:58 am
Ouch! That does suck. Yuck, yuck, yuck. For some reason this reminds me of the poem by Bukowski called, The Whore Who Took My Poems”
“why didn’t you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:”
I know how you feel. I’ve lost art on the computer, never to be seen again. Ouch I tell ya, out. A true cause for mourning.
Austin
April 1, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Thanks Austin–commiseration helps with things like this. And it really is something to mourn over when there’s creative work in the lost things.