On the Idea of Using the Essay to Archive the Self
I have been fascinated by Buckminister Fuller’s Dymaxion Chronofile. Fuller had from 1917-1983 a goal of documenting his life every 15 minutes by many different means: writing, video, and audio. He was trying to document his life as completely as he was able to. Or so the story goes at least.
This could remind us of things like microblogging or other things in that same vein. But the Dymaxion Chronofile is a massive 140 thousand pages and countless hours of film and video, and then the added audio recordings on top of that. Just think about how incredibly big a human life is and how little of it is usually recorded. Recording yourself, or making something to outlive you, is probably as old as humanity. The Lascaux cave prints are around 30-40 thousand years old. There are probably carvings older than that too that we still haven’t found, but either way, we love to make something that outlasts us. Is that the purpose of making great art?
I am probably not the only one who has thought about making something that outlasts me. The thought that, if only I diligently continue to make cool stuff that people resonate with and share with others then I can outlive this flesh prison, is not unique to me. I believe most artists and writers will have that inclination at some point. I’ve talked to people who aren’t afraid of death. And while I can logically see the argumentation, I cannot say that I get it in an intuitive sense. I still think death is terrifying. And making stuff on the off chance that someone could stumble into it one day is comforting. This writing does serve that purpose to an extent. But this was not the intention of Buckminister Fuller.
When I was younger, I tried to write this book of essays in much the same way as the founder of the essay himself did. Montaigne wrote quite frankly about his frustrations with reading stuffy Greek philosophers, the nature of friendship, on liars, and what it means to die. He was trying to leave a bit of himself in the world with his writings. There is something so honest and open about reading this humorous little Frenchman that I wanted to do a similar thing. I wanted to outlive death, but my overall goal was more about using the essay to do a kind of self-archiving. To let the meandering thoughts and tangents alongside the topics I wrote about show the kind of person that I felt I was. I felt really good about this idea, and the first couple of essays were feeling really good. I wrote about the glasses we put on (here to be understood like an interpretive lens), how we think about gender roles, and what it could mean to have a self. The plan seemed flawless, if I just kept writing I would have a pretty decent starting point from where to publish.
Oh, I didn’t know how wrong I could be. There are several problems with this project. But before I get to those I would like to say that I still think that the idea of the book was cool. Trying to leave a little piece of myself on Earth; a piece that was independent of my existence no less, is cool.
That said, the first problem I stumbled unto was when I came back to this book after being away from it for two months. The person who had written those first couple of essays was not the same person who had returned to them. And the person who returned to the book was not impressed to say the least. How could I even start to attempt to capture a kind of essence of a person when this person kept changing in strange and unforeseeable ways? That is even before I get to the question of editing.
Most, if not all serious published texts (excluding this blog of course), is edited. Is editing these texts a kind of sullying of what I was trying to capture? Back in those days my answer was: yes. Now however, I would never want to feel so embarrassed as to release an unedited text (excluding this blog of course). Editing is essential for narrowing, cutting, and enhancing the vision, or the aura, of the text. If you have a section which subtracts from earlier mentioned stuff, you would want to cut that. If you have this crazy idea which just isn’t ready to come out of the oven yet, you have to put it back in.
When I write these blog posts, I sometimes edit them. If I write a report or something that is of a more official capacity, I will make sure it is heavily edited. While I don’t really expect anyone to read these posts, I do sometimes have to put some shine and polish into the texts to make sure that I get my point across. But if I am feeling more off the cuff, I will write what comes to me and let the reader sort through what is worth keeping and not. My old self would probably be proud of this attitude. I’m not so sure it is because of principles as much as it has to do with my laziness.
In writing this book of essays I was hitting my head across some very philosophically dense questions: is the self something coherent if it keeps changing? Can you locate a self within a piece of art? Is art even about the author at all? All interesting questions to which I only had ambivalence towards at the time. But the idea of writing a book of essays as a way of archiving some kind of self (whatever that could mean) is still so incredibly tantalizing to me. There is a part of me which still wants to externalize my thoughts in a physical object; to contain it in a lifeless thing that could last way longer than I could even dream. Mostly though, I want to do a little bit of a Dymaxion Chronofile. It titillates something intellectually within me.
Buckminister Fuller did not have this haphazard idea of containing a self within a couple of essays. The Dymaxion Chronofile is not, as has been popularly reported, only a mere 15 minute interval of his own thoughts. Rather it is all in-going and out-going communications he had, documents concerning himself, newspapers mentioning his work, and yes also his own reflections. This effort was to be a methodically crafted inventory of his entire life from the point he started until he died in 1983. It was to some degree a science. But he had learned three important lessons from this endeavor:
The first important regenerative effect upon me of keeping this active chronological record was that I learned to ‘see myself’ as others might see me. Secondly, it persuaded me ten years after its inception to start my life as nearly ‘anew’ as it is humanly possible to do. Thirdly, it persuaded me to dedicate my life to others instead of to myself, not on an altruistic basis but because the chronofiled first thirty-two years of my life clearly demonstrated that I was positively effective in producing wealth only when I was dedicated to others.
In reading about how others viewed him, he had figured out that the perception of how he was to himself and how others viewed him didn’t coincide. There were in practice two selves running around: the first was his own self-perception and the other how he was perceived by others. While it doesn’t sound mindblowing, it certainly must’ve been impactful for Fuller, seeing as he totally set about to dedicate his life to helping people using the scientific method.
In fact, what I was trying to do with my book of essays was a very selfish thing to do. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to do. Not anymore so than the first person to write about their experiences farming or hunting. But I would be dishonest to admit that my intention was not first and foremost self-driven. I had no intention of helping someone, but of merely reproducing the stream of consciousness which exists in my head on a piece of paper. Even in that endeavor I failed miserably. Maybe because I wasn’t methodical enough, or maybe because I really had no clue what I was really doing. But either way, it didn’t pan out as the Dymaxion Chronofile did. Or did it?
Going back and reading those oft so terrible essays, I do find myself being able to find that person again. I was very different back when I wrote those essays, but there is a piece of a person that has been preserved. Often it felt like Galileo’s preserved middle finger right in my face, but it felt authentic and real. Which is what I set out to do in the first place. Was the failure in not completing the damn thing? No. The failure was the hubris of ever thinking I could be as thorough or as all-encompassing as the Chronofile with a genre like the essay. What the essay is great at doing – here thought of in its original conception – is exactly the opposite of methodical collecting. The essay shows a personal and conversational aspect of a person.
I’d say that the essay has a prime potential to catch the ways that you connect ideas to eachother. Montaigne was a master at this. He will constantly move in between a lot of different topics in between his different essays, but just wait until you go into his essays proper. From the thoughts of Plutarch, to his own judgments, to anecdotes about french nobility, back to Plutarch, and then ending on sardonic or introspective reflections. I wish I had the courage to do it like him. Maybe the next couple of essays ought to have some reference to the classics just for kicks? I guess Montaigne would be considered as classic for us as Cicero was for him.
The whole project of documenting a self seems fraught from the very beginning. Excluding the obvious question, “what is a self?”, what are you even trying to collect in the first place? Is it perceptions, affects, conversational style, attitude, facts and measurements, or are you foolishly trying to collect everything in a kind of big data vomit-soup? 1 Are you able to encapsulate everything using mere representations? Because I am not only the flattened out words on a page. In fact, language might be a terrible way to encapsulate me. Why would I want to cage myself in with the symbols and sounds that we all agreed on? Wouldn’t this make me lose the uniqueness of me if I described myself with words that point to generalities? Kierkegaard had a particular word for this phenomenon: nivellering, or leveling. It is the process whereby a person loses their uniqueness; where you lose all of the little things that make you into you. Kierkegaard certainly had bigger aims than just language in this matter, although language is not left out either. While I can say that I have five toes on each of my feet, the words themselves cannot represent my toes in all their particularity. It would kind of defeat the purpose of language as a public utility. Language has to work on this level of generality unless it ceases to be useful in communication with others 2.
Writing cannot capture some heady essence of my selfhood (whatever that might be). I think I can capture little snapshots of a thinking mind which has been run through an editing process. Is it an authentic snapshot? I would dare to say that there are little specks of me in there. When I create something I have sunk some labor into a thing, I have sunk some time, and I have hopefully sunk some of my knowledge and personality into it as well. If these are not important aspects to having a self then me be damned. There is still something tantalizing about that project I had all that time ago, but it was my wrongheaded thoughts about genre and selves which led me to capsize. I cannot capture a full picture of me on a page. I can merely seek to recreate the bits and bytes in ways that hopefully reconstruct the intended effect in you. I could say like Montaigne that:
I had no regard therein either to thy service or my glory; my powers are equal to no such design. It was intended for the particular use of my relations and friends, in order that, when they have lost me, which they must soon do, they may here find some traces of my quality and humour, and may thereby nourish a more entire and lively recollection of me.
I think that I would write that book today and bind it myself. What should I write about though? Maybe I could write a book a year on similar but diverging topics and check the differences in between years. Sounds like a lot of hassle.
At the very least I know I don’t have the stamina of a Buckminister Fuller.
.dash
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