There’s a small but potent web-think-link that I’ve found myself in, one having to do with memories, digital archives, the intrusion of material reality, the comfort of material reality, the correction provided by materiality … I find myself somewhere between Emily Fox Gordon, Tommy, and Errol Morris.

This morning I read a fascinating story in the New York Times about a new series of web memoirs seeking to preserve web communities not by archiving the pages but by publishing the memories of those who were in those communities. I tweeted the story out:

Fascinating. https://t.co/80DNrhLCj1

— Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell) March 22, 2021

and Alan Levine responded:

Love this concept, balancing it too with Olia Lianlina's https://t.co/QlayFWu3Dn and Jon Udell's recent bit on archiving.

Is it "the" internet or "my" internet ? Each experience is its own. Print is a format to "preserve" but ought it not to live on the internet?

— Alan has x-ed to @cogdog@cosocial.ca (@cogdog) March 22, 2021

To which I replied:

I didn't know abt Lianlina's work. More fascination, and a key element in the compounding I'm doing at present: historical research, memoir, metaperspectives on my archives & the legacy I'm recording as I teach via Zoom. Most of all, the forgetting I'm trying to undo. Thank you.

— Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell) March 22, 2021

All the forgetting I’m trying to undo. Perhaps that’s the tagline for my Lenten blogging. I’m not just trying to recover the past, though I’m sure I’m doing that as well. What it feels like, though, is that I’m trying to let the memories reassert themselves, memories I’ve held in check because the pain of loss has become too great for me to process. That’s obviously a self-defeating strategy, hardly original with me–and there’s more where that came from.

The pandemic year has been a good time to undo things. Not to let them go, but to reverse course. Backtrack and take another fork in the garden. Or just find a garden again, or train myself to recognize one anew.

I’ve been making videos, little films that are ambitious workings of fairly crudely videoed family outings–typical dad stuff, I guess. I show these to my family every now and then. One of them explicitly concerns memory, in that it records and reflects on our family visit to Tintern Abbey in 2003, a spot immortalized by William Wordsworth in a poem about experience, reflection, and love. I should probably say experience versus reflection, and the many-layered loving that comes from years within a family.

Thing is, I remember shooting that video, back in the day, and thinking to myself as I did so, this video will be a great way to think about this day when what we have are both this document and our memories, including the memory of me walking around with this video camera. As with the Wordsworth poem, I will have these layers, and perhaps I can make something of them. 

Then, seventeen years later, I made something of those layers, with a reading of Wordsworth’s poem as the structural underpinning, with English string music as the score, and then a coda reflecting on the reflection itself to bring it to the present, the day (now months ago) when I shared the memories, the movie, and my current state of mind and memory and love with my family, my stars. That coda was all small, sweet moments of Alice, Ian, and Jenny walking about, talking with each other, with my eye looking on with love both in the moment and many years later as I cut it all together on my computer, to the song “Love,” by John Lennon.

Which brings me to the “Jon Udell’s recent bit on archiving” Alan referred to in his tweet, a blog post breathtaking in its poignant vulnerability and insight. Another layer, another coda.

Love is real.