My Written Life

Every day I write. Yesterday was a Friday. Then I wrote 26 emails, which is less than average, because I was just at work for five hours. I wrote seven text messages on my iPhone and five Facebook comments, including one status update. Some days I write down stuff in meetings. I sometimes blog. I may write down random scentences in a notebook. And although I enjoy writing and go through periods where I write more than others, I do not consider my daily life more written than the average person. I think the average person writes a lot, and more now than ever before. Here are some observations:

• More and more of my life is channelled into my iPhone, and yet I actually talk to people on the phone less and less.
• When the use of a phone was so expensive and rare I had to ask for permission, I knew the numbers of my family, my friends – even my foes! – by heart. Now my phone is one of my vital organs, and yet I do not even remember my mother’s cell phone number.
• I interact with a surprisingly large number of people every week, and yet a week may have gone by without me uttering a single word, let alone leaving the house.
• Although more and more of my life is happening in writing and thus reading – two quiet activities – my life feels exceedingly noisy and I have developed an allergy against radio, tv, and sometimes people.
• I have always felt the need to write, and kept a diary from I was twelve till I was 22. Then I got a proper cell phone, emails became part of my daily life, and I have not written a single diary entry since.
• More and more of my life happens online for a gruelling amount of people to read. I feel like I am able to keep more friends now than ever, and yet that gruelling amount of people makes sure that what I leave of my life out there for them to read is so general, my written life could have been lived by anyone.

Granted, my interest in the written word is not just average, and due to my reclusive-social nature, I may splurge in these so-called social, written environments more than others. I am also single, most of my friends are settled and busy with kids, and I live alone. And yet I cannot free myself from the thought that my experience of having more and more of my life written down instead of told – God forbid, lived! – is far from unique. A lot of attention has been paid to the fact that oral traditions are lost in modern society. These oral traditions usually referring to the publicly organized storytelling of historical facts and myths which took place prior to the written word and literacy, and on which a sense of collective memory and identity depended. But what about the very necessary storytelling of an ordinary life? The small exchanges which do not qualify for the grand epics of a culture? What happens to our memories – and our ability to remember – when our individual lives are written down instead of told? What does this mean on an individual level?

I know, to a certain extent, what it means to me. I am a person with literary ambitions. I want to write, and so I have a vast amount of material to pick from – at least if I want to write non-fiction. But will it make for good literature? All these out of context messages, often limited by a fixed number of characters? When you never make an effort to remember experiences because you write them down, will you, when you trace back this writing (if possible!), remember what the experience actually felt like, presupposing you did not make a diary entry out of it? Will all my experiences be like those phone numbers I once remembered, but which I now never remember because my iPhone contact list renders it unnecessary? Unfair comparison, would you say? What’s a phone number compared to an experience?

A phone number is a simple code we need in order to access a fairly complex technological process. We never actually have to deal with this complex technological process because the phone number deals with it for us. Being a living human can be looked at as that complex process. Let’s call that process identity. Memory is the code we need in order to access our identity. If modern society with its written word means the end of oral tradition, and thus the end of collective memory and identity, the survival of our individual identity depends on our individual ability to remember. But our written lives are not remembered. History has taught us that writing down means forgetting. Our identities then depend on our personal writing. Will I have to read up on myself to know myself? What kind of reading experience will it be? Not good literature, I can assure you that. Stories so public and general, anyone could have lived that life. What difference is there between a phone number and a Facebook update: «Kristin is at work.»

Our memory’s place in the human experience and what makes us remember is to a large extent still in the dark. In my university studies, I have focused on these themes. Then I also concerned myself with the body and its ability to remember. The body, our beautiful source of true wisdom, has not been part of my thoughts above, and I know it should have been. I could have written something on the slow activitity and the lost craft which is the penmanship. I could have written something about living life instead of describing it. All this is beyond the scope and format of this blog post, not to mention beyond my competence. But I do consider myself a competent user of the written word; in emails, in text messages, and in social media. Who does that make me?

The backside of a beautiful, old typewriter I photographed through an antique shop window.