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March 25, 2009
Urim and Thummim
There is a small group of men and women still in a young age whom I think of under the rubric of Gawdchildren. Most of them fall there because our relationship was first with their parents, and then we tagged along while they grew up. I’m proud to say that I officiated at the wedding of the oldest; she printed and bound for me a Zen photo essay of the event that I keep in the bedroom bookcase. A very few others were gathered into the house as friends of our own children—although they eventually grew away from us. Still, I think of them that way today. There’s a second generation of Gawdchildren across the street—but they don’t know it. And then there is our real godson, who publicly acknowledges that formal relation though we have no actual connection to him anymore. But then we have only a precious, small relationship with his far-away parents any longer, and . . .
Wait, where was I going with this?
Oh, yeah:
1. An inventory
A. Following a series of unanswered tweet-questions a few weeks ago, I called my oldest gawdson for input to a thought I’ve been having in relation to the continued existence of bound books. The thought also reveals itself in the context of physical sound recordings, the sort that one might continually reorganize to make sense of one’s life—you know, the nesting instinct of a fellow like Rob Fleming ). My gawdson buys no such recordings but, rather, downloads everything he listens to, and he listens to a lot. When I put my question to him he said, “Oh yeah, I have this bulletin board right here in the living room and it has all these playbills and ticket stubs and stuff.”
“How far back does it go?”
“Here’s one from 2004. Oh, wait, here’s a String Cheese Incident ticket from 2000.”
That would cover, basically, his entire club, concert, festival, downloading life.
“Do you buy concert t-shirts?”
“No, not really.”
I thanked him, told him I loved him, and moved on.
(The last cd I bought for him was years ago, a Conlon Nancarrow piece actually played, as opposed to player-pianoed. I still buy him books, as I do for—or to—his brother.)
Okay, so the one committed downloader in my world keeps paper mementos of his music life.
B. I’ve also noted that many of the wired young men I know (and some who aren't wired) are emotionally and intellectually attached to comics, including and most notably graphic novels.
(I’ve discovered that something in the wiring of my own brain makes me muddleheaded trying to read such things—including those wonderfully verbal ones by Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman. I get confused, as though I’d had a small stroke. But that’s another topic.)
C. Recently, we took part in a conversation with some young booksellers about whether they would read downloadable ARCs from us. At first they enthusiastically said yes. But as the conversation proceeded, it seemed that some of them wanted only digitized excerpts from which they could decide which ARCs to ask for. It was suggested that publishers could use Print On Demand to fill those requests. In short, at least some in that conversation, finally, wanted to read something printed and bound.
D. . . .
2. A thought
The abstracted amongst us acknowledge that there are (at least) two aspects to living. The first, of course, is experiential. This seems obvious to all materialists, those sure-minded folks who address the question of whether the world is an illusion by soundly kicking a stone or whacking a student with a cane. For them, it’s simple: We do things in a real world. The second aspect, however, is clearer after the hike up the Fourteener, when you either recognize and voice internally that the world is charged with grandeur or you sit down, animate yourself, and describe the trek to your friends with gesture, beer, inflection, and elaboration.
Of course there is an experiential element there, too (not just in the beer). But what I’m after here is that there is a Doing and then there is recognition, definition, reflection, analysis, organization, and memory of the Doing. It is that second process, I think—the mental one—that gives rise to the sense of a particular self in a particular life lived.
Yes, other things can be remembered and reflected on and, yes, there is a huge mental aspect of experience. But this isn’t a philosophy course.
What strikes me these days is that We Online argue and predict as though we have collectively entered a time (a new time) in which analysis and reflection, the remembering of life, has become completely separated from materiality. And we try to project future consumer behaviors in light of that belief. In our conversations about social media, about productivity, about digitization and property rights of all kinds, about a life lived online, like newly ours—wired, quick, mobile, up- and downloaded—we often proceed as though the only materiality folks will need in the future—other than food, drink, and the body of the sweet, dancing Other—will lie solely in the mobile devices that provide full-time connectivity. We proceed as though we already assume this to be true: That there is no longer a material aspect to defining ourselves. And I do not take that particular assumption to be Buddhist.
3. A Question
I don’t think my question is about a collective, conscious rejection of capitalism or the sudden appearance of higher human consciousness, but I am willing to acknowledge that I could be wrong.
If we have truly reached a generation that consumes only sustenance and services—that is, if our future “customers” do not by practice, habit, and behavior accumulate objects of any kind—then the change we are dealing with is bigger than the changes we are trying to predict.
If the desire to hold in hand the track of one’s life has actually left us, then we are, I think, addressing a sea change in the human mind, and we need to recognize that first.
I’ve been trying to move forward, it seems, with the previously unacknowledged thought that folks like to accumulate mementos of their intellectual and emotional, experienced lives—like that photo essay my gawddaughter gave to me. I’ve unconsciously thought that holding a cd or a book, pointing at a photograph on the wall or extracting one from a purse, turning the pages of a scrapbook, even caressing a gewgaw picked up on a vacation or a pilgrimage, is the result of a desire that is well nigh primal. That is, I have been operating under the assumption that hard-wired into the human brain just might be a love of the memento and the heirloom—not solely as keys to memory, but as the demonstrable traces of one’s own living and, therefore, the evidence for one’s definition of self.
I’m not talking about collecting. I’m not looking for young people who have walls filled with, say, every bit of vinyl released by BlueNote. Okay, that dates me. I’m talking about our own personal Urim and Thummim—the objects we own, shelve or hide away and then withdraw to divine ourselves. I’m talking about that emotional tie we’ve always had between what we have experienced and the traces of that living that we can hold in our hands.
That is, I’m asking whether the wired people we imagine in the near future really won’t need shelves, but only closets.
In our conversations about (among other things) the publishing world to come, it seems to me we’re quite simply assuming that this attachment to the hand-held concrete is not with us any longer. On the contrary, as we project the behaviors of the generations now taking root, we assume no physicality in their future abodes other than, perhaps, their interconnected hand-held or laptop devices and a set of earbuds. (Indeed, at times we imagine even those replaced by something implanted.)
So has something happened to bring on a generation whose sense of self is wholly free of association with all personal objects but those with on-off buttons?
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: divination, heirloom, memento, publishers blog, urim and thummim
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Comments
Well, we have already shed the handwritten letter, more or less. I think it will take much longer though to shed the other artifacts of a life lived. I think as long as parents still collect artifacts of their children, the habit will be hard to kill.
Also, among certain women (young ones too) right now, scrapbooking is HUGE. But if we’re focusing on men, I’ll have to think a bit longer.
Posted by Jason Quinn Malott 03/25 10:39 AM