writing as working memory
Updated 9 months ago
when i say “writing as working memory,” what do i mean? memory refers the act of remembering—but in our modern day memory also refers (perhaps more prominently) to computer memory. but is the dynamic now not reversed—as surely i meant “working memory” as though i myself was a computer—describing myself in the metaphor and language of the machine?
Television changes what we once meant by the terms “political debate,” “news,” and “public opinion.” The computer changes “information” once again. Writing changed what we once meant by “truth” and “law”; printing changed them again, and now television and the computer change them once more. Neil Postman, Technopoly
what becomes of remembrance when it becomes a process of perfect recall, done by a machine? does remembering not then become an act of documentation—of capturing, recording? what happens when i am displaced from that process?
rememberance is a kind of act—a performance, that reflects a moment of the past through the lens of the present. but with digital tools, our primary concern is often centered around fidelity—it is a question of simulacra, rather than a transformative act—to relive the past, as it was exactly, without the lens of intepretation or bias.
but it is precisely subjectivity, intepretation, and synthesis that brings vitality and meaning to remembering: a scrapbook is not simply an assemblage of photographs, but a synthetic work—an act of care—that transforms what came before into something new.
in this respect, writing, too, offers the prospect of this transformative affect—it is not a question of regurgigating ideas, but weaving and reworking them through one’s own lens, and to provide an anti-pattern through which allow the subconscious to arrive.
i know little about the reality of the practice of oral history—of people tasked with the work of remembering. surely removing the burden of rememberance was a good thing—that this information was more accessible, transportable, reproducible?
but then does increasing the ease with which information is produced not also then lead to the issue of too much information—oversaturation, where information becomes functionally meaningless by its sheer speed, velocity, volume?
and in any task requiring an effort of the body or the mind, isn’t it precisely that itself that grants the reward? to make a decision to take one photo out of a roll of thirty-six, rather than one out of a dozen in less than a second?
what of the cultural practices, relationships, and traditions that are built around something?
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Joan Didion
i find writing with a bias toward cross-referencing, revisiting, or relating material to be a valuable approach that doesn’t just help me document ideas, but process and integrate them more fully into how i view the world.
writing becomes not just one of many tools for thought, but a substrate through which thinking itself occurs. when i write, the tendencies of the medium are interleaved with my own. they cannot be decomposed from one another.
that said, this practice has only really seemed to click when i started to practice it with a particular mindset, namely:
regularly observing and documenting specific elements in something i’ve read or heard that resonate with a concept or idea i’m curious about
allowing myself to write without being precious, e.g. setting an expectation for length, brevity, or impact
regularly adding, cutting, revisiting, reconsidering, and revising what i’ve written, based on patterns i can observe within the current corpus of material
i’m not saddling ideas with the burden of being perfect or profound; they have space to be small. revisiting them gives me an opportunity to add richness and nuance each time.
And always keep in mind The Collector’s Fallacy: you have to work with new material to really learn it. It doesn’t suffice to bookmark websites or just read and annotate books. Zettlekasten: Overview