Suitcase full of memories

I went and opened my suitcase full of memories last night to look for a small 'zine that I produced with a group of fellow campers at Nelfty camp '94.

I am not shitting you, the suitcase is real, in fact that's a picture of it right there.

It's an old vanity case that used to belong to my mother with a hard naugahyde shell and a blue satin interior. It is basically crammed with every piece of archival matter related to my emotional life, that is *not* a photograph.

A quick flutter through the contents brings up, hand crafted cd-cases, a set-list, a bunch of 'zines, even more letters, a draft of a short piece of erotica written and then mailed to India in 2002. Also postcards from Europe, birthday cards from my Bubi, a coaster with a phone number on it, and a face embroidered onto a piece of clothe.

A little note on practice. It's not like I open this suitcase every day, or add things to it on a weekly basis. It's been in my possession since I moved out of the house in high school, this much I know. I have no memory of starting it. In that, my suitcase is like memories themselves, constantly accruing with no fixed starting point.

I don't think normally I would be interested or willing to analyze why I have been putting scraps in a box for 15 years, but as I am taking this class on Obsolescence this year, and I have become accustomed to looking at things more carefully then normal. If I really think about it, my suitcase is more then a handy storage case that means a lot to me. It's a "palimpsest of shifting social signifiers." It's a record of the very different ways my friends family and lovers have chosen to communicate their most important and also the most quotidian infos, it is these little traces that secretly contain the most important memories: "I love you", "I miss you," "Please come visit", "you left your toothbrush by my sink, I'll keep it for the next time you are here" (memory: I never did go back, and a small sense of loss). All these messages that furnish both a sense of who I've been, but also in what manner and using what methods I have reached out to people and the shockingly singular nature of what they've sent to me in return. What makes this suitase so lovely is the utter heterogeneity of it's content, even between letters from the same sender there is little similarity. Each item is as different as the memory it contains.

So, no matter how much I want my suitcase to do nothing but carefully and kindly hold the physical traces of my emotional history. I can now see that it is a piece of history itself. This is mostly because over the past 4 years, as more and more of my memory-keeping practices shift online (hello this blog, hello email, hello flickr) the less I send and am sent, physical artifacts. Thus, the less reliable my artifactual digesting becomes. Entire relationships can come and go with only a single postcard. I have friends who live in Europe/Vancouver/WhiteHorse/Australia etc... and though I miss them terribly I never make the time to send care-packages like I might have 10 years ago.

Part of this I think, also has to do with getting older and more engaged with other activities, not so focused on relationships and friendships. I just don't have the time to write a 10 page letter about my romantic frustration,(circa 1998) anymore, I am too damn busy/writing blog posts about said-same letters. Then again, at this age I think I would be hard-pressed to fill 10 pages with romantic woe ;). In any case, the person who might have received the 10 page letter in 1998, now has a 5 year old son and an 8 month old daughter. So when she does even manage to write (and I'll be honest, she is better then me in this regard) her words are tucked in little bubbles on newsprint, around the crayon-smear artwork of the five-year-old. Her "letters" come bundled with a batch of the families homemade Calendula lotion and a tin of "green-aid" ointment, much better indicators of her families activities then her letters, but ones that quickly get used up on chapped lips and my seasonal dry-skin. Probably if she chose to even address romantic worry, it would read; "get over it, do some yoga.".

Anyways, the point is, I do less for a variety of reasons, and what I do, I do online. My friends also do less, and most do not even send home-made pharmaceuticals. So this entire archive is going to get older without getting a renewed layer of memories. It will stop where I have stopped, at approximately 27 - 30 years old.

I think what makes me feel the greatest sense of loss about this fact, is that physical memories are difficult to destroy. Well, I mean it's as easy to throw away a letter as to delete an email. But for some reason, I just never seem to do it. I have love letters from people who quite emphatically stopped loving me years ago. I long ago deleted all the emails they ever sent during that blissful if short-lived union, but I will never destroy their letters.

So the more I shift online, the less likely I am to maintain a rich and tangible record of the ways I have felt, the ways I have expressed my feelings or nicer still, had feelings expressed to me.

In terms of obsolescence then, I think we have lost an unbelievable amount of value and intensity by shifting many of our more intimate communicative practices into a medium that hasn't got the handwritten, hand-decorated, doodled-on, mis-spelled tenacity of letters, crafts and handiwork. It may take less time (or appear to take less time) to send that friendly email, but it means so much less. That makes me sad.