By JC Spark
Things are really hotting up at the SPACE WORLD TIME(s) editorial office. New editors and big plans for the future. And it happens that someone peppers the entire staff with questions for their article. For me, that was the impetus for this curly thought.
I was asked whether it would be bad for me as an author if everything I had ever written suddenly disappeared. All my notes, all the originals of my poems, everything I have. And whether it would change my feeling of being an author.
And I spontaneously said, "No, it wouldn't." I'm not an author because I can prove it with the books I've written or my drafts. I am an author because I know that I wrote the books and because I remember them. Above all, because the stories I tell have been published. If they hadn't been, I would be a storyteller—something I have been since I was 4 or 5 years old. And that means since before I could write, before I could write down the stories. So it wouldn't change anything. And yet, when I think about losing these boxes full of notebooks, scraps of paper, scribbled beer mats, typewritten pages, and first computer printouts, it's a terrible feeling.
In my life, through more than 30 moves, many relationships, and various upheavals at certain moments in my life, I have lost or left behind almost everything. Except for the contents of these boxes. On the contrary, even though everything else kept disappearing, their contents grew. And not stored somewhere on a USB stick. Okay, at some point that happened too, but mainly on paper, the originals, going back to the first poem in a school newspaper. And if there were several versions, there were also several versions. All the originals of my poems, of the song lyrics, many of them written in bars, some on receipt pads or napkins, even toilet paper. All these originals exist.
And I asked myself why. Even if I the text I wrote didn't make me remember, when I pick up the piece of paper on which the original is written, I remember the moment I wrote it. And that, too, is a fragment of what makes me who I am.
Of course, it has something to do with the fact that what I write contains so much of who I am. I don't write about topics or people or things that don't somehow belong to me, and ultimately it's a collection of memories. When I was 25, I wrote my first novel—at the time I thought it was finished, but today I would say it was just the first draft. At some point, I would like to work on it again and see if I can turn it into a real book. But it is a reminder of the storyteller I was back then. The storyteller I was when my little sister was born and I started telling stories. Or when I started telling stories in song lyrics, when I tried to write short stories and realized it was extremely difficult for me because I don't like to be brief 😊 When I started writing a musical, planning a fantasy epic—everywhere there are these memories that accompany my life in words and texts and fragments.
Is this now a case of “it's always been this way” or rather “everything used to be different”?
Perhaps both. Collecting memories is closely linked to storytelling, “it's always been this way.” In a way, tying these memories to tangible objects is also linked to storytelling, only in the past they weren't personal objects—and certainly not so many of them. Why is that? And now we come to “Everything used to be different.” Less noise, fewer people, fewer things, fewer influences, less... simply less.
Our lives have become more complex, and we too have become more complex, or at least it seems that way, because our lives consists of so many parts, so many experiences, so many memories, so many different people and places. Perhaps many different professions and, of course, so many ideas and knowledge and information... and also diagnoses. When all of that is inside me in one way or another, it's often not easy to know which part of it is me. What is really mine, what is just learned, what is assumed, what is actually part of someone else?
And I believe everyone needs something that gives them the feeling that this is mine, these are my memories, this is what makes me who I am. So when someone collects Disney characters, you might say, “My goodness, how can you be so fanatical about such stuff?” But perhaps they are exactly what childhood photos or letters from a lost loved one are to other people: they are memories of moments, memories of oneself. And they are parts of what makes me feel like myself and allows me to perceive myself. And when I surround myself with something in which I can see myself, it is often the only way to hear my own voice amid all the noise, to see my own image amid all the images.
Thinking about why it is so important to surround ourselves with our memories of ourselves brings me back to the beginning: why would it be so bad to lose all these texts, even though I can never lose the fact that I am an author, that I am a storyteller? Because it is the physical expression of it, the image in the world of what I hold on to of myself. For emergencies. It's like a safety net. In the course of life, no matter how convinced you are that you know who you are, where your place is in life, and what your goals are, there are always moments, things, people that shake that certainty, and there are also phases in yourself in which you undermine and destroy that certainty yourself. And having something that can give me back the memory of myself, something that helps me find my way back to myself, is what gives me security. I think that's pretty much the reason, at least in my case, for keeping all of this.
Whenever I moved, sometimes while packing, but sometimes also while unpacking, I would pick up an old book and leaf through it. I see the writing, see the type of book it was written in or the piece of paper it's on. All of that is part of the memory; the words are connected to that memory. Without the book in which the words are written, which is the original, where perhaps something was underlined, something was crossed out, something was added, perhaps there wasn't enough space on the page and it was written in the margin. These are all things you don't see when the text is finally in a book or even when it has just been retyped. And perhaps that is part of what makes this memory visible.
Now I am in Denmark and have hopefully moved for the last time – which would probably mean I have arrived. I have rarely lived anywhere where, under normal circumstances, I had to meet fewer people. Maybe now I have time to think about why I kept all these things for so long. Maybe to arrive here. Now that I know I'm a writer, to show myself that it's always been that way. And I have a few boxes full of evidence to prove it.
And then I read a few lines I wrote and think about when that was. What was happening at that time. And that's not nostalgia, that's strengthening my self, my identity, not because I say yes, that's how it is and that's how I am. Often through the exact opposite, when I say, “Wow, back then it really was like that, back then I didn't know, back then I couldn't do that yet or I had never done it before.” But the person I'm saying all this about and to is still me.
And that helps. If I were to sit completely alone in an absolutely empty room, with nothing but my thoughts and my memories, then I could focus on that, then I could bring all of that back and build myself up from it. But when do we ever have that? Usually, we have a tremendous amount of noise around us. We have so many things and so much life and so many people that we can no longer hear our own voice. And maybe that's why we need this visible memory, so that we don't forget who we are in all of this.
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