In the beginning, people remembered things.
The world saturated the life that lived in it to such an extent that a kind of consubstantiation took place. The world and its sequences became beached inside the life that experienced them, long after the sensations that represented those sequences had drained back into nothingness.
Memory.
Can you think of a pure memory? Do the common features of all memories have any shape, taken alone?
No.
Memory, like remembrance, is a process. The common features that all memories share, and because of which they can be called memories, are an essence out of time. The world is the opposite of an essence. We are so drenched in the world that it is all we can do to point to the common features of something like memories. It’s all we can do to point to an essence.
The fascination with bulk goods is a thrall to essences. Plunging your hand into a sack of coffee beans allows a glimpse of their essence. ‘These are Beans.’ The salivary look of tourists gazing at money being printed. ‘That is Money.’ The mettle-testing stare of young men regarding footage of bodies being bulldozed into trenches. ‘This is Evil.’
Memory has always been more expansive and humane than the puncturing dart of the essence-hunter. In memory the hide of the world is stretched out in us without a hole to betray how it was subdued.
And then, speech.
From the world, to remembrance. From remembrance, to the mouth. From the mouth, to someone else. And then the world blooms in them. The only lineage worth caring about.
But then, writing.
The thread of speech from the mouth of a mind is exiled now. The threads are set down in lines, pushed into a surface by an implement, bled in ink by a reed.
The world is hunted down with a pen, and left to desiccate.
The facile image of speech as a line of text grows into the scroll. The sequential nature of speech is misapprehended into a sequential method of storage. A picture is worth a thousand words only because images roam an area unimaginable to the line of text. Like an unhunted animal.
The arbitrary and playful access to the world that memories preserve is paralyzed by the scroll. The free motion of a person in the world is reduced to directions on a line, up or down. See above, see below.
Everything brilliant drips with a kind of ephemeral liquid. Drops of this liquid dissolve the artifice and compromise of the made thing. They reconstitute the freedom of being in the world.
The scroll is not brilliant. The effort required to operate it is a dismal inheritance of the fecklessness with which text captured speech. Memory comes from an intense cohabitation with the world. Just as the one dimension of text mocks the freedom and flow of a voice, so is the scroll a parody of memory.
The book is brilliant.
A scroll accordion-folded, sliced on one side and bound on the other.
How long is a book? If a book has 350 pages, each six inches wide, the book is 175 feet long. A scroll as tall as an apartment building. Wet by the brilliance of the book this scroll suddenly fits on half as much paper and into your hand. The scroll’s entire length is silently indexed along three edges.
If freedom is the product of an unencumbered will, the book has performed the miracle of making the shackle of text resemble the freedom of memory.
But I still write on a scroll. And you still read this on one.