Saving the buried past from obsolescence
Jul. 6th, 2010 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyrasantae
I'm a closet archivist (almost literally; my middle and high school notes are in my closet) and a romantic, so naturally I felt a desire to save the data on my old floppy disks from magnetic film death and obsolescence. Some of it is already gone. Ones-and-zeros are much more fickle than the relative permanence of paper, but at least binary can be transferred from digital medium to digital medium without altering it in a way that bothers me.
The vast majority of the data from those disks is from before the Sundering -- a part of my life that I had been largely successful at willing to forget, were it not for photographs and a few other physical artifacts that exist inescapably around the house. These data are my first, manually-coded HTML files (1999); silly antics with Hypercard (1997); second-place-winning competition program in QBASIC (1998, my partner did most of the coding; I did design); exercises in QBASIC (1996). I had never forgotten of their existence; only of what memories they embodied. It's painful but a bit fascinating to unbury the past, but I feel that this must be done, or it is lost forever.
But what draws me to seek these out? I think that being in that middle school classroom this year brought to mind that there is a childhood that I never lived. I stood in front of the pupils and could see in them the same fear, the same wonder, the same optimism I saw in myself. I saw the trust I never had. I knew that I was really just one of them, not the supposed-to-be teacher in front of them.
I don't mean all this in that goth-glorified "child within"/"lost innocence" kind of way, but I did not have an ordinary middle-schooling, after all. Teenagers take risks; it's in their nature to. But part of that risk-taking is seeing themselves fail, to learn what their capacities are and what needs to be done and when. This is facing the natural consequences of one's actions. When one is sheltered and coddled, though, so that he never has to face the folly of his own choices, failure only comes as disobedience or not heeding some warning -- hazarding to touch something when told not to touch it for safety reasons, for example. Where natural consequences could have been, are now logical consequences for breaking some "rule". The removal of privilege, a contrived consequence, such as the Sundering, is the severest form of punishment, and the most interventionist.
And thus the coddled child trembles at freedom. Where are the rules he has come to expect? Perhaps they are unspoken; he would rather play it safe, than risk facing the wrath of yet another god, god of these rules unknown. Push no boundaries; all is well in the world. Anger not the old gods either, for they have always been there and he has not known a time when they were not plucking him from the face of failure and smoothing out bumps for him, in exchange for not breaking the rules.
So if you wish to fault me for being naive or applaud me for good faith in people and stubborn perseverance, remember that. Skipping "childhood" has some benefits of wisdom, but it leaves a hole or a delay in experience that beckons to be filled.
I just wonder if it's even possible to have such a sheltered childhood in Finland. And if so, would it feel the same? Would anyone there understand all the confusion in my soul?
The vast majority of the data from those disks is from before the Sundering -- a part of my life that I had been largely successful at willing to forget, were it not for photographs and a few other physical artifacts that exist inescapably around the house. These data are my first, manually-coded HTML files (1999); silly antics with Hypercard (1997); second-place-winning competition program in QBASIC (1998, my partner did most of the coding; I did design); exercises in QBASIC (1996). I had never forgotten of their existence; only of what memories they embodied. It's painful but a bit fascinating to unbury the past, but I feel that this must be done, or it is lost forever.
But what draws me to seek these out? I think that being in that middle school classroom this year brought to mind that there is a childhood that I never lived. I stood in front of the pupils and could see in them the same fear, the same wonder, the same optimism I saw in myself. I saw the trust I never had. I knew that I was really just one of them, not the supposed-to-be teacher in front of them.
I don't mean all this in that goth-glorified "child within"/"lost innocence" kind of way, but I did not have an ordinary middle-schooling, after all. Teenagers take risks; it's in their nature to. But part of that risk-taking is seeing themselves fail, to learn what their capacities are and what needs to be done and when. This is facing the natural consequences of one's actions. When one is sheltered and coddled, though, so that he never has to face the folly of his own choices, failure only comes as disobedience or not heeding some warning -- hazarding to touch something when told not to touch it for safety reasons, for example. Where natural consequences could have been, are now logical consequences for breaking some "rule". The removal of privilege, a contrived consequence, such as the Sundering, is the severest form of punishment, and the most interventionist.
And thus the coddled child trembles at freedom. Where are the rules he has come to expect? Perhaps they are unspoken; he would rather play it safe, than risk facing the wrath of yet another god, god of these rules unknown. Push no boundaries; all is well in the world. Anger not the old gods either, for they have always been there and he has not known a time when they were not plucking him from the face of failure and smoothing out bumps for him, in exchange for not breaking the rules.
So if you wish to fault me for being naive or applaud me for good faith in people and stubborn perseverance, remember that. Skipping "childhood" has some benefits of wisdom, but it leaves a hole or a delay in experience that beckons to be filled.
I just wonder if it's even possible to have such a sheltered childhood in Finland. And if so, would it feel the same? Would anyone there understand all the confusion in my soul?
