There is apparently a universal feeling of dread that accompanies the crashing of computers. The experience is certainly not universal, in as much as some peoples' digital life can be retained, some cannot. You lose the accumulation of your whole digital life, wiped away as though it is simply drops of water on glass. So it was with me, my digital life wiped away with a short clunk. I had been paging through photos on the internet, when the computer froze. I restarted it to nothing. Macs have this lovely little feature of the folder with a blinking question mark on it. It signifies the loss of connection to the drive, the loss of startup instructions. In my case it was definitive.
Losing my digital life has been hard. With each hour I tally yet more that had gotten onto that little platter and nowhere else. I have learned a wicked lesson in multiple sources of data, of backing up my data. Eased by thoughts of not having a dissertation on that disk, of no pressing deadlines, of having gotten two of four field guides off to others before the end. Counting small victories in the face of overwhelming loss. I imagine what the last speaker of a rare indigenous language feels. Only it is not a matter of life and death for me, nor my heritage, it is a hiccup at best, a long drawn out reconstruction. In the language of my life, it is the most personal restoration I've ever engaged in.
Our minds store so much information, yet they too have this fickle recall capacity, so unlike the computer with its tidy folders and exacting replication. I struggle with facts of disappearing field guides, of lost designs, photos, music, endless files of organized research, and all my writings from the last two years. It was as simple as snapping your fingers and it was over. The process of compiling the vestiges of our lives, of bringing our knowledge into a single drive, into a single location. As though the process of bringing all that knowledge brought it all to a vanishing point.
Part of me feels like I am grieving at the loss, part of me is just mad at my stupid complacency. Macs are as fallible as any other machine. No matter how much we humans engineer our machines, they fail. Like plane crashes and dam breaks, unfortunately they tend to fail catastrophically. It is the idea of failure that has captivated me in the last two weeks. Where I work at home, in our little back office I look out on my garden, and specifically the little nursery where I am continually trying to grow plant starts. When my computer first failed, my reaction was one of such shock that I ultimately came home after doing all I could to get it on the road to being fixed and could do nothing. All I found that I could do was endlessly fill two by two inch pots for seed starts. I ultimately filled eight trays before I snapped out of it. My computer failing had brought me back to the ground and to my seeds.
A few days later, sitting under the falling leaves of my hackberry trees, I slowly put seeds into every one of those pots. I planted grasses, jojoba, chard, broccoli raab, beets, agave, sotol, and even kale. As I did, I began to think about knowledge, mainly about all the knowledge that I had lost. It was certainly in my head to a degree, but it was not a replicable knowledge. Sitting under the trees that grew from seeds, the thought of the knowledge that was in each of the seeds in my hands was suddenly real and speaking to me. When you compare the knowledge that is encoded in a seed, to germinate and grow and provide seed and food, it really changes the way you see knowledge. Human knowledge is like us, fleeting. Seeds are enduring and ancient. I planted another row of grass seed as I thought about my loss. In the broader scheme of things, it is meaningless. In my life it is devastating, but temporary, fleeting. Data is not always knowledge.
