Thots on Going Retrograde
It’s a bit on the nose that Mercury allegedly retrograded itself during dead week. I think we’re all already feeling that time-standing-still, stew-in-your-juices, deep- December-doldrums without invoking celestial events. But I did find it funny to hear about the planet’s backwards turn after I decided to spend a whole evening this week going down the rabbit hole of my gmail archives. Like ohh, you got me! For hours I tore through more than 10-year-old correspondences with old friends, really let nostalgia rip. I even read old writings of mine, which I know people find cringe as a practice, but that’s never really the point for me; some of it stinks, some of it’s pretty good, but I just love that it exists, an accessible record I can revisit when I want to.
Visiting your internet archive is really like visiting an archive of the self. There are ancient blog posts; Google docs and even Microsoft Word attachments of short stories or poems or whatever; brief stints on random platforms like Medium or Tinyletter and others I forget existed (one day whatever the hell I’m writing here will join the archive, too). Your own digital museum. But there’s something special to me about the emails. Circa like 2005-2012, before many of us had smart phones, and texting was still T9-based and wonky, we emailed each other all day long. At least this was my experience. (And gchatted all day too, which I know a lot of people still partake in but I turned if off years ago when it started to feel like yet another distraction, yet another thing demanding an immediate response from me.) And because the internet wasn’t on the phone, whereas now I’ll text someone an article that made me think of them, before I would email it.
But more than that, we constantly wrote letters to each other. This was especially true if someone was out of town, and you’d send long rambly dispatches, but it would also be a weekly, even daily pastime, something as simple as being bored at work and firing off an email that starts “OK I had a crazy night last night I gotta tell you about it”. I guess I feel like emailing made communication more deliberate and intimate: you had to concentrate and write full sentences to the person, whereas texting is often an afterthought, something you do while you’re doing a million other things. I don’t think texting has actually helped any of my relationships; it more often gives way to misreadings or misunderstandings. Though I do like the clubhouse vibe of a good group chat. But I can’t imagine revisiting texts or group chats ten years from now; they’re too frequent, fragmented, ephemeral—a medium that doesn’t really lend itself to preservation.
When I reread the old writing or the emails, I get this feeling that time isn’t linear—like we can slip back into old selves whenever we want, hopping around our own personal multiverse. Of course time changes our interpretation of the memories, and maybe it’s a delusion but often I think I can still remember how I felt at a given time, so in the act of remembering—strengthened by having the words there in front of me to describe what was going on—I’m actually still feeling it in the present, or at least some version of it. I’ve never felt this way just from looking at an old picture; at least for the way I’m wired, language does way more. Either way, it’s cool to like, go back and look at different eras of your life, like Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Past, but I guess this would be the Ghost of Self Past.
Ok sorry to get all sappy Prousty, but this is what dead week does to a motherfucker! See you next year.