Secular society takes the idea of salvation out of the equation, and in one stroke the whole construction loses its balance. Without a belief in salvation, “conservation” becomes no more than an institutional archive: a museum, a library, a warehouse, allowing a sort of conditional and limited immortality — a greatly extended single day, the only version of eternal life that is possible in the emancipated new world. Technological revolutions, one after another, have made vast digital warehouses possible, and “possible” in the human tongue means “indispensable.”
Long ago, the memory of a person was passed into the hands of God, and any extra efforts to preserve her memory might have been considered excessive, perhaps pointless. Being long remembered was the preserve of those few who understood how to achieve it, or wanted it very much, and you could quite happily die and be resurrected without this, as the task of remembering everyone had been delegated upward, to the highest level.
Any attempt to fix a memory, to give it body, usually meant a list of wonderful attributes. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, there is contempt for the written memory:
Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
By the nineteenth century and its technological revolutions, remembrance suddenly becomes democratic practice, and archiving a matter of general importance. It’s called something different and it’s thought of differently, but it manifests as an urgent desire to obtain photographs of all one’s family. At first the disembodied voice provokes fear and recoil, then slowly the horned head of the gramophone is domesticated, and Moscow dachas ring to the sound of mezzo-soprano Vyaltseva. Change happens slowly, and at first the whole process seems to fit well within the ancient tradition of collecting the best and most representative things: Caruso’s voice is recorded, a speech by the Kaiser.
Cinema appears — it too has a purely functional use, as another way to retell history. But now from the viewing platform of hindsight, you realize that something else entirely was intended (by whom?), leading directly to the high point of all human progress: the selfie stick. The home movie. Giving everyone the opportunity to retain everything forever. Immortality, as we understand it, is a kind of trick: the complete and total disappearance of any one of us can be hidden, like a grave, under a scattering of little deceptions that give the illusion of presence. And the bigger the pile of tiny deceptions (saved moments, little speeches, photographs), the more bearable the nonexistence of oneself and others. The daily visual and verbal debris is suddenly made respectable, it’s no longer swept under the carpet, but carefully put away for rainier days.
You’d think that in order to become a whole archaeological strata (and lift the ground under our feet a meter or so), the rituals and materials of our life would have to be obsolescent, used up, detritus, like everything created by humans until now. But it’s a strange thing: since the invention of photography and sound recording these rituals and materials have forgotten the art of decomposition, just like today’s plastic waste. They won’t be returned to earth and dust — they pile up higher and higher. They are of no use for the future. Anything that cannot adapt and change is fruitless and surely must be doomed.
In the apartments of the early twentieth century it was still fashionable to display stuffed creatures of various size and shape — from the stags’ and boars’ heads on the wall to the tiny birds, stuffed so delicately with sawdust that they looked alert and alive, frozen in the act of bathing their feathers. We often read of the elderly ladies who had generations of pets stuffed, to the point where any house with heavy curtains and fire screens went to auction with a dozen dusty terriers. There were other, more radical methods of conserving one’s nearest and dearest: at Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villa you can still see the souvenir made from the shell of his beloved tortoise. Fed to giant proportions, it is said the tortoise could barely crawl from room to room or along the avenues of the estate with its victorious-sounding title: “Vittoriale degli Italiana.” When she died from overeating, her body was scooped out of its horned case and the case made into a dish, an elegant tortoise tureen, to decorate the table and remind the poet’s guests of better days.
The difficult, fragile status of the dead in the age of mechanical reproduction made their very existence a task: if we can no longer hope for a new meeting, the joyful dawn of resurrection, then we need to do everything possible to put what remains of the dead to good use. This conviction resulted in a surge of funereal souvenirs: locks of hair with the beloved’s initials bound in, photographs of the dead in which they look far brighter than the living — the long exposure of the studio photographer blurred the twitching features and tiny movements of the grief-stricken to unrecognizable emptiness, so it was immediately clear who, in the decorously dressed group, was the much-missed corpse.
By the middle of the twentieth century the process had been taken to its “logical extreme,” however you want to understand that euphemism: the rouged face of a political leader lying in state in a crystal coffin on a main square, or millions of unknown bodies, seen only as a repository of raw material or spare parts. What began as the Russian “antideath” philosopher Nikolai Fedorov’s obsession to give life to the dead, to drag them from their oak coffins so they walked and talked again; what began as an attempt to resurrect the old world with the power of words — to make a glass of tilleul tea and use it as an elixir of life — hit against a living wall of the drowned and the lost, against the simple impossibility of remembering and calling the dead by their names.
This tidal wave has rolled on for two centuries and is finally at our heels — but instead of the resurrection of the past we have artisans, the production of perfect casts, and taxidermy. The dead have learned to speak with the living: their letters, their voicemails, their posts on social media, all of this can be broken into its tiny elements. There’s even an app that uses the words of dead people to compose answers to questions put to them. For several years now this app, available in the Apple Store, has allowed us the peculiar indulgence of chatting with someone as famous as Prince or as unknown as the unfortunate twenty-six-year-old Roman Mazurenko, who was hit by a car. If you type into the chat box the words, “Where are you now?” Mazurenko answers, “I love New York.” There is no sense of awkwardness in all this. The seams all meet in the middle, the window doesn’t suddenly blow open, there is no cold wind to send a shiver down your spine.
The digital creators of these verbal phantoms (made in the image of a friend) had plenty of material to work from as nothing is ever wiped in the digital age. Instead of one, the only, photograph, there are hundreds. No one, not even the photographer, manages to look at every snap: it would take years. But it doesn’t matter, the important thing is to store all these many moments, to keep them safe for the Great Looking, the Grand Viewer who has all the time and attention in the world, more than would fit in any lifetime, and who will draw all that has happened into one line of events. There is no one else to do it.