I’ve been on the road the last week. From Sydney to Brisbane and Brisbane to Melbourne. All of it responding to calls for story consultancy on media projects from downloadable locative games to a feature comedy movie. My seminar at State Library of Queensland’s new Digital space – The Edge – in Brisbane, with Jason Nelson, got me dreaming. We were ostensibly talking about using online archives as a basis for games. But we got into a riff about creativity and media and I was away.
We’ve been using archives as the basis for creative and scholarly work forever. Karl Marx wrote, ‘Das Kapitas’, sitting in the British Museum, calling up books and MS from their wondrous collection. Armchair cultural anthropologists from JG Fraser and his ‘The Golden Bough’ through Joseph Campbell’s, ‘The Masks of God’ series to Carlos Castenada’s ‘Don Juan’ books all pull their power from the library and the archive.
As we sat there in the new concrete and glass space, surrounded by leading-edge technology (with only the occasional glitch), I had a flash to the Library of Ashurbanipal: thousands of baked clay tablets accumulated in the Akkadian empire. They preserve the Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the first fiction narrative the world had known. It was preserved because the technology of pressing a metal stylus onto a clay brick to record the events in Pictographic language – and then baking the bricks – created an almost indestructible record. The library even had meta-tags. Smaller baked clay tablets summarized the contents of various sections of the library. But early archeaologists and scavengers totally mixed all the tablets up, so that it has been almost impossible to reconstruct the stories. All that data and no system.
In 1974 the sponsor of our seminar – the State Library of Queensland – had 80% of its stock damaged by floodwaters and silt. Queensland is a very flood-prone state and paper is a very water-damageable recording medium.
There are many cultures of which we know nothing because their data management systems involved such organic and destructible mediums as bark, wood, hide or reeds beaten to a pulp. Other cultures recorded some of their data in stone (Easter Island) but we have no way of reading those enigmatic records. There are scripts like the Cypro-Minoan which still defy interpretation. In these enigmatic spaces fictions, myths and fables have grown like rich, wondrous plants that tell us much about human dreams but little about the cultures whose data we cannot analyze.
Classical Athens and the era of the great Playwrights. We know that every year new plays were written and performed at the festivals. There must have been dozens of playwrights, scores of plays, maybe hundreds. There are references to many. But only the works of 4 remain. Why? Because they were recorded on scrolls, on paper. On materials that broke down in humid climes. Many perished in the great fire that destroyed the Library of Alexandria. Those that remain and bequeath us our ‘Classical Literature’ did so purely by chance. Our understanding of Classical Greece is randomised: as if someone spun a wheel and called out a number and the lucky winner got his play recorded on the list. And we got to create our cultural mythos from those scraps.
In my very first ‘real job’ Geologists Assistant at a desert gold-mine, one of my tasks was to log all the core samples obtained from deep drilling. They lay like long slabs of salami in metal trays, all identified by little wooden tags beside them that showed the bore hole and the depth. That salami contained gold, copper, rare earths and uranium. We had a very rare cyclonic flood and it swept through my core-sample shed and washed out all those little wooden tags before I could log them. I had a shed full of useless data.
Jump back to the days of the Homeric Epics: The Iliad, The Odyssey. Such stories were told and retold by skilled Bards with prodigious memories, using mnemonic devices and stylistic tricks to call up the stories and recast them anew for each audience – much like a Rap singer might use a system for rhythmic and rhyming loops to keep rolling out his/her stories. Or a Blues singer repeating their four-bar phrase whilst groping for the resolving phrase in the final four.
So the Homeric epics stayed because they were embedded not on frail paper but in human memory that was constantly rehearsing and recalling the tales to ensure that passage from generation to generation was precise and unchanged. As to are the dances and songs of Indigenous Australia.
Now we have a flood, a tsunami of data. So much of it that no one person or organization can grasp its totality. Data mining is the new frontier. Forget gold, copper, uranium…this is the real treasure. It will never be destroyed by flood or fire. It will go on accumulating. It’s more than a flood or a wave for they eventually recede, but this phenomenon shows no sign of ever abating.
And that leaves us as artists and storytellers to contemplate how we play with this wondrous stuff. No work of fiction springs from emptiness. Somewhere, somehow, a piece of data elicited a response in a human mind. Several pieces of previously unrelated data suddenly came together and from their juncture a new idea – a new story – erupted.
Feeling myself sailing so nervously on the surface of this flood I felt a shock, a transformation of my own consciousness.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
John Keats recording his response to a new translation of the Homeric tales in 1816.
