The Weight of Memory

I'm not sure that we understand what it means today to hold knowledge, to hold memory

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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Long ago in the area we now roughly identify as the Middle East but used to be called Assyria and Mesopotamia and Babylon, the weight of memory was a clay tablet.

I have actually held one of these in my hand — just one, and for a very short period of time, but it was mesmerizing. Very few experiences have made me feel as connected to history as holding that piece of fired clay.

The specific one I was holding in my hand is part of the collection of the Florida State University Archives. It is probably between 4,000 to 4,500 years old, which is a stultifying number of years in human terms. What really shocked me was how small it was, because I guess I never paid much attention to the measurement devices placed in all the photographs of cuneiform clay tablets I had seen up to that point.

Pick up your phone. That “tablet” in your hand is probably larger than the clay tablet I held. The cuneiform document was thicker because of the nature of the material, but it was roughly the same shape and size, made to be held in your hand. It makes a lot of sense when you think about what those tablets were primarily used for, which was for things like receipts, invoices, and prayers — all the stuff that was important to note down have on hand, but weren’t intended or needed to be preserved long term. Honestly, most of those clay tablets could go under the label of short-term memory aids in much the same way a lot of us use our notes apps on our phones to keep track of something we don’t want to forget or that we want to share with other people.

(Yes, the epic of Gilgamesh was also written on similar clay tablets, but also some people write epic webnovels on their phone. The circle of life, etc. etc. etc. )

It was a very lightweight tablet, for material that is often considered heavy. But if you think about having hundreds of them, or even thousands of them, then you can imagine storage would be an issue. The weight of memory, in such a case, could easily become hazardous to life and property.

It seems a fair number of people with a large library/archive of cuneiform tablets sensibly put them in a basement or on the lowest floor of their homes/stores, where the collection of them wouldn’t eventually destabilize the entire building. And indeed, there is a theory that one reason we have so many of them left to discover is because they were kept in areas that were easily sealed off by cataclysms and warfare. Once a house falls down on a basement or the ground floor, then it's just a bunch of rubble sitting on top of a library. The library itself gets a bit smashed up but is not the rubble. That wasn't always the case, but it was the case enough times that we have these precious, precious pieces of memory left to hold in our hands (and in our archives and our museums).

Until the modern era, the weight of memory was always heavy.

I'm not a medievalist, and as an archivist I've held precious few pieces of books from the pre-Gutenberg era. However, I'm sure most bookish people (MAH PEEPS!!!!) are aware that medieval libraries were very small, according to our current standards for a library or book collection. A medieval European nobleman having 200 books in his possession put him in the upper tier as a collector.

This is because books were expensive products before the Gutenberg revolution of movable type. Books took a lot of time and resources, both material and labor, to create. It was a cost only the most well-off and privileged people could afford. Even storing them was costly, because of the many shelves in the specialized room they required.

That was the price of memory.

The weight of it was equal to the materials themselves: vellum or parchment for the book, plus the covers which were hand-made as well, usually from wood and leather and sometimes precious jewels.

In the modern era, we've progressed from handwritten commonplace books to apps like Evernote and Obsidian (which are very different in structure and usage, but are both advertised as being used for “second brains”). We've leapt so high over the barriers of memory hoarding that everything, absolutely everything, can be kept (relatively) cheaply, insofar as the cost to an average person goes. I'm not getting into the cost of the resources such as electricity, or the mined minerals needed to create the technology, or the petrochemicals required and the resulting price on our climate, and ecology. All those costs are there, those are the price of memory. We don’t think about them because the weight of memory is so light. To us, our phone or our laptop is a limitless storage bank, especially when tied to cheap cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive.

The weight of memory these days is infinitesimal.

(I'm sure a nerdy scientist out there who really enjoys figuring these things out has determined what the weight of a byte of data is, but whatever it is, it's really, really, really tiny.)

But unlike those clay cuneiform tablets, it is also very, very, very vulnerable.

The weight of my youngest memory is kept in old notebooks which are a pain in the ass to lug around. By my late teens when I was in college, my memory shifted to floppy disks, three and a half inch little things which were used on the Apple computers we had available to us in the “Mac Lab” at my college. The weight of my undergraduate dissertation is three floppy disks, formatted for the nearly-forgotten Amiga computer system.

None of these can be easily read at this point in time. I would have to go in search of computer museums with functioning machines to be able to access any of that data, and that is assuming the floppies have not become irretrievably corrupted after 30+ years of storage. The weight of those memories is nothing. If I hadn't printed out a lot of the things I worked on back then, they would not exist at all.

Before writing, memory was always, in a sense, short term because defined by the length of a person’s life. Our lives are not so long, after all.

Once the last person who remembers something dies, that memory becomes a legend, or a myth, or a folktale. These were valuable to the people who retold them, and there is a lot of real history hidden inside the ancient stories that were handed down for generations, but they are essentially a very old game of telephone. It is why so many cultures prized rote memorization of information, since it was the only way facts and stories could be preserved.

Then writing happened, then printing happened, then digital storage happened.

I'm not sure that we understand what it means today to hold knowledge, to hold memory. We take it for granted. We think memory is, or should be, weightless.

Yet, when you get down to it, memory is as ephemeral as humans are. We dig up bones like we dig up clay tablets. We lose the ability to retrieve data the same way brains decay. We rage against the dying of the light and try to save everything because we know we are mortal creatures, but we have no control over what is remembered about us, no matter how hard we try.

It's almost enough to drive a girl to make her own clay tablets. Because hell, you never know, do you?

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