sounds/sights

stuff.

Cleaning my room tonight and just wrapped up two massive bags of old banged-up CDs and obsolete floppy disks which will soon be wiped and en route to a hardware recycling plant in Los Angeles. I don’t know what’s on them anymore – old high school projects, old PC back-ups, bad music mixes, all this information that is now on the way to destruction. I get so overwhelmed with technology sometimes – in fact sometimes I fear it, the way that we rely on it to store so many facets of our lives. The way we hoard information in this physical way, things that we don’t look at for such long periods of time – things that we hope we or someone after us will revisit and find nostalgic in some odd way.

Suddenly I remember an old violinist friend telling me how a teacher of hers had told her that, during a lesson, making marks on the sheet music were not of much use; no, the things worth remembering were the things that stuck in the mind after the lesson. (I didn’t agree with that much at the time, but it perhaps says something that, in recent years, I’ve become less of a compulsive note-taker.) I think of this anecdote as I discard the old relics and make empty space on these bookshelves in my old Houston bedroom that will go mostly untouched for another several years. And I think of stuff – the way a teacher of mine sometimes says this word with a certain weight, a certain burden, to emphasize how heavy it is, how overwhelming it can be.

Maybe there is something sentimental and worth keeping in these old disks – maybe photos or childhood poems or early essays, I don’t know. I’d rather not know. All this stuff that I haven’t thought about in years… I’ve had enough of it, and somehow it seems right to say, at this point in time, that I’ve had enough of old information in general. If anything, it just makes me more aware of the need to tear down and reconstruct and preserve the remnants (most of them mental) that I have held onto all this time.

I don’t know where I am going with all this, but there is something that feels weighty and symbolic in the act of throwing all this old information away. I feel better for it. As for the fate of all the old relics – well, perhaps the things worth reviving will find the right time to revive themselves in the space of my memory.

13 notes

2 years ago

on wilderness

I spoke to my mother on the phone today. Over the last few months my family has adopted a mockingbird that had been abandoned in our front yard. They have tried their best to return it to nature but the bird seems to refuse. “Be wild,” my sister commands him every now and then, although in a strangely passive tone. “Be wild,” she says, sometimes while hurling a blue napkin in his direction. The color blue startles him in particular, and when she flaps the napkin at him he puffs up and opens his wings but does little else, doesn’t flap or move. Instead he hops in my mother’s lap like a puppy, and keeps her company while she watches television, and perches on my father’s hand, singing to him over tea. He has taken to my family’s summer sleeping habits as well, waking up at around 11:30 or so and going to bed near 3 AM.

A few days ago my mother took him outside, as she has done for the last several weeks, and for the first time he flew so high into the air she could hardly see him. She left him alone for a few hours (as she usually does), and expected to see him lingering near the window (as he normally does), but he never came back. Oh, he’s finally gone, she thought. She tried not to be sad about it, because after all, that’s where he belongs, in the wild. But the next day when she woke up in the morning she heard his cry, eep! eeep!, at the window. She opened the door and he hopped back inside, and when she fed him he ate more than usual. He spent the majority of the day in his milk crate in our dining room, and was quieter than usual for most of his time there.

By the next day, however, he was back to normal, an adopted member of the household. I asked my mother if he was ever leaving for good, but no, she says, it seems like he’s not going anywhere. If he goes, it’s for a night, and he comes back again, behaving as he always does. Be wild, they tell him, but he insists on staying where he his, keeping my mother company in her loneliness, singing for my father after a difficult night of work. He is growing up. He empathizes with their emotions, and understands a serious moment but gazes back at you and your serious eyes, cocking his head as if to ask what the matter could be.

It seems that he has stumbled upon them at an interesting time in life — such a strange bird. He could be wild if he wanted to, but in the meantime he is afraid of water hoses and will jump to my father’s head when the splash comes in his direction. Such a strange, lovely bird, and I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him yet.

sounds/sights

stuff.

on wilderness

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