Culling the Past
One of those momentary and fleeting moods to cull my past this afternoon (it's such an aptly violent verb: to cull, as in to cull a herd of sheep; though this time only the past). At the tail end of it, I found an old box of checks in my closet. Taking the timee to chop my old unused checks into illegible scraps of paper gave me pause for a moment: An old check register from when I first started writing checks, my debits and credits faithfully recorded in the leaning script I used to favor. I tossed nearly all of it - save the register.
Maybe it's in the spirit of The Last Mughal, which I finished the other night after Jordan was kind enough to bring me back a bootleg version of the Indian press edition, in which William Dalrymple explains the amount of time he and his research assistants spent in the old archives, deciphering old petitions and bills, all written in the court's Urdu. There were no stirring narratives in those archives, he explained, but there was a kind of mute testimony: The tattered scraps of a life lived.
Did my checks have something of that? I think they might have - a record of rent mailed, bills paid, enthusiasms cultivated. There wasn't much point to keep the checks, but there was something kind of haunting to find my scrawl on duplicate checks. In the end, most of it went into the trash, but I saved one register. No reason for it, but it's a marker of a past that was, a person that was and in some ways continues to be.
Two other brief notes:
Maybe it's in the spirit of The Last Mughal, which I finished the other night after Jordan was kind enough to bring me back a bootleg version of the Indian press edition, in which William Dalrymple explains the amount of time he and his research assistants spent in the old archives, deciphering old petitions and bills, all written in the court's Urdu. There were no stirring narratives in those archives, he explained, but there was a kind of mute testimony: The tattered scraps of a life lived.
Did my checks have something of that? I think they might have - a record of rent mailed, bills paid, enthusiasms cultivated. There wasn't much point to keep the checks, but there was something kind of haunting to find my scrawl on duplicate checks. In the end, most of it went into the trash, but I saved one register. No reason for it, but it's a marker of a past that was, a person that was and in some ways continues to be.
Two other brief notes:
- Jordan has a new project up called the Los Angeles Cycling Map. I'd encourage you to go take a look and let him know what you think. I was especially impressed by the idea to link Twitter into everything else, and I hope something good comes from it.
- A couple of days late here, but get well soon Roadblock.
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