On the coast of South Australia there are stories about the day the sea came in and the hills became islands. They are not flood myths. The linguist Nicholas Reid and the geographer Patrick Nunn matched stories like them, told all around the Australian coastline, to the actual post-glacial drowning of the shelf, and dated the events they describe to between seven and thirteen thousand years ago. Some four hundred generations. Kept accurate, Reid says, because kin carried a responsibility to get it right.
Nobody wrote any of it down.
That is the standard Helena holds writing against, and it is why, between two of our planned conversations, we got into an unplanned argument about whether any of this should exist.
I had said i would love to keep having these conversations for twenty or thirty years. She said the knowledge we are trying to bring back comes from far deeper time than that, from cultures like the one that carried those stories, and that it is fundamentally oral. Then she hesitated, and said this might be too extreme to put out publicly. I said let’s be edgy. So she said it: the minute we write the word down, we are holding still something that in the real world is alive and changing.
It has cost her friends. Literate, articulate friends, offended at having their medium demoted.
I tried to map the objection while she made it, and it came out as three charges.
Writing is not local. A sentence on a page claims, or is taken to claim, a truth that holds everywhere, when the truth was always this valley, this woman, this red. Every time anyone says tree, the experience behind the word is different, and the word pretends it is not.
Writing moves us into the left brain. Speech, she says, is where the feminine has always been more fluent. The page is where the dissecting mind takes over and the web becomes a list.
Writing outlives the writer. Which is the whole point of it, and the whole problem. A position written down cannot evolve. It can only be argued with. And the culture built on that habit now believes it can improve on life itself.
I have made her argument myself, about a different medium. In The Sound of the World Has Narrowed I wrote about MIDI chopping time into 128 slices because that is all a 1980s computer could hold, and how everything with swing in it, everything too alive to sit on the grid, was silenced. What did not fit the grid vanished. Helena’s claim is that writing was the first grid. MIDI only did to music what the alphabet did to everything else.
Socrates said it twenty-four centuries ago. In the Phaedrus an Egyptian king tells the god who invented letters that they will “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls.” We know this because Plato wrote it down. Everybody makes that joke. It is not a refutation. It is the problem, restated.
Tyson Yunkaporta, whose name is how we got into this, gives the engineering version in Sand Talk. The only sustainable way to store data long-term is inside relationships, in what he calls biological peer-to-peer networks. A backup nobody can burn down. That is not romanticism about oral cultures. It is a claim about storage media, and the sea-level stories are the benchmark.
This is where I disagreed with her, and she did not let me get away with it.
Her case for paper over digital was durability. Whatever we preserve in the digital sphere, she said, will not last as long as what we put on paper. She is right about that. The BBC’s Domesday Project, a million contributions pressed onto laserdisc in 1986, was nearly unreadable by 2002. The parchment from 1086 still reads fine.
She meant it as an indictment. I think it is the feature.
There is a hundred and fifty year old Dickens edition around the corner from where i am sitting. It will be there in a hundred years and there is nothing to be done about that. A book is a broadcast you cannot recall. Digital is the first medium in which forgetting can be designed. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger proposed expiration dates on information back in 2009. Take it one step further and you get something like a Jubilee: in Leviticus, every fiftieth year, land goes back to the families it came from and the bonded go free. Imagine a recording that comes up for renewal on a fixed date, and the community it belongs to decides whether it still needs to exist outside of them.
Because loud, centralised voices, and you are reading one, are for the eye of the needle. Right now, while the empire is suppressing and separating and killing this knowledge, preserving it is urgent. The moment it is lived again it should stop being a file. Culture is what is left after you delete the recording.
I should add that five years ago, in a post called Knowing, I called for an immutable global information space, and I meant immutable. I was proposing the Dickens edition at planetary scale. Consider this the correction.
Helena’s pushback was one word, and the word was when.
Deep indigenous knowledge should fade, she agreed, when we are living it. And that will not happen in twenty years. She is not against the deletion. She is against my calendar. If it must be recorded, record it in situ, on paper, and keep it moving by mouth inside the communities it came from. Then she handed me the bill i had left off: the energy, the mines, the water, the whole destruction the internet has entailed from the outset, and a species that mistakes the rapid sharing of disembodied fragments for knowing and grows more certain with every upload.
So the protocol, if anyone ever builds it, and nobody has, needs a decision point and not a deadline. It might take generations. It might be tomorrow. What it cannot be is the default, which is forever.
Then she pleaded guilty. She wishes she had recorded more in Ladakh in the early years. For many peoples, she conceded, speaking into a recorder is far easier than writing, and it is the women who hold most of what needs saying. What people are doing now, putting the old knowledge online, is probably better than nothing. That is the highest grade she has ever given the digital in my hearing, and I am taking it.
In the first of these conversations I wrote about the Tibetan verb that tells you whether the speaker saw it happen. A recording is the other form. Hearsay, at the very best. The witness form is only available in a room.
So use this the way it is meant. Listen to the whole thing. Go and find the twenty. Carry it into a room where somebody can correct you. Live it until the file is redundant.
Then delete it.
Listen to the full conversation above.
