Screenshots & Bookmarks

& a little honesty

Machine memory in action

I have over a thousand screenshots stored on my smartphone. It’s embarrassing.

The last time I went through them was the last time I flew on a plane over a year ago.

I found some real gems in there, but short of a few handwritten notes there is no record of my having revisited them, just a sad digital file of my attention being turned over to machine memory. I’ve given some thought to printing out a selection of screenshots for each year and making a little book out of them, but that remains a mere thought, not a reality.

You can apply this to bookmarks, too, of course. Am I really going to read that Slate Star Codex article “I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup”? Maybe, maybe.

To bring this into the poetry realm of Silver Door I’d like to make a simple suggestion:

Write poems you really enjoy into a notebook or onto a piece of paper. Then, you have it.

Part of humility is being brutally honest with ourselves and acting accordingly. You’re not going to go back to that article you bookmarked six months ago.

Pick up your pens. Save a poem from the machine.