05 April 2006

Memory

The police are playing it close to the vest, and Few details of the killing have been released. It was a shotgun, that much seems to be clear, since two shells were reportedly found near the body. It is said that a woman passing the little whitewashed cottage noticed a broken window, and that is what led the authorities to investigate.

There is only a single door into the two-room house, and no way out the back. No running water, and no gas. It was a place for a man who wanted to be alone with his thoughts and with his memories.

He had some remarkable ones. He was a pal of Bobby Sands in the Long Kesh Jail, and I remember those days at the height of the Troubles, when the Brits were running a system not much different from Guantanamo for their Irish revolutionaries.

The self-imposed solitude he had in the little cottage with the stove that burned wood he cut himself must have been simplicity in itself. It sounded a little attractive, since I periodically consider internal exile myself, especially early in the month when the money is already all gone and the weeks stretch out ahead.

As it turned out, he was not alone in his memories. There were others who considered his work with the British Intelligence Service to be treason, and it was doubtless one or more of them who shattered the window and shot him in the head and the arm.

Denis Donaldson was born the year before I was. He was fifty-six when they killed him yesterday. The IRA says they had nothing to do with it, and so did Jerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Republican movement.

Adams had denounced Denis as a traitor and expelled him from the Party last year, after he admitted he was a paid British spy.

There are talks tomorrow on the matter of devolving shared political power to Ulster, high-level ones, and the Prime Minister says that this act will not derail them.

Maybe that is true, but it is curious about the power of memory.

A friend wrote me and bemoaned the loss of his. Five years of electronic mail had been expunged from his server, and it was as though a half-decade was razored right out of his life.

You know the frustration when a file disappears. Imagine years of them gone, suddenly as blank as a featureless concrete cell.

I wrote him back immediately, since I fear the same thing. When you store your life and pictures in digital format, there is always the risk that the whole enterprise will disappear with the grinding sound of a dying hard drive.

My computer at lower Big Pink has around fifteen-thousand e-mails in it somewhere, and there is a growing balance on the one in the new unit, not to mention what might remain on the old laptop with the broken screen in the back of my desk.

I pay to have a backup of some files on a server located in another state. At least I think it is. No one knows where things are physically anymore. It could be down the street.

I try to remember to burn critical files to compact disc periodically, though God knows I have copies of stuff going back to the beginning of time, big seven-inch discs from the prehistoric Wang system we used in the early 1980s, when the rebels were held at Long Kesh, and 5 1/2 inch floppies in cardboard sleeves, and those crazy little plastic-covered discs that were so cool, and thick format floppies and a couple more kinds of magnetic media that no longer fit anything.

I just purchased a 250 megabyte desktop external drive so that I might have a central back-up for everything, a sort of universal data vault that would no longer be dependent on storage media, but of course it is just another one.

I'll back up everything up, again, though the files are beginning to look like fun-house mirrors, copies of copies of copies going back to the kids middle-school book reports from the first computer I owned. The photo files are critical, since I no longer bother to print them out on archival paper. They are just zeros and ones, all in a line, and if the format convention become archaic, they are gone for good.

I thought about printing everything, just in case, but there are binders spilling out of the closet already.

I am still concerned about the effect of a catastrophic Electromagnetic Pulse event, as is the Department of Homeland Security. It doesn't matter how many electronic copies you have of your critical stuff if all the hard drives are fried simultaneously. It would be easy enough to do, with the airburst of even a crude nuclear weapon. It is possible that no one would even be directly hurt, except by the machines that would run amok

That contingency is one that someone else is supposed to be worrying about. No massive exchange would be required, just a single explosion at altitude would wipe out data systems all across the country. The digital age come to an abrupt halt. Everything with a computer chip in it would die.

And that is just about everything. I have thought about a lead storage box for my memories, and maybe a reinforced bunker out in the country someplace.

I would hate to rely on the pesky human memory I carry around with me. It is so fallible on the details, and nuance fades with time. It gets hard to remember just exactly what happened, who was guilty, and why. It is awfully subjective and subject to caprice.

But human memory is a curious thing, and if Denis Donaldson were alive, he might say it is remarkably persistent.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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