“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust
I’m at Madison Square Garden, NYC, watching U2. Despite being seated in nosebleed territory I have parted with some substantial coinage to be here, having bought from an online reseller who, I wouldn’t be surprised, is probably in the middle of a luxury cruise around the Galapagos on the back of the proceeds.
I’m sitting with my phone, recording. Bono obviously doesn’t fail to notice all the phones held aloft, trained on the stage: he urges the audience to just “be in the moment”. “He’s so right!” I think, like everyone else, and then, like everyone else, I carry on recording anyway. I agree with the sentiment my Irish millionaire friend, but I was sure as hell going to take home my doggy bag of iPhone footage.
Flitting back and forth between the phone-screen and the real-screen of my eyes, I spent the evening hovering between the role of live witness and of videographer. This way, I could attend the concert again whenever I wanted, albeit through a screen. After all, we don’t download a song and listen to it – or “experience” it – just the once and then try in vain to replay it in our heads. I know that a concert is by its nature meant as a one-off live experience, but it seems that “one-off” is not a proposition easily sold.
Months later, watching the footage, I wonder what my memory of the evening would have been If I hadn’t taken the footage. I probably would have a more vague and unstructured reminiscence; an abiding sense of how I felt on the evening anchored by a handful of images and sounds, the rest floating somewhere out of focus. But having allowed my phone footage to take centre stage I will never really know.
Now, even if I lost my phone or the video got deleted, my own latent memories could no longer self-resurrect like an organic back-up disk. The phone recording has framed the evening how it wants and, with it, reframed my memory of it. The video snippets are escorted to the foreground in my mind, painting a curtain over everything else, supplanting what would have been my “unframed” memory.
It’s like the song on the scratched CD: it becomes the song as you know it and every other version is made untrue. Even if you hear a clear, new recording, you still hear the skip in your head.
So the quid pro quo of having the footage is that I have to accept that the owner of my personal memory of the concert is the flash storage on my phone, not the frontal cortex in my head.
Is it better to have had the purity of the personal memory or the enhanced artifice of the phone memory? If you’re reading this for an answer, you’re out of luck – my view changes depending on what mood I’m in. Today I wake up an experientialist, tomorrow a historian.
I don’t regret recording at least some of the evening because it does take me back there. But I’m not kidding myself – what I have is a digitally diluted drink, pasteurized on the night and packaged disjointedly for future consumption.