Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #21–a darkroom lab notebook

I will probably be running into boxes labeled “Parents/Misc/???” for the next ten years. I was cleaning off my desk and ran into such a box containing some postcards, a proof coin set, printed emails (because my parents wanted to save them but couldn’t figure out how), a few receipts, and this lab notebook. It dates from 1981, when we were in Canberra, Australia, as my dad was spending a sabbatical year at the Australian National University.

At this time, my brothers and I were old enough that we didn’t require as much attention as when we were young, and my mom didn’t have a garden she could fuss over. Maybe she was bored, or felt a bit isolated, but after six months, she sought employment at the ANU. She found a position with a professor who was documenting the indigenous shipbuilding practices of Indonesia. She developed the film the professor had exposed, and made ink drawings for publications to support his descriptions. Illustration made good use of her talents, but darkroom work was foreign her. She didn’t much like it, and she didn’t much like the professor, who was bossy and not very appreciative.

This notebook is completely mundane. It has her notes on how to work in a darkroom, how to load exposed film into a developer tank, what precautions to take with chemicals. Beyond her neat handwriting and occasionally idiosyncratic spelling, there is little that makes this notebook speak of my mom. I was honestly surprised to see absolutely no doodles of flowers or weird faces, but then I remembered that her boss was unpleasant and probably didn’t tolerate such foolishness. It is as personally significant and meaningful as a Kodak a darkroom guide. Having been consulted daily for some months, then having been hauled halfway across the world, then having been stored safely for four decades, then having somehow eluded the purge boxes of so many similarly inconsequential papers, and having been moved to a farm in Oregon, it will end its existence as kindling for the fire that keeps my house warm this winter.

It is not a meaningful object. I’ve disposed of dozens of boxes of similar artifacts over the last few years. Why should I pause on this notebook?

If I am here with my beloved, I can look at her and see her, as a whole. I can move closer, and see a part in greater detail. I can get a loupe, and while I’d lose context, I’d see even more detail. Were she patient, I could examine her with a microscope. The microscopic examination of a square millimeter of skin would be meaningless, though. It wouldn’t tell me anything about her, it wouldn’t help me understand or love her more, and all I might see would be insignificant detail. But, I can, in principle, reach across the breakfast table on a Saturday morning and look as deeply as I want at any part of her. There is a sense of real-ness that this gives to me; she is tangible, visible, and detailed at every scale I wish to examine.

This notebook allows me to do this with my mom, in a way. I can zoom in, down to the pixel level, on the random date of March 3, 1981. Never mind that what I am seeing has less significance than a single dot in a Seurat painting or a square millimeter of my sweetheart’s skin. If I have that ability to zoom in at that specific point, maybe I can do that anywhere, for any date? Maybe I can have that same sense of real-ness and infinite detail that I can have about the living? And If I burn this notebook, don’t I lose that sense?

Of course this is illusory. Accepting the death of a person I have been close to is, partly, relinquishing their physical actuality, and replacing it with a story or a painting composed from memory. This composition is no more static than a painting that keeps getting touched up as long as the artist keeps it in the studio. The mere act of remembering changes memories, the phrasing of a sentence gets tweaked, a line in a picture gets refined every time they are considered. It’s rare—to the point of being upsetting—that something can emerge and change the overall composition.

A good portrait is more than pixels of pigment or dots of paint. A good portrait is also categorically different from a living person. It is not infinitely detailed, nor should it be. You can’t zoom in, arbitrarily deeply, on any point. A good portrait maybe doesn’t even look exactly like the living person. However, it should capture what is important about that person to the artist. So, in making a mental portrait of my mom to carry with me, now that she is deceased for some years, this notebook isn’t needed or desirable. A single pixel such as this notebook isn’t nearly as meaningful as a strong brushstroke such as “she had an artistic bent, could get bored, but was methodical, and bridled under bossy and inconsiderate people.”

The years-long decline of dementia and the passage of some years since her death have given me ample time to compose and refine the picture I carry of my mom. It is a pleasing composition, a good story. It’s not finished, nor will ever be. As I grow old and my memory fills—or, as I fear, it evaporates in the siege of Alzheimers—the portrait will probably become simpler, or perhaps more pure and symbolic. For now, it is fairly rich, though there are places without detail: the relationship she had with her brother, whether she was frustrated or satisfied with the role she played as the wife of a professor, the mother of a family.

I have yet a few boxes of letters and juvenilia to go through. I hope they will provide a few of those missing details, though I doubt the composition will change much. If they do add to the story, it’s likely that I will preserve some of these scraps. I will also, as I go through all her papers and belongings, keep running into things like this notebook, stray pixels and footnotes that do nothing to advance character, action, or atmosphere. Like a good editor or an artist at the easel, I will discard them.