My "Papers"

First, a quick word of congratulations to Jeff for his book deal and a word of farewell from Harriet. We will miss you, Jeff. Muchly.
Now onto our blog:
I have been asked for my “papers”.
At some level this is a flattering. Someone thinks my “papers” are worthy of keeping. Of course, the larger question is, what are my “papers”? It is an interesting question. And there is an implication that the papers are only important as a legacy—as the kind of thing that people look at and think about and access when I am dead. So, in a sense, the collecting of my papers amounts to preparation for death.—my death. Which raises quite a number of issues for me. I do wonder whether I am too young to be thinking of my papers without a certain vanity. But vanity is built into this business of making books, rankly, except that there is civility in the art of pushing the vain impulse to the place where we place all necessary but unseemly impulses—farting, telling people exactly what we think of the shirt they have on, responding to other people’s bad breath, etc. So to consciously start thinking of the junk in my filing cabinets and in boxes all over my office would as my “papers” is to indulge openly in that vanity. Further, to think of organizing these papers for the sake of posterity is to think of posterity, which is the same as thinking of dying, which is different from vanity but equally unpleasant.
But I have been asked for my “papers” and I have been forced to think about these things.

My father had papers—lots of them. But he left quite suddenly, and this after the upheaval of job loss, moving houses too many times in a sort space of time, and a period of despondency when I suspect he did not want to assess what he had. No one, I suspect, had approached him recently about his “papers”. So what he left were the scattered remnants of a generally organized pattern of keeping letters, articles, newspaper clippings, family business documents, and much else. But, like his books, these papers, vulnerable to marauding cockroaches and insects and the damp heat of the tropics, were always at risk of disintegration if not collected and properly cared for. The gap between his passing and our effort to organize the papers was quite a few years, and so that act became an act of retrieval. I would go to my sister’s home and raid some boxes for this and that, but I never got around to organizing the papers properly, and even now they are not as organized as I think they could be. They also seem quite diminished. The books, I have kept, but even they are a with me because I have use of them and not so much because I am some fort of archivist. And I love my father, admire his work, and want to retain his legacy! It is clear to me that children may not always be the best archivists of one’s legacy. They are not professionals. They do not have the unbiased eye of someone who values everything for largely dispassionate reasons. And more often than not, they have a life and that eventually becomes more important than trying to sustain the legacy of the parent. This work should be left up to the professionals. But we can help, I think.
There are so many tragedies surrounding papers that I do think I have to respond responsibly to this request for my papers. I think of the remarkable scholar and poet, Kamau Brathwaite, who lost so any of his archives (he called them archives then. He has been a historian all his life and a collector so what he had in his archives were undoubtedly “archival”) during the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in the late 1980s. Perhaps the archives should not have been in his home, but in a library. But what is remarkable ad a lesson for me, is that he knew exactly what was lost and had a sense of the value of what he had. I can’t say that about what I have. Indeed when I think of my papers beside Kamau Brathwaite’s, I immediately think of how absurd this usiness of collecting my papers might be.
But they have asked for my papers and have promised me that they will catalogue everything, ensure that the work in an atmospheric heaven, and most enticingly, that they will happily seal to anyone any work that I want to have sealed for as long as I want it sealed. This is attractive. The idea is that within a couple of generations, embarrassments (any that I might have been engaged in, that is) will seem quaint and actually exciting, rather than horrific, confusing and painful. Bad poetry will suddenly seem intriguing to people or, by then will be wholly irrelevant since the verdict on me would have been long reached by then. The beauty of sealing material is the vain element: the idea that I might have some secrets of such import that they should be sealed from the rest of the world for the next one hundred years. I imagine a student, a hundred years from now, finally being the first to look at the stuff. I can’t even continue with this fantasy because of how absurd it is—who will care? Who should care then? Yet, I am comforted by the offer.
I have preempted the business of sending my papers anywhere, but taking the tough decision of having my papers made into real papers by being organized. Until recently, they have not been organized at all. Now they are organized. They are in labeled folders, they are indexed, they are color-coded and I can tell what I have at a glance. Apart from the amusement of looking at some old letters, some journal entries and some intriguing business documents, the lot seems depressingly unimportant and underwhelming to me. I am told that this is normally what people think about their files. But professionals will have a better assessment than I will have. I take comfort in the fact that if anyone is to take my papers, at least they will find it in good order. The impulse is not unlike my odd inclination to make my bed in hotel rooms. Of course, I don’t always make the bed, but I always think about making the bed, and when I don’t I feel like a slob.
All of this thinking about papers, however, has brought me to one of the most obvious considerations of the twenty-first century. What I am calling papers, represent such a small part of what, thirty years ago, would have constituted a huge part of anyone’s papers: e-mails and the thousands of files that I have on my hard drive and on disks and other digital storage devices. I gather that my university has a massive archive that contains pretty much all my letters and many of my word-processed documents. Who owns this material? As far as I can tell, the university does. But this cannot be a reasonable thing. And how does one collect this material? How does one embargo such material? I have began to think seriously about printing out e-mails that I think are important and filing them. And once I start thinking about papers, I somehow stop caring about the number of trees that I am using to save this material and the amount of space that this material will take up. Here is the thing when I die, and if I am buried, my body will occupy a few square feet of space and will, eventually, disintegrate into nothing much. But my papers will continue to occupy a far larger square footage. What is that about? Ad to justify al of this, I have to conclude that my task in life is to ensure that this stuff is valuable enough to pay for the space it takes up.
I wish I could say that I am coming to the realization that the less one leaves, the better. Perhaps all the published works, a few unpublished works, a few letters and nothing else. But I have to say that I don’t really believe this. If that is all that I found of my father’s life, I would be disappointed. Already, I wish I had more of him. Much more. But papers are peculiar things because we have so little control over how they will be received by those around us. And I mean this for even the work people look at while we are still alive.
I will admit something: part of my newfound desire to organized my papers has been prompted by an, until now, unstated plan to purge from those papers everything that I don’t want left behind. The tug will be between the vanity of my artistic legacy and the vanity of my personal legacy. I am not sure which will win.
I have written to the folks who are asking for my papers. I have told them I am flattered, honored, moved, even by the invitation, but I want to see what I have before I decide.