A project pretty easy for a writer to empathize with: rebuilding another writer’s house, post-fire, brick by brick by brick.
Coming as this does on the heels of yesterday’s post about the cat man of Caboodle Ranch, I’ll just say: I know, I know. So many needs… I’m embarrassed to have overdrawn a check recently myself; I know what things are like right now.
But this just feels different — sharper and even more personal — to me. I’ll get back to the regular business of RAMH, whatever the hell that is, later today but in the meantime wanted to deal with this.
You may remember that Toni Morrison lost her house in a Christmas Day fire some 15 years ago. In an interview with Salon, she replied to a question about the fire:
It was just a routine, stupid Christmas fire, in the fireplace, with the coals and the pines smoldering. The wreaths, you know — the detritus, the dried needles were around on the floor and not swept up. And the fire leaped to one of those and leaped to the couch, where it smoldered, and no one knew. I wasn’t there. One of my kids was there. And by the time he got downstairs, it was shooting through the roof. So he called the fire department, but it was a terrible winter, and the water was frozen in the pipes. And I lost … I write by hand … I was able to save some books, but I had all my manuscripts, notes from old books, in my bedroom on the second floor, in a little trundle underneath the bed, where there was some storage space. It went up first. I said to somebody later, “Why did I think that having those things near me was safer than having them in the basement?”
My manuscripts, I didn’t care, I mean, I’m never going to look at that stuff again, so that wasn’t the hurtful part to me. They had a value, I think, to my children. As an inheritance. But I know I would never look at that stuff again. I would never look at “The Bluest Eye” — seven versions, in hand, of it — again. So I was not that upset about that. Other people might be interested in that. For me, it was the pictures of my children and of myself. Family. And I have nothing. Everything’s gone. So, I’m sorry about my children’s report cards, I’m sorry about my jade plants, certain clothes.
Travis Erwin, whom I don’t know, would probably happily insist he’s not a Toni Morrison. Nor am I. But philosophic though I might be about it (as Irwin is), my skin crawls now when I think of how much can be lost when someone who lives by paper experiences a fire.
[Heard about this from MoonRat’s blog yesterday;
Janet Reid followed up with her own thoughts.
Travis’s own account of the fire made it truly immediate.]
cuff says
I remember when I used to handwrite all my papers and then type them out (or have my girlfriend type them out, because back then I couldn’t type and she could actually read my writing…no small feat). Everything was so singular — if you lost it or your professor lost it, it was gone. Now with hard drives and flash drives everything’s so reproducible, but I’m willing to bet that most people would be in the same situation as Morrison should their house go up — how many of us actually make backups of our photos and writings and put them off-site? That fire will burn through your hard drive as quickly and as finally as it burns your box of looseleaf.
marta says
I knew two sisters in school who lost their home in a fire. They were in the house at the time and while one got out unscathed, the younger one did not. Her skin was raised and twisted from her cheek down to her feet.
Fire is terrifying.
John says
cuff: When I first read about this fire, I looked around my office. Because I’ve been “doing computers” for 30 years, and desktop ones since the mid-80s, I jumped on the digital-dext bandwagon pretty early. Even so, I’ve got a whole raft of stories and even (ack!) poems which exist only in type- or handwritten form. Not that the world would miss them post-fire anymore than the world does now, but still…
Recently I’ve taken to carrying a copy of my work around on a portable hard drive. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it now occurs to me that it’s little improvement at all: wherever I am, there is my backup. So it’s temporarily “off-site” only insofar as buildings are concerned. But if the building I’m in at the time goes up in smoke, so does my backup. Duh!
marta: I’m embarrassed to admit that — at least when in school, though I hope not now — not only would I have never looked at the younger one, I would have gone out of my way to avoid her, and would never have even considered actually, y’know, talking to her. So much for our common humanity, eh?
I can’t think of any of them off the top of my head, but believe there are a couple stories or whole books along these lines.
Jolie says
*shiver* This is why I email myself every draft of every story. Gmail gives me plenty of storage for attachments, and I can access them from any computer with an internet connection.
John says
Jolie: Yeah! Actually, what I’ve started doing is not even actually emailing them: just start a new message, don’t even fill in the addressee but attach the relevant file(s), click Save, and then go on to other business.
My Gmail “Drafts” folder is currently my largest, just on the strength of all the attachments. :)