Writing a book on memory and memories has, for me, been a titanic endeavour. I do not have an easy relationship with ‘looking back’, as it always leaves me with a melancholy sense of loss. This forces upon me the need always to look ahead and to recognize the importance of dying and being forgotten. However, as incoherence tends to win out over coherence, looking back is the central issue of this book which, having been written in order to be published and read, reveals the author’s implicit desire to leave his mark.
I would like, first and foremost, to offer my most heartfelt thanks to Roberto Gilodi, Michele Luzzatto, Flavia Abbinante, Elena Cassarotto and the publishing house Bollati Boringhieri for having given me the opportunity to write this book.
I would also like to thank all of those with whom I share, each and every day, the objective of bringing the discourse on death back into the public space in order to limit the negative effects of its social and cultural repression: Marina Sozzi and the blog Si può dire morte; Ines Testoni and the Masters in Death Studies and the End of Life at the University of Padua; Ana Cristina Vargas, Gisella Gramaglia and Fondazione Ariodante Fabretti in Turin; Maria Angela Gelati and Il Rumore del Lutto in Parma; Massimiliano Cruciani and Zero K in Carpi; Laura Campanello and the Death Cafè in Merate; Alice Spiga and the SO.CREM. in Bologna.
I would also like to thank everyone who has shown interest and enthusiasm for Online Afterlives, giving me the possibility of discussing the book’s themes throughout Italy. I will cherish the memories of moving experiences I have had from North to South over the last year and a half. I am truly grateful to those splendid individuals whom I have had the opportunity to meet from time to time.
I would also like to thank Ade Zeno, friend and companion in never-ending thanatological adventures; Valentino Farina, in memory of past times; and Dedalo Bosio, the Splunge cited in this book. Finally, I would like to thank Lorenza Castella, because she doesn’t read my books and therefore will never know she has been thanked.
The final and most important mentions go to Nello and Silvana, and to my irreplaceable Roberta, so involved in this book (poor her!) that she dreamed about it at night. May many pasticcini al pistacchio atone for my sins.
Introduction Social Networks and Looking Back
The Past is Just a Story We Tell Our Followers
The past is just a story we tell ourselves. These are the words Samantha, the OS1 operating system and the protagonist in Spike Jonze’s film Her, uses to console Theodore Twombly, the man who constantly imagines he is talking to his ex-wife, Catherine. He picks up on old, never forgotten conversations and uses hindsight to construct justifications he was unable to give when the woman, before leaving him, pointed out his repeated failings. The past does not really exist. This point is made unremittingly by Jonathan Gottschall in his book The Storytelling Animal: though it may have actually happened, the way in which we present it makes it seem like nothing more than ‘a mental simulation’. Our memories are not perfect recordings of what actually happened but reconstructions, and most of their details are unreliable.1 This is probably what pushed Desmond Morris to take such a radical step following the death of the woman with whom he had lived for sixty-six years, getting rid of all the physical memories that made his grief unbearable. As Aleida Assmann observes, ‘By erasing a mark, the survival of a person or an event in the memory of those who come after becomes as impossible as the discovery of a crime.’2 Therefore, the British zoologist asked himself, why not eliminate all traces? The thousands of books, paintings and antiques bought with his wife over the course of more than half a century of marriage, those simple utensils (a teacup, for example) that symbolically contain the most normal daily gestures of a shared life, along with photographs, and even a whole house. The house represents ‘a deposit, that exists both physically and within us, of memories that are still shared’, it is ‘the final bulwark of a time painstakingly removed […] from the unrelenting progression of loss, from the painful dissipation of living worlds’.3 Morris follows this rule: if you leave me, I’ll erase you.
Theodore Twombly in cinematic fiction, and Desmond Morris in real life, share the same fate: the end of the world in its totality, to borrow a famous expression from Jacques Derrida. Both the end of a sentimental relationship and the death of a loved one suddenly erase the physical presence to which we are bound, along with everything that had been shared both materially and emotionally up until that moment. Twombly and Morris suddenly find themselves at the starting point of their own lives, as if every experience up to that moment had been erased. The only thing posing any opposition to the end of the world in its totality is the spectral presence of the person who is no longer physically there, the transparent copy that proliferates in material and mental memories, remaining alive and kicking in their scattered remains. That copy, which according to Umberto Eco is relied upon by every human being who, aware of both their physical (‘I’m going to die sooner or later’) and mental weakness (‘I’m sorry that I’m going to have to die’), finds proof of that soul’s survival in the memory that remains of it.4 In other words, both the death of a loved one and the end of a loving relationship determine the passage from identity to the images of identity that transform the absent into a collector’s item, the bulwark against the memory’s fragility at which one can direct their own enduring regrets.
The inevitable disconnect between the disappearance of the physical presence and the force of the spectral presence usually generates profound emotional unrest in the person left behind. The bitter knowledge of the end of the whole world is continually invoked by the eternal excess of its shadows and images, which make thoughts and objects that were once shared the exclusive inheritance of the person who is suffering. This is why, in cases where the grief is particularly unbearable, it can be useful to remember Samantha’s suggestion: to view the past as a story we have told ourselves, breaking its suffocating bond with the present. Ghosts are kept at a safe distance, as per the approach taken by Desmond Morris, to avoid us becoming their prisoners, like Theodore Twombly. As Thomas Hobbes teaches us, if we set aside the passing of time, we have no way of distinguishing memory from imagination.5 And, as Bertolt Brecht confirms, ‘without the forgetfulness of night which washes away all traces’, we would never find the strength to get up in the morning.6
Morris, however, has to reckon with a greater problem than Twombly: he is obliged to walk the fine line between his own sacrosanct need to forget and his dead wife’s equally legitimate desire to be remembered.
So what happens when the past becomes a story that we not only tell ourselves but also our followers, recording it on social media profiles and online more generally?
If, traditionally, the house is the archetype of hybrid memory, filled as it is with the past in various areas of the domestic space and thus becoming an extreme stronghold of a time removed from the urgent rhythm of loss, our second home today is the online realm. To inhabit, Walter Benjamin explained, means ‘to leave impressions’. This is confirmed by the invention of ‘an abundance of covers and protectors, liners and cases […] on which the traces of objects of everyday use are imprinted’.7 In those countless online rooms, we are constantly recording, accumulating and preserving these marks in excessive quantities, creating digital deposits of our memories and delegating our own faltering memories to artificial tools. In comparison with the first house, the internet’s front door is always ajar, if not wide open. Sharing has become one of its defining imperatives. As Kevin Kelly writes, it is also ‘the world’s largest copy machine’ because it is continually updating, ‘[copying] every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it’.8 It copies our own psycho-physical presence, dematerializing it. It detaches myriad digital I’s from the biological I physically present in only one location in the offline world, creating digital presences that wander (more neurotic
