Contributor’s Marginalia: Brandon Amico responding to Jared Harél’s “Elegy for Recycled Encyclopedias”

Accumulation is the driving force of this century. Whereas technology has traditionally served as a means of reducing unnecessary work and energy—think pulleys, air travel, baseball’s intentional walk—it’s now an open maw as well, simply collecting. Every click, every post, every reaction recorded and stored, filed and at the ready.

Back home, we build archives of photos, books, financial records, digital copies of movies and albums. Maybe it’s FOMO, maybe it’s just the pleasure of a library suffuse with moments we can refer back to, a place to store what’s important to us outside of our brains. I needn’t commit a fact to memory if I know where to find it.

Copies of our identities are being cobbled together across the infrastructure of the digital world. Your preferences on yogurt flavors and your shirt size exist in the cloud (which is actually a number of warehouses full of humming towers tucked somewhere off major highways or in rural areas), but so too do educated guesses at who you are. Enough pertinent info about your identity has been scraped from your interactions with the digital world (like skin cells you leave on doorknobs, napkin dispensers, pinball plungers) that a reasonable facsimile of yourself exists, if dispersed, ready to be called up when needed. The loss of the “l” when you say “wolf” can be found in a desert in Utah. Your reaction to a yet-unreleased episode of your favorite show is percolating in a row of drab buildings in Secaucus.

Data is big money in today’s world, but that’s not entirely new. We have always sought knowledge, as it is a means to progress. Every newcomer picks up the weight of the world from where their ancestors left it, carries it some distance before the next generation takes over and moves it a bit farther. Language is data; it is recording and transmitting. Every report in the newspaper, each obituary, each gossipy phone call is data. We are trillions of data points, each of us. We are product—that’s what’s new. The same way we might have bought encyclopedias, a summation of our selves will go on beyond our carbon usefulness.

Elegies accumulate lives into containers that can be parsed, transmitted, and carried on. They overlay an order onto what we are otherwise unable to comprehend (though not for lack of trying).

Fear of disorder is the fear of death. Not of dying, but of death: a lake beyond the fence at the end of our vision, an unknown that we cannot reliably catalogue. We cannot reflect reason back on our living without knowing whether the surface of that lake is water or mirror, and the thought of no reason, no logic, no purpose, is not a comfortable way for many to live.

Getting more to the point, accumulation is a means of comfort wherein we can see progress made, something being built. We can doze off in the hazy illusion of something lasting.

However futile, we will keep trying to stave off oblivion. Read endlessly, hoard knowledge. Shop online, find tangible (if gossamer) joy. Develop friendships, find a home for yourself in others’ consciousness. I keep a spreadsheet where I can track all the media I consume within a given year. There’s a tab for poetry, one for fiction and one for nonfiction, drama, essays. I also include tabs for movies, TV shows, and games. Each time I complete a book, show, or game, I create a new line item where I plug in the pertinent info—title, author if applicable, date completed, a rating. There’s even a column for notes. Notes written to myself, I suppose. This practice of cataloging the art and media I consume has become second nature to me; if I don’t record what I’ve completed, I feel like no progress in my life has been made—somehow, checking the box has felt more satisfying in many cases than actually doing the task. That might be the case for many when it comes to to-do lists, but these are my pastimes, my sources of pleasure. I am accumulating but I don’t know to what end.

“In the end, every detail in the world / couldn’t save you.”

Jared Harél’s “Elegy for Recycled Encyclopedias” begins with this line. Begins with the end. The futile is futile, but why then continue? Because we’re human, and we must. The “you” in that sentence is ostensibly referring to the neglected and soon to be recycled encyclopedia collection, but it could hold up to any other reading: the “you” could be the poet, the reader, any third party. I read it as me, because I was at that moment the reader and I too exist with a drive toward the encyclopedic, the need to understand the world around me as much as I can. This a means of anxiety management, of some semblance of control in a world that offers very little, especially in the years of 2020 and 2021.

“Knowledge as mythic and / dispensable as fact.” It’s fitting that the encyclopedias are tossed (recycled, better!), as that sort of fact has fallen out of favor politically and socially. The only “hard data” is, as Harél states, redundancy. In an unstable world, we seek out what comforts us, what can fill in the foundation we build our worldviews on. Soft facts can pack in as good as the hard stuff, you just need more of it; the internet doesn’t differentiate, data is data, and there’s a lot of it. It doesn’t need to be true, it just needs to be there when searched for. The internet is an afterlife we can understand.

Late March of 2020, I opened a browser page on my phone that I haven’t closed in the year and a half since: the New York Times Covid-19 tracker. My way of processing the unfathomable loss of life and world-altering impact of the pandemic was data. Updated every day. The 14-day average of cases bumping up and down each day like a stock price, each new column daily a representation of another group of infections. Many lives around the country and world transformed into something visible, tangible, on my phone in North Carolina. Tracking the spread, the latest on hot spots and new research on how the virus moved person to person…it felt less apocalyptic in this presentation, like if I can wrap my head around it, if I can understand it, can organize where my fear should be pointed, I can survive it.

Mind you, I don’t think Harél was thinking about the pandemic when he wrote this poem. At least, there are no obvious signs of it. It could have well been written prior to 2020. But it is a mark of good art when it can be extrapolated beyond the environment where it initially lands.

Not a small number of persons have told me, directly or indirectly, not to use technology in my own poems because they date the piece. But technology is just as revealing as anything else, based on how we use it or are affected by it. Poetry is a record, art is a record, and discarding a series of old encyclopedias is the 21st century equivalent of ditching one’s horse for an automobile, and poems with both horses and cars both seem to be doing just fine.

Organizing soothes me. Finding a place for each item among others suggests that there is order in the world and nothing can be lost because I know where it is, and if it hasn’t come yet, I’ll know where and when to find it. I am comforted by patterns because they suggest predictability.

Predictability is derided in art, though it’s one of the hallmarks of many commercial sitcoms and serialized dramas. I recall standing in my kitchen with my brother sometime in the late aughts when a lull in our conversation allowed the procedural drama my father was watching on the TV in the next room to carry into our space and grab our attention. The line we heard was: “You can’t change the past.” Hackneyed already, sure. I turned to my brother, and with as much gravitas as I could muster, I added: “But you can change…the future.” The character on the show continued from the other room, saying: well, you guessed it.

Quietly, predictability is also one of the greatest assets to the artist, because of the audience’s tendency to try and jump ahead, guess where something is going, and the creator’s ability to use that presumption to their advantage and make the audience reconsider their preconceived notions. Offering a setup with all the hallmarks of that which we’ve come to expect is a great way to catch the reader or viewer off guard when you swerve the other way. Had the show’s writers written literally anything else to close out that line, the show would have been better off for it—and I would have looked like an absolute asshole.

Restrictions breed creativity. Give an artist a boundary and watch how they play along the edges, press against them, seeking out soft spots and places bending can occur. Give a salesperson that same boundary and they look for the product (the solution, in today’s jargon) already in their toolkit that fits the exact shape of that framework. I’m not begrudging them this habit—it’s what makes them a good salesperson. But creating something doesn’t necessarily require creativity; there is also plain production.

Simply put, the mere fact of existence against all logic that would suggest otherwise is the greatest subversion possible. It’s ludicrous on the surface: every bit of physics, chemistry, history, each detail needing to be right in place where it currently is is implausible, and the more you think about it, how easily there could be nothing, the less it makes sense. (Trying to imagine “nothing” is also a source of my anxiety.) This shouldn’t be, and yet it is. We shouldn’t be here, now, able to be bored and overwhelmed at once by the limitless information available to us at all times. And yet.

Toward the end of February 2021, the New York Times published a new visualization of the Covid-19 deaths in America. It was a vertical bar that featured a black dot for each death from the virus, beginning in February of the year prior at the top, and going down the page to the present day. Horizontal stripes of clustered-in dots marked passages of time with increased spread and deaths, and toward the bottom of the page, the worst spike in cases from January through the day of publication made the column nearly opaque. Total deaths were closing in on 500,000 in the US alone, and that black lake of ink defied any reader to see a point, a purpose, in its surface.

Ultimately, “Elegy for Recycled Encyclopedias” is a celebration. It’s a poem about mortality (what poem isn’t?) but it places the mundane squarely where it belongs: among the fantastic, the ecstatic, the practically holy: “It’s a miracle we are / till the instant we aren’t.” Human history in this set of encyclopedia volumes, as specific and essential as each of us, and equally bound for the irrelevance of the dustbin. Or, if you prefer, as the author did here, the recycling bin. Which fits better both with the idea of reincarnation as well as the simple physics of molecules breaking down to be reincorporated later. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, but the same cannot be said for meaning.

Vaccinations were tracked on the Times’ website starting at the end of 2020; there was another graph for me to check every morning. This time a green line, inching upward, each column lifting it an accumulation of shots, of people now safer, the totals climbing toward the numbers that we’re told mean herd immunity. A tangible goal, something to put, if not faith, then hope in. Those tend to both fit in the same types of containers.

When I first read “Elegy for Recycled Encyclopedias,” I was moved, and then flabbergasted: I had pangs of nostalgia for the act of owning an encyclopedia set and using them as reference tools, despite never once owning an encyclopedia myself. “Nostalgia” is a combination of the Greek nostos, to return home, and algos, pain or grief. Thus, the pain of returning home. But in this case, it wasn’t my home I was returning to, it was someone else’s. I could see myself thumbing through the book, but the walls of the house around me are of indefinite color, their patterns and the furniture they enclose morph when they leave the sight of my mind’s eye. If the afterlife is consciousness without a fixed physical anchoring, I fear that I may actually be ready for it.

Exactly how, or where, we will live on, if we are to live on, via the technology we’ve accumulated up to this point remains to be seen. How will we transact conversation between each other? Will our digital selves be able to stray, wander? That’s just another way of asking if we’ll have a home to return to.

“Your being redundant,” Harél states, is akin to being “a poor use of space.” Now, entire family trees can exist in a fraction of a server somewhere that not one of those individuals ever stepped foot. As the set of encyclopedias can accordion down into a phone, the question of our ongoing—not as a species, but as individuals—is also no longer a matter of space. Early in the poem, the author describes the encyclopedia entries for things such as medieval plumbing systems as “thorough summation[s].” That oxymoron is as clever as it is enlightening, as the accumulation of data into smaller and smaller spaces works in exactly that way: summarized, graspable, handheld, and yet lacking no relevant detail, if we wish it.

The zenith of all of this—the accumulation, the classifying, the cataloguing—by definition cannot be reached. We cannot one day look up and realize that’s it, we’ve gotten it all, because that realization too is a Thing and must be acknowledged, dated, and made room for on the shelf. Writing, when you drill down into it, is just a matter of organization. I’ve organized the words that are here, that I am writing now, and separated them from the words that aren’t. Jared Harél organized, or excavated, “Elegy for Recycled Encyclopedias” from the babel of atmospheric noise, all that Is, and gave us a moment of clarity, of catharsis, and of record. One should always write about a work of art in the present tense, as it is always something ongoing, to be experienced; it doesn’t cease when observed. This is no less a miracle than anything else.