Fossil Poetry: Bandwidth
“Ametsuchi” (2013) by Rinko Kawauchi
Hello! In case you don’t know us, we’re Yi-Ling Liu and Sophie Haigney and we’re starting a newsletter, called Fossil Poetry.
It will be about a lot of things: tech, art, travel, feelings (!), language. We’re fascinated by language, and so will focus each issue on one word, using them as provocations and jumping off-points for mini-essays. Some may deal directly with the words — their etymologies, they way they sound and feel and taste. Others may veer into new territory, inspired by the words as lenses into life.
We’ve borrowed our title from Emerson’s essay “The Poet.” He writes: “Language is fossil poetry. As limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes.” The meaning of words, like fossils, are always shedding their old associations and ossifying into new forms. This is particularly true in the language of the tech world, which we both write about, so this newsletter will focus on tech words — still evolving in meaning, still malleable and up for grabs.
We’ll also use the newsletter as a way to share some links to our work and work we like, far and wide. This is all an experiment, subject to change, so stay tuned.
Our inaugural edition: bandwidth.
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Yi-Ling:
When we talk about our interior lives, we often talk of gaining energy and losing steam, of feeling gassed and switching gears. The metaphors that we use to describe our feelings draw, inevitably, from the technologies of our age. And to be honest, in the great scheme of history, we’ve been barely out of the industrial revolution.
But recently, a new word has popped into my emotional vocabulary: bandwidth. Now perched on a digital revolution, it’s only natural that I’ve co-opted the jargon of computing.
Bandwidth: Explicitly, it refers to the rate of data transfer. Metaphorically, it refers to the mental and emotional capacity to deal with a situation. i.e. Instead of not having the energy to listen to you complain about life’s inequities, I could say I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to hear about your relationship problems right now.
But unlike the word steam — messy and diaphanous and difficult to pin down — bandwidth is easily quantified, like figures on a heart-rate monitor, step-count on a Fitbit, calories logged on a nutrition app. Perhaps there’s a little device somewhere, smaller than the eye can see, implanted in one of the small capillaries of your heart, or lodged in the fleshy part of your amygdala. It processes all that raw gunk of emotion and churns it out as a neat string of numbers, easily whipped out when necessary to justify basically all of your emotional decisions.
A friend needs a shoulder to cry on? Sorry, you only have a bandwidth of 20hertz to deal with other people’s issues right now— maybe ask me next weekend, bud. An employer wants you to work a few extra hours because the company is overstaffed? No can do, you are operating at particularly low frequency today and need to allocate your emotional resources more prudently. A guy you’ve been going on dates with wants to enter the next stage of an intense relationship? You are going to have to check your bandwidth count —the last romance really depleted your stores.
Think of all that data, those numbers flickering on your bandwidth counter, figures on a stock market ticker. How does bandwidth fluctuate with the day, with the seasons, with the stage you are in, in life? Can you gauge the collective emotional bandwidth of an entire people? (what was that number, say, on November 8th, 2016, in the United States of America?) Can it be stretched like a rubber band, or does it stay within a fixed range forever? Is it a finite resource to be tapped into frugally and sparingly, or allegedly infinite, like that crazy thing they call unconditional love?
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Sophie:
My bandwidth has recently increased. Or rather, there are more free slices of time in my life, all of a sudden, or I’m filling them differently—which is a way of saying that I quit my job, moved out of my house on a hill in San Francisco, and am floating through the world, improvising again and living out of bags and boxes.
For the last nine-ish months, my schedule was rigid, regimented down to the minute. I woke up at 5:10—sometimes 5:15, 5:17, 5:19—and made it to my newspaper job by 6:00, occasionally 6:02. I had coffee and lunch and another coffee at the same times every day. I started to count down the minutes around 12:30. Then at 2:30, on the dot, I packed up. My afternoons were often rigorously scheduled, too—writing projects, job applications, drinks with a friend, planned phone calls—before a self-imposed bedtime, which I often failed to make.
I’ve never had a Google calendar, and I’ve always failed to update my paper ones, so I track my bands of time only in my head. But I do visualize my day that way: in strips of minutes, of varying width. I am trying now to break that habit.
Bandwidth—the technical term, though rarely how I use it—has to do with capacity. How much data a system can transfer, a fixed amount. So when I say my bandwidth has increased, I may not be exactly right. The capacity of my day is the same as it always was: 24 hours, plus the amount of energy I have, minus a series of inevitable tasks and obstacles, divided by what I choose to do with it. I have no new capacity.
But I am trying, maybe, to rid myself—at least for a little while, or as long as I am jobless and unanchored—of the sense that my day is a series of finite bands of minutes. Unstructured time has a way of feeling like more time, and my bandwidth, the undefined emotional kind, feels bigger, deeper, wider.
I feel a lot of things now: happy-sad, jetlagged, anxious, overjoyed. But most of all, maybe, I feel somehow more porous.
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Written and reading:
SH: I wrote a strange little reflection for The Economist, on the subject of language, and creating new words for our terrible times, some thoughts about the use of tech in museums for The San Francisco Chronicle, and a piece about mini-utopias on display at MoMA. Here is a long, good story I liked about the concept of “privacy,” a squishy and confusing term that’s often ill-defined.
YL: I wrote a profile on a Chinese-American hip-hop artist Bohan Phoenix for the LA Review of Books. Another deep-dive on rappers navigating the Great Chinese Firewall will be coming out soon in Guernica Mag soon! Currently indulging in Elif Batuman’s novel “The Idiot,” after being utterly stunned by her piece on the Japanese “Rent-a-Family” industry.