Sneaking Up on Myself

I hope to reveal something about the process of crafting a narrative of self by 1) recounting memories through old audio recordings, 2) shining a light on the way we edit and craft our utterances, and 3) moving in several directions at once, eschewing the idea of a linear, centered personal narrative.

I think of “Sneaking Up on Myself” as an audio/autobiography, incorporating multiple voices (myself at various times and from various points of view, as well as critics and other thinkers) and incidental environmental sound.

TRANSCRIPT

In his article “On the Record, All the Time,” Scott Carlson speaks with lifelogging researchers in the corporate, academic, and governmental arenas who foresee a day when the constant recording of one's daily activities will be the norm, when the accumulated experiences of a lifetime—what we now call memory—will comprise a searchable database that we can use to better understand ourselves and make more effective choices moving forward. However, after conducting his own experiment with audio lifelogging Carlson wondered whether the data he captured had anything to do with the person he actually feels himself to be: “I never really forgot what the re—.” Quote—I never really forgot that the recorder was on, and now and then I sensed that I was—. “I never really forgot that the recorder was on,” writes Carlson, “and now and then I sensed that I was talking differently, as if to a crowd.”

And it's funny, people say that recording yourself makes you self conscious, you know, so it inhibits you from really communicating, blah blah blah, but I would say, Yeah, but so does teaching, so does talking with your in-laws, so does, you know, being at a job interview, We're constantly faced with situations where we become more or less self conscious about our spoken language, and just because we're self conscious about it, does that mean we're inhibited? In other words, does that mean that we're less likely to share what's real? Or what's, um. Um. Whoo! Gotta resist those “ums.”

When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in the late 1860s, he believed that one of its primary functions would be to record telephone calls, thus transforming an instrument of “simple conversational chit-chat” into a “means of perfect record” (“The Phonograph and Its Future” 535).

[phone rings]

Automated Voice: To ensure quality service, this call may be recorded.

I went through this period where I was just so enraged at these corporations. If you called their customer service lines, they'd basically announced that they were recording you.

Automated Voice: This call may be recorded.

It's supposedly to ensure that you're getting good service.

Automated Voice: To ensure quality service.

But I always felt it was more of an intimidation tactic. As if they were saying, “Ah ha! We're pointing a microphone at you now, so you better watch what you say. And so, for this period of time, whenever I had to call a company like this, I decided to just point the microphone back at them.

Phone Rep: How can I help you?

Ken: Um, oh, first I should let you know that I'm recording this call for quality assurance.

Phone Rep: Okay.

And I don't know if it necessarily got me anywhere.

Ken: Um, alright, so do you understand what I'm saying or no?

Phone Rep: Yes, I do.

Ken: And there's no way you can do anything. Your company doesn't—

Phone Rep: Right, all I can do it reverse the last charge.

Ken: Is there a manager I can speak with, because it seems, it seems, um, awful.

Phone Rep: I can give you the number to our home office.

Ken: Great.

But, you know, there were a few time where maybe they did resolve the issue a little bit faster, or a little bit more completely than they would have normally.

Phone Rep: Okay, a refund has been processed of $17.85. That's three months at $5.95 a month.

Ken: Great.

Phone Rep: You'll see it on your next credit card statement.

Ken: Alright, thanks. I really appreciate it.

Sort of a counter-surveillance tactic, I guess.

In 1878, after tinkering with it for more than ten years, Edison predicted that the phonograph would “teach us to be careful what we say—for it imparts to us the gift of hearing ourselves as others hear us” (“The Perfected Phonograph” 650). One of the benefits of recording technology, he concluded, would be its power to exert a “decidedly moral influence” on its users by making them accountable for what they said (650).

Jim Gemmel: Well, I think there's no doubt that you live differently even if there's the possibility that you might be recorded.

This is Jim Gemmel on the public radio show On Point. Gemmel is a senior researcher at Microsoft, and he's the co-author of a book called Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will change Everything.

Jim Gemmel: There's a fellow named Steve Mann at the University of Toronto , who does this little experiment they call Maybe-Cam, and they walk around with these t-shirts on with, ah, clouded-out domes that say, “This might have a camera behind it, and you might be recorded.” And the interesting thing is that people will change their behavior of course regardless of whether there really is a camera. My point is, in a way, we're already there, so even if hardly anybody were to embrace toal recall, already we're at the point where we might be recorded, and already embarrassing videos are showing up on YouTube and so on.
Tom Ashbrook: Well, that's true.
Jim Gemmel: And in a sense, that part of the problem, that's already there. It's already happened.

Hello, check, check. My name is Ken Cormier. I'm recording this in 2009. I'm 41 years old, and I've been recording myself and others for as long as I can remember, and in fact, I have recordings of myself from before I can remember.

Dad: And what's your name?
Baby Ken: Kenny.
Dad: Kenny who?
Baby Ken: Ah nana.
Dad: No, what's your last name?
Baby Ken: Kenny Cormier.
Dad: Oh, are you a nice boy?
Baby Ken: Yeah.

It's not that I think this is too uncommon, although, back when I was one or two, back in 1969 and '70, I think it was a little less common for people to have this equipment in their houses. My dad was a junior-high-school teacher and he took care of the audio-visual equipment at the school, so he would bring home whatever the state of the art stuff was at the time. So, we had reel-to-reel tape recorders.

Dad: Do you know any songs?
Baby Ken: Yeah.
Dad: What song do you know?
Baby Ken: The tape recorder.
Dad: No, that's not a song.
Baby Ken: What?
Dad: Where's the tape recorder?
Baby Ken: Under the table, see?
Dad: Oh yeah, I see it. What's it doing? [fade]

And, early on I just got accustomed to having these machines around. For having microphones around and speaking into them.

Baby Ken: I want it.
Dad: What do you want?
Baby Ken: I want tape. I want tape-phone.
Dad: What is this?
Baby Ken: The tape-de-phone.
Dad: A microphone?
Baby Ken: Yeah.
Dad: Say microphone.
Baby Ken: Microphone.

In a way, I see these old tapes as my earliest training with tape recording—my father and my older brother showing me the ropes.

Dad: Well, if you're not going to say anything you can't have the microphone.
Baby Ken: I want it.
Dad: What are you gonna say?
Bob: We can't leave a space in the middle of the tape, can we?
Dad: [sigh] No, but we did.
Bob: We did?
Dad: Yeah, cause Kenny didn't say anything.
Bob: No, he didn't say one thing.

A couple of years after these initial recordings, my brother, who is four years older than I am, started to get a little more intentional. Started to think about recording and performance.

Bob: What happens when steam's pouring out of the radio and it's turning purple? I can't imagine what would happen when steam's pouring out of the radio and it's turning purple? Does anybody know what happens when the steam goes out of the radiator and it's turning purple? What's this? The starter wire? The starter wire? What if I pulled— [loud machine noise] No! Oh! No! Eeee! Help! Help! No! Cut the tape! Cut the— [abrupt cut]

And then the two of us just began spending our time doing skits and dialogues and all kinds of things on tape.

Ken: What is your name?
Bob: Full Hee Hee.
Ken: Really?
Bob: Don't make jokes about it, either?
Ken: Okay, the first question: How did you get your name?
Bob: Yes, absolutely.

Matt: We have another person coming down here who looks like another Hitler. So, what is your name?
Ken: Hitler!
Matt: Uh, yeah! Did you like Abraham Lincoln?
Ken: Nah!

Radio Evangelist: Come on, shout amen, somebody!
Bob: Amen!
Radio Evangelist: Put that power to work!
Bob: Amen!
Radio Evangelist: It's the law of the lord.
Bob: Shut up, Reverend Big Mouth! And now, on with Betty Ford's Cooking Show, a really educational show where you'll learn how to crack an egg five different ways. Here.
Ken: I'm stuck in bed right now, so I can't talk.

Eventually we started to think about the tape recorder itself and how the machine could become part of the performance and could bend and twist the performance around.

Ken: My name is Kenneth Cormier and I am a millionaire, a millionaire. I have lots of money. I have lots and lots and lots of money. [tape speeds up and distorts voice]
Bob: And, uh, I'm the cab driver.

And then in that same period, in the early 80s, we started to think about the fact that the tape machine can run backwards and forwards. So, what you do is you say a word like “hello.” This is my brother saying “hello” over and over again.

Bob: Hello hello hello.

You play it in reverse to hear what it sounds like. It sounds like this.

Bob: [Hello backwards]

Then you practice making that sound into the microphone.

Bob: Walleh. Wolleh.

Reverse that, and see how close you came to the actual word.

Bob: Hello. Hello Hello.

And then, of course, you can do this with musical instruments as well, like a guitar.

[backwards guitar]

Now, one of the challenges here, because we're using cassette tapes, is that you can't just simply flip the tape over and reverse it to play it backwards. I remember we actually had to pull the tiny spool of tape out of that slot in the bottom of the cassette and then find two points and twist it and reverse it so it would actually play smoothly through the machine. So we were pretty determined here not to let the technology stop us from doing what we wanted to do.

On July 29, 1899, an article appeared in the Literary Digest entitled “Reversing the Phonograph,” in which the author refers to the curious effect obtained by running a phonograph backwards. It “positively introduces us into a new world,” he writes. “Gives us a new language and a new music. This is a good opportunity to put anew the following question: Is the universe reversible? That is to say, if we admit the principle of the convertibility of the various forms of energy, could it happen that the universe should return to its primitive state by passing through all the intermediate states in reverse order?”

[fade backwards guitar]

Maybe it's due to the fact that I've been recording and playing back my voice since before I could remember, but I've never seen the recording machine as inhibiting. On the contrary, I've seen it as a site for possibility. A place where the universe can bend and reverse itself. A place where I can act out the other, my double. A place where I can exaggerate who I am, play characters, distort my voice, act out in ways that might not be appropriate if it weren't framed by the recording device.

In 1985 my brother bought a 4-track cassette recorder, and the introduction of multitrack recording into our lives really changed everything.

[fade in voice piece]

What the 4-track meant was that for the first time you could multiply yourself, you could harmonize with yourself. So, for example, all the parts here are performed by me. We used the machine to not only record musical ideas we had but to actually compose as we were going. This meant you could have a vision for any kind of a composition and just realize it yourself without having other musicians involved, without having other players involved. So there's a certain narcissism and a certain solipsism involved in this. The idea that you could take your own performance in time and pile another one on top of it and another one on top of that and another one on top of that. And I think it also dawned on us that life was multitrack, that our imaginations were multitrack, and that this machine helped us to better explain what was going on in our own heads.

[voice piece stops]

“Although you are alone when you write, this ‘you' often refracts into several ‘personalities.'” This is Loren Barritt from an article called “Writing/Speaking: A Descriptive Phenomenological View.” “Although you are alone when you write, this ‘you' often refracts into several ‘personalities.' Because a paper is often written over several days, you have to go back and re-read previously written sections, trying to ‘become again' the personality which produced the earlier material. Sometimes there are surprises—did I write that? In any case, going back over previous material is essential for stepping back into the role of writer in a way that keeps the paper coherent” (130). There's a bus.

[“Junior” begins]

So every time you sit down to write you are a different self than the last time you sat down to write, and every time you sit down to record you are a different self, and even within the moments it takes to record several tracks you're changing, slightly, but changing nonetheless. So this means that if you attempt to make an autobiography, what you're doing is you're trying to tell the story of all these selves, an infinite number of selves, and the really tricky thing is that you're still constantly changing even as you go through the process of writing it, so each time you revisit your own story, you're remembering from a different perspective. I've been recording songs for years now, and these multitrack recordings I have are like bits of time preserved and then layered one on top of another. And the thing about some of these songs is that sometimes I'll record a couple of parts and then just let them sit. And it can be years before I dig out the tape and add on some more parts. So this song, for example: the drums and the guitar were recorded back in 1998, but I didn't add the vocals and keyboards until 2008. That's ten years, and it's really true that I'm two very different people on this tape. It was recorded in two different houses in two different states. I was a movie theatre projectionist for the early tracks and a PhD candidate in literature for the later ones. In fact, this song spans two different marriages. It's hard to describe the kind of memories that this song evokes for me. And even though the lyrics aren't autobiographical, I think of the song as a kind of autobiography. The stories are below the surface, but they're there. And I'm telling them. Not directly, but by the way I'm playing and singing, my 1998 self tapping his foot to the same beat as my 2008 self. For me, this song sort of sums up that whole crazy decade, all at once.

[“Junior” ends]

When Edison portrayed his phonograph as a moral enforcer that would make people accountable for what they said, he was introducing the idea of a new, mechanized deity—the recording machine as God's ears, only this machine played back your private, unguarded declarations over a loudspeaker, exploding the veil of secrecy you'd find in a confession booth or a bedside prayer. But I'm less convinced by the phonograph-as-God scenario, and more by the comparison with the machine's mythological predecessor, the nymph Echo. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, whenever the goddess Juno was about to catch her husband Jove being unfaithful, Echo would “cunningly hold the goddess in long talk until the nymphs were fled.” Discovering this treachery, Juno robbed Echo of her conversational power, leaving her unable to do anything but “retain the last [few words] that she hears and say them back again to those around her” (Miller146). Thus cursed, when Echo falls in love with the boy Narcissus, she cannot express her feelings except by repeating his words. For example, when Narcissus senses that Echo is watching him from the woods he calls out, “Is anyone here?” and from her hiding place Echo repeats, “Here!” She springs out and throws her arms around him, but Narcissus rejects her, saying, “Hands off! embrace me not! May I die before I give you power o'er me!” to which Echo replies, “I give you power o'er me!” (Ovid 152-3).

Like the phonograph, Echo repeats back the words of a speaker, but from a different body, in a different context. If we think about the phonograph as a kind of echo, rather than as a “means of perfect record” as Edison called it, we can begin to understand that what the machine says is open to interpretation, that it cannot preserve memory, that it does not speak for me.

So maybe that's why I never seem to find that bit of tape that actually captures who I am. Am I the slick radio announcer?

Ken: You're listening to The Lumberyard, a Radio Magazine of Poetry, Prose, and Music.

Or the stammering interviewer?

Ken: And then, what about this, just one little more, um... Looking at this, this idea that... here's a book that you're, you know...

Am I the happy vacationer?

Ken: Here we are in, um...
Emily: Popham Beach.
Ken: Popham Beach. Are you enjoying your vacation so far, Darling?
Emily: Look at that view.
Ken: Your Maine vaciation?

Or the enigmatic poet?

Ken: Honesty, like turkey feet,
Like showing up late for a swim meat,
Like shining a light through red flesh,
Like building a hut,
Like smutting it up with an overtired spitfire.

It doesn't matter whether I'm aware or unaware of its presence, the microphone just takes my words and echoes them back.

[fade in mix of voices]

The tape-recorded life is a series of loops, a cacophony of competing loudspeakers, too many tracks recorded over too many years, with too many agendas and from too many points of view to ever form a coherent narrative. Better to pile the sounds one on top of another and revel in all that noise.

Ken: Is this recording? [laughs] Okay, this is . . . what's my name again?

[end]

Works Cited

Barritt, Loren. “Writing/Speaking: A Descriptive Phenomenological View.” Exploring

Speaking-Writing Relationships. Ed. Barry M. Kroll and Robert J. Vann. Urbana :
National Council of Teachers of English, 1981.

Carlson, Scott. “On the Record, All the Time.” Chronicle of Higher Education . 53.23 (2007). A30.

Edison, Thomas. “The Perfected Phonograph.” The North American Review , Vol. 146, No. 379 (June 1888), 641-650.

Edison, Thomas. “The Phonograph and Its Future.” North American Review , No. 126 (May-June 1878), 527-36.

Ovid. Metamorphoses: Books I-VIII . Trans. Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1994.