Free Satin Island by Tom McCarthy Page B

section, and of the cursor showing which part of the video you’re actually watching at a given moment; if the cursor and red section catch up, then buffering sets in again. Staring at this bar, losing myself in it just as with the circle, I was granted a small revelation: it dawned on me that what I was actually watching was nothing less than the skeleton, laid bare, of time or memory itself. Not our computers’ time and memory, but our own. This was its structure. We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience—if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to (as Peyman would say) narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events. But when the narrating cursor catches right up with the rendering one, when occurrences and situations don’t replenish themselves quickly enough for the awareness they sustain, when, no matter how fast they regenerate, they’re instantly devoured by a mouth too voracious to let anything gather or accrue unconsumed before it, then we find ourselves jammed, stuck in limbo: we can enjoy neither experience nor consciousness of it. Everything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything. The revelation pleased me. I decided I would start a dossier on buffering.
    7.8 Bronisław Malinowski, the father of modern anthropology, said: Write Everything Down. That was his First Commandment. You never know (he reasoned) what will turn out to be important and what won’t; so capture it all, turn it all into data. I used to adhere devoutly to this commandment: as a student, during my clubbing-book research phase, and onwards. I’d keep field-notes which I’d type up in the evening, or first thing in the morning after each night-before: detailed accounts of even—especially—the preceding day’s most trivial encounters; impressions of the people and locations these involved; first-pass appraisals of the hue and undertone of situations. When Peyman, with his visionary vagueness, handed me my epic, my epochal, commission, this Great Report, the sense that anything might end up forming part of this made everything I came across, every event I lived through, glow and buzz with potential even more. Paradoxically, though, at the same time, the writing-down, the field-note-taking, tapered off. This wasn’t due to lack of commitment—far from it. It was a consequence of Peyman’s way of thinking. He didn’t, it was quite clear, want a standard ethnographic paper that would sit gathering dust, or cyber-dust, alongside others: he wanted something different and surprising; something bigger, more ambitious and, above all, new . It will find its shape, he’d said; I leave all that to you.This was the exciting part: this remit to leave all established ethnographic protocol behind, to go off-road, off-map, as radical and left-field as I wanted. Anything went. What if …? What if, rather than it finding its shape, the age itself, in all its shape-shifting and multi-channeled incarnations, were to find and mold it ? What if the age, the era, were to do this from so close up, and with such immediacy and force, that the it would all but vanish, leaving just world-shape, era-mold? I started to think thoughts like this. They excited me. Beneath their vagueness, I felt something forming—something important and beautiful and momentous.
    7.9 One evening, a few months after I’d joined the Company, and about half a year before we won the Project contract, I found myself, still in the throes of these thoughts, drinking with a woman in a bar—a random stranger with whom I’d struck up a conversation. At some point, I stopped listening to what she was saying to me and looked instead at the objects she had placed around her: a cigarette pack, a plastic lighter, a dog-eared travelcard and a key-fob, fanned out in a rough semicircle across the zinc