Over the last few years I have, as time and motivations permit, digitized my collection of old cassette tapes. It is fun to hear some old, old cassettes from answering machines, voicemail boxes, and those audio letters my friends and I used to exchange. I would imagine that certain colleagues from my corporate youth would be surprised to learn that their voice has risen from the past in the form of innocuous voicemail messages left over a decade ago and (for reasons I can not remember) saved to audio cassette.
Digitizing these things provokes an encroaching cloud of melancholy bordering on futility. Digitizing old, rotting cassettes sounds like a fine way to preserve them for immortality but I believe that digital content is far more vulnerable than any analog product to erasure and complete loss. The tape I am listening to at this moment still plays (albeit poorly) after 18 years while I think the chances of these digitized files surviving as long are poor.
Tonight I am listening to a cassette I’ve had since 1990 or 1991: Opera Arias sung by Victoria de los Angeles. I spotted an image of the cassette in this picture from Room 317 at the Parc Lincoln and thought I’d see if the tape was still in my possession. It is.
It sounds like an 18 year old cassette would be expected to sound. Faint, wobbly, with an over-arching hiss that keeps the music subdued. The sound has faded, like a radio station coming through on a weak signal, or staying behind as you drive your car away from it.
Hearing this now, with its vestigial quality, transports me back to the Parc Lincoln. It evokes memories of the opera arias and other sounds I heard coming from Room 314. That room was occupied by a woman who talked and talked and talked (incoherently, I suspect) and whose ramblings were accompanied by recordings of opera arias such as these. It almost feels like I am hearing those operas arias come from Room 314 again but these arias and this cassette in particular are strictly the stuff of my room, Room 317.
A few weeks ago I frustrated a friend by using a word with which she was unfamiliar: Palimpsest. A palimpsest, according to my somewhat relaxed definition, is the indentation of handwritten words as they appear on the piece of paper underneath the one that was written upon. My definition does not quite jibe with dictionary definitions for palimpsest, which settle around the use and re-use of a single sheet of paper for multiple writings.
My use of the word came with an additional meaning. I described my mutterings-to-self while writing or typing words such as these to be a verbal palimpsest, a faint echo of the words being written on the page, but being verbal it vanishes as quickly it leaves its residue. The sounds of this old cassette are like an aural palimpsest, echoes of those hot nights at the Parc Lincoln spent listening to this and other cassettes, and listening to the Danny Stiles radio show.
