Day 211, Last words

This pile of cassette tapes contain over 24 hours worth of answering machine messages.

There is no reason behind why these answering machine tapes were replaced when they were full rather than just overwriting the same tape repeatedly, other than there was a plentiful supply of old tapes.  Perhaps it’s an indicator of an obsessive compulsive nature, not wanting to delete.  The messages were never listened to again. And although they were kept there was never an intention to keep them forever.

When my telephone provider introduced their own voicemail service the tape machine was relegated to a box.  The machine went eventually, perhaps thrown out.  The tapes remained.  And there they are, retrieved from a Gemsoft bag around twenty years after they last recorded human voices.

But there are no last words.

The last words I heard my Mum speak, from 2000 miles away in the Mediterranean, were on the voicemail of my telephone provider.  They were deleted automatically somewhere 10 to 14 days after recorded in mid 2005.

What were the last words.

They made no sense at the time.  It was only later that understanding was pieced together, but by then there was nothing that could be done.  The brief opportunity for clarification had long passed.

The words.

They expressed care and concern.

The words are gone, retained only in human memory.

Does modern technology detract from this, who normally would have a recording of last words.

Would there have been value in continuing recording voicemail forever. Would retaining this type of information help.  There are friends and relatives contained in a moment in time in those tapes, but for what purpose.  Photographs don’t bring a person back but is there something more we would find from hearing the voice of someone loved and lost.  Would it have more resonance or would it be a foolish thing to try to cling on to moments of the past.

Many of these old tapes would have become answering machine fodder, there was a large supply

Are there answers to those questions.

What next.

The tapes may be listened to to see what they reveal, if anything. Perhaps they'll get incorporated into some recorded work as background sound. Or maybe used as a performance art work, or as an installation, or a mixed media melange of historical artefacts cobbled together in some pseudo-intellectual style.

Who knows, perhaps nothing will happen.

Then silence.

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