Conversations

Humans are incredibly fragile but also remarkably resilient. The Dictaphone was for work. Cath used it for her interviews, dozens of them transcribed later as part of the research for her PhD. When she came to Penzance the first time, I didn’t expect her to return so soon. But she did. Three times that first summer.

She’d record our conversations as we sat on the beach late at night, the ocean a vague outline that you could hear by the progress of the waves advancing across the sand. We’d speak in soft voices, although there was mostly no one else around us to disturb. If you listen back now you’d hear everything – the wind, the waves, a stray gull circling above us or the rumble of a late night train arriving at its final destination.

But tape degrades over time. That’s the beauty of an analogue life, it has a finite span. It grows old gracefully and then departs. In the digital present everything is too harsh and too permanent. It will haunt you forever and it will never forget.

I don’t recall what we talked about. Nonsense mostly. I’d made some impassioned speech about the importance of supporting local businesses over chain stores and this would be repeated back to me until it became a comic shorthand, an audio meme. Or one of us would describe the stars we could see or the beauty to be found in the shadows of the moon. Maybe we’d make lists of books or bands that we loved. Or repeat a favourite joke from The Simpsons.

The tapes span several volumes. One of us made copies so that we could each keep a copy for ourselves. They had evocative titles like ‘Fragments of July’ or ‘Sketches of summer’. There’s a recording from Mont Royal, the highest point in the city of Montreal, where you can look across the city as a whole and see all the greenery still surviving amid the concrete and bustle of this modern conurbation. The first time we visited the spot (which we would return to on many occasions), we walked inside Saint Joseph's Oratory - the impressive catholic church located there - and the Wedding March music started up from the organ. It was like a sign (if you believed in signs) and we laughed about it afterwards.

When we made our recording there we’d spotted a dead bird, a pigeon that had passed away seemingly as close to the sky as it could manage. It was not a pleasant sight, but it became another audio meme, another conversational short cut. One of us would say, ‘dead bird’ and we’d both laugh. You can’t go back and explain these things. You had to be there.

Tape degrades. A few years ago I wanted to replay those recordings and transfer them to my laptop. To convert the fragile tape into its resilient digital form. It required some effort (I’m not an effort person, I like the path of least resistance). I have a tape player, but I don’t really use it these days. And connecting up to something that can then record on to the laptop was cumbersome. And digital can be an unforgiving medium. 0s and 1s have no soul and no amount of additional technology can fix that.

In Montreal there used to be drummers that assembled every Sunday in summertime in the park surrounding Mont Royal. I suppose at some point people must’ve organised to turn up and do this, but now it had become a thing of its own. It didn’t need organising, people just came. Summers in Montreal are warm (sometimes unbearably so) and dry. Skies are blue. Lots of people assemble to listen to the drummers or participate or dance to the rhythms. Local artisans come to draw pictures or sell their art or their crafted jewellery and the like. There are dogs and children weaving among the trees.

There’s a recording of this somewhere too. Our conversation underpinned by a rhythm that appears to be ceaseless. It could be insects beating their wings or a lost tribe chanting some ritual bass language, tongues clicking against teeth.

In winter we recorded inside the bedroom of the bed and breakfast we stayed in. Outside it’s too cold. You have to keep moving or you’ll freeze. In the city’s main cemetery snow covers the monuments. Out by the river there’s a skating rink, tiny figures moving across the ice in random patterns, breath freezing the moment it leaves the mouth. Wet hair can freeze too and then break off in clumps, like picking apart an icicle. It’s no wonder they have a complete underground city there, linked by the metro system and offering food courts, a cinema, hundreds of department stores and the like.

What do you speak about late at night? Intimacies. The ramblings of those already half asleep. The accrued worries of the day or an inventory of everything you’ve achieved. The tape will run out eventually, otherwise you might go on talking forever.

I transcribed a few minutes of one of those tapes. That was enough. I knew it didn’t make sense to do this. The past doesn’t have to be exact, it’s better if it blurs with age and then fades. Earth sends its signals out to the stars, more by accident than design. No one would come if they got the full unfiltered picture. But whispering, that’s what draws people in. A siren song is more potent than the truth.

I’ll keep the tapes, although I don’t need to. They served a purpose and they still serve a purpose. It’s like when we were children and we buried a tin full of memories in the back garden of our house in Leamington Road. No one is going back there to knock on a stranger’s door and ask permission to dig up the ground. The Lego bricks might have survived, but the old comics will have faded and crumbled and who knows if there was a tape buried among the rest of the detritus, but it won’t play now. The material would stretch and jam up the mechanism of whatever device you used to try and replay it.

Time takes everything, for the better and for the worse. The act was in the doing, the selecting of items, the acquiring of the tin (probably once used for biscuits or the like) and then the ritual of burial. It was an offering made to the future, which we were young enough back then to still believe in. We didn’t know where we would be but we knew we’d be somewhere. I’m not sure we ever really believed we’d come back to retrieve its contents.

Conversations are better than photographs. There are the words and there is the way those words are spoken. The pauses and silences often tell you more than the sounds themselves. Words are truths in these conversations, they have not been posed for the camera. I hear them but don’t hear them to this day. A wave on the shoreline, a pounding drum, laughter or just the simple act of breathing.

A wedding march.

A dead bird.

The last train to arrive at Penzance station.

The whir of the machine and then the clunk as the tape runs out.