Flight data vs. flight memory

Once upon a time, when the world was neither more nor less dangerous than it is now, awful things happened to good people and to bad. Sometimes they happened to both at the same time: battle felled the mercenary and the recruit, railroad accidents took drunken conductors and courageous brakemen, the wrathful sea closed over pirates and penitents.

To make sense of this indiscrimination, humankind told stories about these events. Most of the stories were transmitted as songs, because music is a wonderfully efficient container for words. Over the millennia we have created tens of thousands of such songs, and hundreds of them made the journey down through the centuries and all around the world, sung long after the original events and the people affected by them had passed beyond living memory.

Of everything we left behind in the 20th century, the language and practice of folk music (by which you understand I mean the real, topical stuff, not that self-indulgent mewling one hears in the lesser bars and coffeeshops) might be the saddest. What could be worse for humans than forgetting how to tell each other stories? And whose idea of progress was it for song-propagation to become something that only professionals are qualified to do? (Which reminds me, been following the RIAA crackdown on online music lately?)

I thought about this last Monday as we watched the news of Alaska Flight 261 unfold. We information-age kiddies are insatiable at times like that, though we are not necessarily proud of ourselves for it. We had to know everything, even though there wasn’t much to know.

Our era favors news over stories, knowledge over memory. We sift through data trying to figure out what happened. We look for causes and reasons. The crash of an airplane doesn’t tell a story we can follow the way we used to: There is no rail, no field of battle, no track in the sky to show us how the lost ones came to this terrible place. We are reduced to factoids, and we try to accumulate enough of them to build something.

It isn’t just facts we want when we are glued to our televisions or our Web sites—not even for transportation geeks like me, who scuttled to our computers to examine tail configurations. That’s different. What we really want, what it is our most human impulse to sift from the salacious newscasts and expert pontifications, is the story. We want to know how this awful thing fits in with the stories of our lives, since it is, simply by virtue of our knowing about it, part of us. We need to humanize the horrible thing.

Gathering facts, of course, helps us to be sure this horror doesn’t happen again, and that’s good. The religion of technology teaches that to understand a thing is to be on the road to mastering it. But what we do not have, in this age where data trumps story, is an understanding of the disasters beyond the mechanics of the failure. We trust memory even less than we trust observation: If we can see it, if we can sense it, it might betray us.

Memory without information dooms us to repeat tragedies. Information without memory—without an understanding of what made this crash, these people, these heroics, these losses different from any other disaster—dooms us to lose Flight 261 in the haze of all other plane crashes. Folk tradition allowed us to share knowledge about not only the facts of tragedy but about the facts of individual tragedies, as if they matter more than the aggregate of air-travel fatality rates and MD-83 stabilizer trim failure data. The information age, in which we are glutted with news and deprived of the ability to commit the events to group memory, has taken a little of our humanity away. When we hear about such tragedies and then lose them in that haze, we lose a little part of ourselves—to forgetfulness, and to the sense that the world is ineffably dangerous in ways that no collection of statistics can tame.

The night of the crash I watched Alaska Air spokesman Jack Evans, holding himself together god-knows-how, field increasingly pointed questions about the whereabouts of the passenger manifest. There’s no telling how much he knew by then of the dreadful toll the accident had taken on Alaska’s own family, and it would be pointless (and cruel) to ask. At that moment, though we did not realize, we watched a man standing at the matrix of fact and memory.

Western Washington is a small place; it seems that either you knew someone on the flight or know someone who did. We will remember. The culture is stacked against us, but we will do our best.