"Despite her dutiful transcript, the truth of what had happened eluded her."
—From Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
This is the title of a chapter from Saidiya Hartman’s book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Helen Parrish is a white gentlewomanly woman running a reform house for the black waywardly wayward women. She is witness to an exchange between two lovers and she cannot understand what is unfolding in front of her.
"Despite her dutiful transcript, the truth of what had happened eluded her."
I am often asking, How did I get here? How did we get here?
I find myself needing to confront the period of time when my technotopia dreams reached their zenith, 2011 through 2016.
"Despite her dutiful transcript, the truth of what had happened eluded her."
I am convinced that there is a Something that explains why I believed in the technotopia, why I was a participant in its myths. Wanting to be connected to people a great distance away from me is inadequate. I admit I desire the Something to be grand like a traumatic event, but I think the Something is a network. A series of individual nodes connected by a physical element. A tissue. A wave. A cable.
Despite my dutiful transcript, the truth of what happened eludes me.