Unbosomings

June 12: Broadcasts from exile, on the occasion of my birthday

Middle-aged man reads work aloud as part of the Ham’s House Reading Series in Huntington, West Virginia, March 2025. Photograph by Mike Adkins.

It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

—Anne Frank

On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank turned 13 and received a notebook with a cloth, red-and-white-checkered cover and a lock. She named it Kitty, and began writing a diary.

She had literary aspirations and her diary, initially unfiltered teenage musings, became a self-consciously literary endeavor. The quotation above is from the first entry in what became the published book, but it’s actually a revision she made nearly two years later, part of a series of updates and edits she made to her work—apparently after hearing a radio broadcast from one of the Dutch government leaders in exile asking people to preserve wartime diaries and records of Nazi oppression for posterity.

Some of the emotional power of The Diary comes from the young, faltering voice—the feeling we have as readers that we are being gifted an intimate and unfiltered connection. It doesn’t bother me that this feeling is achieved as an intentional act of craft, or that the punch of literary irony in a passage like the above was a knowing concoction, not found poetry. Honestly, I like it better that way.

Perhaps it is precisely after revision and curation that we learn something enduring about the shape of someone’s mind. Surely whatever we mean by “the self” has something to do with the self we perform for the world. We are social animals, I’m reliably told.

Anne Frank died, perhaps of typhus, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March of 1945. “Man is condemned to be free,” the Existentialists would announce not long after. When we speak of literary craft, we speak of the power of choices to make meaning. Existence precedes essence, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, dead old farter. Revision, not free association, is the business of freedom in writing. Make good choices.

Anne was still with her sister Margot at the end. According to witness accounts, Margot fell out of bed and died of shock. Anne—bald, emaciated, delirious, scabies-pocked—died the next day. She was 15.

This image is morally absurd, a void mockery of meaning. Empathy may become a category error beyond some thresholds of horror. What is left of the self when there are no choices left to make, just the furious reflexes of fever and starvation? We’re left to hope that Anne’s essence might outlive her existence. Language was her storage device. We have a record of some choices that she made.

I have never been a diary keeper, though I suppose the work I publish can lean in that direction. Records for the archives. Unbosomings and such.

It is my birthday today. I spent the day researching at the Sound Archives at Berea College. I listened to old records by the Phipps Family, an early country band from Eastern Kentucky who made their name as Carter Family mimics. I took notes. A.L. Phipps and his wife Kathleen sang urgently of home and of Heaven. And of death. They sang the old songs the old way, or at least the way fixed in wax by the Carter Family.

The shells in the ocean shall be my deathbed / The fish in deep waters swims over my head. The Phipps’ harmonies, like the Carters’, are rooted in shape-note singing, but there is a flatter affect to their delivery. They often sound like they’re in mourning.

Every so often, still listening to the Phipps records on headphones, I took little breaks from note-taking. On my laptop, I looked at pictures of children—or the little bodies that once were children. The question of existence and essence had been extinguished altogether in these photographs. Empathy may become a category error beyond some thresholds of horror.

Every layer of distance imposed by the virtual seemed obscene: the body represented by the photograph, the transmission of the photograph into bits, the display on the laptop’s screen. The photographs came one after another in something we call a “feed.” I feel most removed from choice when I line up at the content trough. It makes me sleepy.

Or sometimes we call it a “stream.” But to me it feels like a current. I am being pulled along somewhere. Or perhaps the right way to put it is that it feels like a drain.

Four years shy of half a hundred today, I will endeavor this year to step out of this ill water altogether, as much as I can. Not to look away from the photos. But I have a nagging fear that the trough itself is wicked infrastructure, numbing us to the actual, training us to consume in lieu of noticing. Social media is anti-essence: the simulacrum of choice fools us just enough. We are primed for hunger and never sated. Our time at the feed is self-reinforcing. We do not even notice we are choosing not to choose. We lose strength to resist the current. We can’t quite place why we feel drained.

Not to look away from the photos. But to look at them and see.

I will keep y’all posted on my effort to wean myself from the feed. Diarist, heal thyself: I’m addicted, too. Don’t feel bad, our brains are easy to exploit, a mean trick in the freedom we’re condemned to. It’s a sinister racket. How does social media act as both anesthesia and anxiety machine? It overheats our experience in the virtual so we are pacified in the actual. I’d prefer exile, at least for a time. To choose a different choice—or try—would be a birthday present to myself.

In an interview later in his life, A.L. Phipps lamented the songs and wisdom lost to history. “If they don’t get it from people like me that been back yonder in the early twenties, the music will get away,” he said. He regretted that he had not done more to preserve the old folkways as the rural South’s oral tradition fizzled out in the wake of mass media: “Boy, I wish I would have took time. I could have got a world of history—of my kinfolks, of family history, family tree, not only that but a world of things in music. The people in the early music could have told me things that… But now they’re gone. They’re dead and gone. History’s gone. When they die, history dies and if you don’t get it before that, you just don’t. It’s lost.”

The talent scouts and radio barn dance shows were accidental folklorists. We have an archive, with many treasures. But surely more was lost than saved. We listen to the records we have.

Had she lived, Anne Frank would have turned 96 on this very day.

The voice Anne heard on the radio belonged to Gerrit Bolkestein, the Minister for Education, Art and Science for the Dutch government in exile in London. Bolkestein proposed that after the war, he establish a public collection of personal papers from Dutch citizens to depict their experience: “If posterity is to fully appreciate what we as a people have endured and overcome in these years, then we need just the simple items: a diary, letters from a worker in Germany, [...] speeches from a minister.” Some papers made it, some were lost. We write our histories with the records we have.

One peculiarity of the feed: It miniaturizes what we view and dislodges our perception from orientation in our environment. Might that dislodge the stimuli from our perception of the real?

As of March, according to the records that we have, we know the names of 876 babies killed in Gaza listed as Age 0. For example:

Had he lived, Kenan Nashat Mohammed Kanaan Al-Dabour would have turned 1 on this very day.

Our brains struggle with the enormity of annihilation, or mine does. One form of hypothetical accounting would be for actuaries to crunch the numbers and estimate the total number of birthdays lost.

For the record: We do not know the names of the babies whose bodies have not yet been found. We do not know the names of babies whose bodies will never be found. In some cases, every family member who knew the baby’s name is likewise gone. Their names will be lost to history.

I call myself “middle-aged.” The actuaries might advise me this is an act of hubris. Will I double my yesterdays? Less than even odds. But I’ll take as many birthdays as I can get. My essence is a work in progress. I will try to make good choices.

May we keep what we can. May we broadcast from exile. May we look at them and see.