There is nothing to the pixel, it sort of just is. I can see it, but I don’t know what it is, not really; not like a book anyway. A book is a thing. Weight to it. Its backbone will split with use, and folded corners if left to sink, print themselves against the pages that sandwich them. And there is the first writing of a book, of white paper and black letters. Then the first reading, the stress of a thumb and the page, dirtied rubbings of a reader’s favourite passage. And a second reading, a third and the fabric will unpick itself at the spine. It feels greedy to eat with such manners. Does the author approve? For us to sweat against his white page. But maybe that’s the point? A smudged page has less the grandeur it once posed. Maybe the great book needs a kind of yellowing for it to be dismantled. It needs reading, and with that comes a smudge. A packet abraded by water and drowned of its logos, has a new clarity, simply of the object as a material. Without the comedy of branding, objects can just be stuff. Stuff is fine, stuff is far more honest. No tricks of the advert but plastic and metal. Two materials, just stuff, maybe to be remade or maybe not. And a book is just stuff too. Of trashy books, rubbed by their first reading, names barely legible. Of ideas stalked by its words and a greasy print. Underlined, folded, circled, coloured, these are the ideas I steal. The book can be wrung twice, dirtied three times over, but every piece of woven paper should be kept, as with a fourth reading, or any other, there will be something more to take. Let it yellow for the ideas to grow clearer. And so what of the pixel which never yellows, what to do? It will not rot, no, nothing does anymore. We can keep everything, and we do, mostly, we do. All our images, rank and tangled. Too many. And even those you fail to recall, there are many of them, almost greater than the number of those you do. With so much stuff, how can memory persist. If I recall a memory, a dream even, there is an amalgam of images, cramps of one thing or another. The mess is the memory. Or maybe another kind? A smell fat with association, was this once memory? A memory that moves, that can be felt in the dark, I can’t quite discern it, maybe a face, or a body, even better. Is this a memory? Perhaps to move away from the photograph will mean to feel more. Maybe not more, but in another way. A photograph regulated by the screen will not smudge. It will remember exactly, the date and the face. It digitises nuance and resists our tendency to remake or embellish the moments we hold on to. It misses the gist. We do not recall a memory but the last time it was remembered. And we add to it, as a constant rewriting. Not memory as an original but as a translation, between connections of the brain, and moments unknown. Memories are stitched with yellowing, of the events we exaggerate and those we let fade. Each time we remember, a little more yellow seeps to the mess. Yet when curated as a pixeled grid, photographs, or memories I suppose, resist this yellowed rot. We may remember far more, but do we remember better? The screen is certainly better. More images and more. Words and histories of conversations are all preserved as a part of the sordid codes we return to. But I think we need the yellow, as a chance at elision. Forget something and let it pass, or superimpose it, yes, again and another, towards a newness we strive for. Let the screen rot with a thousand images and us with few. We will remember better, and the screen will crash.