Negative Artifacts

Awhile back the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer was having a convo with the person who might be my favourite podcaster, Randy Cohen.

Safran Foer mentioned that he is a collector of “negative artifacts.”

Cohen was curious: Do tell.

“A negative artifact,” Safran Foer said, “commemorates something that didn’t happen.”

The term, he explained, comes from organic chemistry. Something has evaporated. You can calculate how much of it used to be there. The missing amount, that’s the negative artifact.

Safran Foer continued his story with a recent example. He’d bought on eBay a ticket to the opening game of the 1965 World Series. That was the game Sandy Koufax, the Dodgers’ ace, was supposed to start on the mound, but because it happened to fall on Yom Kippur, Koufax sat the game out. The Dodgers lost. (Koufax came back to pitch shutouts in games five and seven to win the series. Tickets to those games were hot commodities for collectors. But they were of way less interest to JSF.)

Another thing Safran Foer collects is blank pieces of writing paper from the desk of famous writers, which he acquires from their estates. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Susan Sontag. Presumably, this is the next piece of paper this guy (or woman) would have put into the typewriter. It would have contained art that is now never going to exist.

The paper is the placeholder for pure potential.

Safran Foer puts each of these blank pieces of paper in a frame. By so doing, he changes them – from something almost worthless to something kind of priceless.

I believe you can change a day in the same way, by putting a frame around it. Giving it a name and putting it on the calendar. This is the day my kid and I both play hooky and swim in the old quarry. This is the day I let the dog walk me. This day is going to be special. We’re making it special by declaring it so in advance. Committing to it. Clearing the decks for it.

Nothing about the upcoming day feels like a chore. Now it’s a sacrament. You have created an architecture of time around the day. When the day arrives, it unfolds completely differently than if you hadn’t made it precious with that frame.

Say you’re cleaning your attic. As you go through stuff, you steep yourself in the memories. You let the family story sweep you away. You are actually, by performing this act, changing the family story, in ways you may never know. You’re throwing out that firetrap insulation that may have ignited in the drought coming next summer and burned down the house with everyone in it.

Cohen told Safran Foer that it felt very Zen to him, this business of collecting negative artifacts. Not really, Safran Foer replied. The Zen move would have been simply to contemplate what might have been. But he needed to acquire the blank paper itself.

Their conversation rolled around to Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated.

Funny story: the publisher put out a special edition of that book, Safran Foer said. By chance there was a printing error. It’s missing the last line. The edition was pulled, but not before quite a few books were released into the wild.

Those books are now collectors items.

“I end up signing it a lot,” he says. “It ends in the middle of a sentence. But it just so happens that it reads in a way that feels quite natural.”