2024-03-07 9:08:00 ¶ ●

There is some so insanely heartbreaking to me about Jonathan Sims and the way the statements were recorded. They were all originally handwritten which is such a very human thing, using your own flesh and blood write something down, just the amount of effort and emotion that goes into that. And then Jon had to digitize them using a tape recorder, definitely a lot less human as it’s now batteries and tape but still human enough since it’s using his voice. And now he’s fully inhuman, robotic, stuck in a computer, where there used to be blood and skin and bone there is now plastic and wires and a screen.

I’m currently studying funeral services and in my embalming textbook it talks about how one woman phrased it like “a dead body is an object, but it is an object unlike any other object, cannot be like any other object, because this object used to be alive” and I really like that, it feels comforting, it feels human. Jon doesn’t get this though, he was terrified of being inhuman and he doesn’t even get to be human in this “somewhere else” he doesn’t get to be an object that used to be alive, he is just an object, like a pencil that wrote down the original statements, or the tape recorder that used to record them, and now the computer.