In March 1991 the Baltimore Sun ran a piece about a widow from Camden, New Jersey, who had somehow become the Queen of Camp. Edith Fore had fallen over in a low-budget commercial for a medical alert pendant and cried out, in a voice nobody had coached, "I've fallen, and I can't get up!" The line went everywhere. T-shirts in shops around Baltimore and across the country. Two rap songs. Comedians, radio DJs and chat show hosts repeating it until it wore smooth. Life magazine called it the statement of the year. For a while you could not trip over in public in America without hearing your own accident narrated back at you.

The line is still in circulation thirty-five years later, detached from anybody. I can find the commercial in about four seconds. What I cannot find, and have no particular right to demand, is the shape of the life that carried on around it. An archive is very good at keeping the artefact and hopeless at keeping the continuity, which means the fragment it hands back is always the loudest part of somebody rather than the largest.

Mark Fisher is usually read as arguing the reverse. In Ghosts of My Life he writes that digital archiving destroyed the fugitive evanescence that used to characterise watching television, seen once and afterwards only remembered. Things we assumed were gone turn out to be recoverable and endlessly repeatable. "What we have lost, it can often seem, is the very possibility of loss." He is describing the fate of artefacts, though, not of people, and set beside Edith Fore the two accounts stop competing. The clip is perfectly preserved. Preserving it did nothing whatsoever for her.

The seam runs somewhere through the early nineties. Visibility then was broadcast rather than accumulated. You could be seen by tens of millions on a Saturday evening and leave behind almost nothing that would still be indexed in 2026, because the indexing did not exist and nobody had begun to assume it should. Change your surname, move abroad, take an ordinary job, and the thread simply stopped. Today even modest exposure lays down sediment: accounts, interviews, databases, a search engine quietly stitching your twenties to your fifties whether or not you consented to the join.

I treat that disappearance as a failure, as though the past were sitting intact somewhere and my access to it were merely poor. It was not a failure. It was the normal operating condition, and it was industrial in scale. A paper given at the American Culture Association in April 1993 collects the damage with a certain weariness: of the 21,000 films made in America before 1951, by the American Film Institute's reckoning, only half survive, and for the silent period the loss ratio may climb above 75 percent. The missing prints include work by Griffith, Garbo and Laurel and Hardy, so obscurity was never the qualifying condition.

That paper cuts against me, though, and I should say so. Gary Burns was writing about music magazines and industry trade journals disappearing in real time while he watched, and the only reason I can read his warning is that somebody scanned it into exactly the kind of database he was arguing did not exist. The machinery I am being wistful about rescued him. It rescued the commercial too. Neither rescue reached Edith Fore, and I cannot honestly tell whether that is a limit of the archive or simply a job nobody was ever assigned.

Photographs are the part I find hardest to hold steady. A picture from 1991 runs two clocks on one surface. Inside it nothing has finished: the clothes are current, the lighting is current, the person is mid-sentence in a career that still had somewhere to go. Outside it, thirty-five years. Fiction handles this better than archives do: Mark Jenkin drops two fishermen into a harbour that is still 1993 and spends the film watching what it costs them. The trouble is that the early nineties refuse to look historical. The colour is too clean, the rooms are too much like rooms, the faces carry none of the formal distance that lets a Victorian portrait announce itself as finished business.

What disappeared alongside the individuals was the machinery that made them legible, and that machinery was extraordinarily narrow. A line from a pendant advert could reach most of a country inside a year because there was almost nowhere else for attention to be, and the route into the room was narrower still. Saturation was cheap then in a way it has not been since.

I could have found out what happened to Edith Fore. When I checked the 1991 piece I specifically did not go looking, and I want to be straight that this was a decision rather than a limit. The essay does not need it, she never volunteered for any of this, and going after the rest of her life to round off an argument about the indignity of fragments would be its own small demonstration of the problem. A culture that records this much has stopped producing the conditions under which anything gets missed properly, and it turns out that not looking is now something you have to choose on purpose.

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